Animation

Lost in Sleep and Imagination

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During my time in bed most of yesterday I pretty much kept to myself, with my Linux Surface at my side. It’s really nice for reading, watching videos, spying on my corner of the internet, etc… I’ve been watching all kinds of music videos recently, to both see what the songs I grew up listening to were like in video form, and to also study the cinematography of each video. I’ve been kind of playing a game of “if I were to recreate this music video in SFM, what game would it represent?”. I’ve already come up with a few ideas!… that will never fully see the life of day thanks to YouTube’s copyright bot demons. Maybe I can get away with using them in future cutscenes? Speaking of cutscenes, here’s a WIP:

Goodnight everybody!

Meanwhile, in After Effects

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u w0t m8?

I’m almost done animating the hologram/codec call in AE. I just have some other tweaks to perform to it, possibly add another layer on top of a couple of points, then I’ll have something to render. I’ve forgotten how fun it is to play around in After Effects. It makes me wish there was something available in Open Source software…

I’ll have to sit down one of these evenings to see if there is something that could give AE a run for its money. I never use Premiere Pro anymore, and Photoshop is getting less use thanks to Krita. The less Adobe I use the less I have to use Windows. 😛

From Stage 1 To Stage 2

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I successfully rendered the first part of my animation yesterday, and now I’m working on the other half of the scenes. Yutram was away from his usual computer when I was doing this particular livestream, thus he had to rely on his laptop microphone, which is better than nothing but a bit of an obstacle when thinking about how to animate it, fortunately my imagination is always working on overtime. The audio quality is such that it wouldn’t look right if we were both in the same room, so I’ve opted to have us both in different locations.

I have more animating to pick up on tomorrow. Fortunately Yutram’s Minecraft body is easy to work with (and less creepier than Steve, fuck Steve), at least for now. 😛

SFM Diary: The Lipsyncining and Choppening Continueith

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I’m a little over halfway through the lipsyncing process. With normal Valve models I would normally be able to auto generate phonemes, but the particular model I’m using in this instance doesn’t have any; meaning I have to manually animate mouth movement. It takes longer, but it’s at least doable.

I’m not sure if I’ll continue on it a bit more tomorrow or if I’ll just chill… I didn’t really get a chance to work away at it on Tuesday due to the paying version of work. 😛

You Wouldn’t Download a Lollipop

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Whenever the opportunity presents itself I try to find assets that go with something that could potentially go into a project. In this instance it’s lollipops from Bayonetta. I’m also going to look for a map or two for a potential cutscene; if successful I anticipate something crazy that will take me a mad while to animate.

On the subject of content creation; I’ve been paying closer to my YouTube channel lately. For reasons unknown YouTube’s algorithm has selected a video of mine from over a decade ago, and it’s making me want to also revisit making some Breencasts, and maybe even some other oddball ideas involving comedians and entertainers as different game characters. It makes me wish I could vacation for a few months just to get some of these ideas out of my head and onto a screen.

Back at it!

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Tonight I rightfully returned to Source Filmmaker under my Manjaro install, with my primary focus being how well does the program run on my new swank GPU. After a few good hours I can say that the results are in, and the answer is awesome! My Vega64 ran SFM alright for the most part, but if you imported too many models or particles into the world it would lag when dragging your cameras, even when splitting clips into smaller ones. So far I haven’t experienced that with the 6800XT, even with the same stage setups I’ve created! If this continues to perform as such I’ll only really need to go into Windows to do the export (and possibly for After Effects work if I can’t get it to work under Wine/Proton), and even then I don’t always have to depending on the scene (lighting sometimes looks better under Windows or vice versa depending on the map and the materials being used).

I mostly spent the entire session doing mouth movements and some animation tweaking. I am shrinking the audio as I go; removing any long gaps in between.I’ll continue on it some more tomorrow after I get off work and do my usual stuff. Who knows, if I get far enough along that I can post something different I might provide an update tomorrow! 😛

Early Animations From Portal 2

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Went looking for early development stuff for Portal 2… was not disappointed. I always like seeing what creativity unfolded, and what would eventually lead to the final product for a game. Some of the included animations make it look like it could have been a horror game. Out of all of it I did like the tube ride!

Portal 2 SFM Diary

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I’ve been plugging away at this again. I would have done some animating yesterday, but my adventures through Kamurocho left me in constant suspense. My head is back beyond the clouds though, and not just because I have that good watermelon laced shit. 😛 More fiddling planned for tomorrow.