Hey everyone, I’ve had a bit of a setback as I lost power for a few days because my landlord decided it would be cool to not pay the power bills even though I give him cash on time every month. I’m convinced he has a mistress in Copenhagen, so maybe he needed the money in advance for that. Regardless, I have power back now and will continue working on stuff. I’ll be working on Freeman’s Mind this month and making more (but slow) progress on the movie project. I’m thinking it may be unrealistic that the movie will be finished this year, but I hope to get a lot of it done regardless.

I tend to be perpetually behind on the things I’m working on, but I thought I might add some democracy to the process. While I will be continuing to work on videos, I wanted to see if people had a clear preference for other things I can be working on. I’ve put up a poll above, let me know what you would like to see happen next (besides more videos of course).

[poll id=”5”]

Youtube

Download 848x480 MKV (93MB)

At long last, here’s the next episode of Freeman’s Mind. This episode got delayed for dozens of reasons, none of them especially interesting. It mostly has to do with me attempting too many things at once. I’ll try and get more FM episodes out as soon as I can.

People who are very familiar with Half-Life may notice this episode doesn’t play out how the game normally does. Normally, there’s a sequence you have to initiate before the game will progress, but here, it’s already happening by the time Freeman shows up to it. You can blame this on Half-Life: Source. All I did was load a saved game I had, and the events played out as you see them, every time I tried. I wasn’t able to find a workaround for this, but I don’t think it really matters in this case anyway.

Youtube

Download 1280x720 MKV (148MB)

Merry Valve-Time Christmas! This episode is obviously late for a lot of reasons, but I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. This episode ended up taking massively longer than it was supposed to and was meant to be an “easy” episode. It was actually supposed to be the second part of a sub-series idea I had for Civil Protection, called “Community Outreach” episodes. The idea was that I would take viewer questions pretending to be City 17 citizens, pick ones I liked, then have Mike and Dave answer them on-camera. I thought this would be a fast way to get episodes out, but too many things in the Source engine ended up slowing me down. I still think the idea has potential at some point in the future however.

This is also the first episode where the majority of the animation (maybe 90%) is done via motion capture. While both “Morning Patrol” and “The Tunnel” used a few motion capture animations, this is the first one where I acted out the major parts myself. I think the results are mixed. The raw animations are quite jittery, so I had to smooth them out substantially. This leads to some slightly awkward movements in places, but I think the technology has a lot of potential and can save a bunch of time, depending on how dynamic the animation is.

Finally, this is likely going to be the last Civil Protection episode done on the Source engine. While I have almost no problems with the general look of the engine, the behind-the-scenes work involved with creating the episodes is just too massive for what I’m trying to do. While I plan to eventually make future CP episodes with Half-Life content ported over, it’s going to be a long time, as I’m going to be focusing on trying to create an actual full-length movie this year (and more Freeman’s Mind). I still don’t know what software I’ll be using in the future, though my first priority is to be able to easily create lots of characters capable of facial expressions and lip-sync and then see what’s compatible with that.

Here’s an update of what’s going on:

VIDEO RELEASES FOR JANUARY:

Civil Protection: The Christmas episode is practically done, it’s primarily just sound editing left. While I could delay until December of this year, I’d rather just release it as soon as possible, even though it’s late.

Freeman’s Mind: You can expect at least 2, maybe 3 episodes this month.

NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTION:
While I’ll be continuing Freeman’s Mind, my goal for this year is to create a really great movie. I have an idea for one I’ve been interested in doing for a long time. I’m still writing the script to it, but I have a pretty solid idea of what I want it to be. It’s going to be a feature-length movie and take place in a medieval fantasy environment. It will be a comedy / adventure / mystery movie. I was originally going to attempt this in the Source engine, but after my experience on the last CP episode, I’m going to use something else now. It’s my hope to finish this movie sometime this year, though I can’t promise anything. It depends on how long it will take for me to learn new software, animate everything, and get all the assets I need. The help I’ll need will depend a lot on what software I use. Right now the only position I know 100% that I’ll need help with is a creature modeler / animator.

NEW SOFTWARE / ENGINE:
Due to my frustration with the upcoming CP episode, I’m about ready to abandon the Source engine for anything more complicated than Freeman’s Mind. Unfortunately, I still don’t know what software I’ll be using instead. I was originally leaning towards the program iClone, though someone has recently made some compelling arguments for the Unreal 3 engine. If I want to port over the many assets available for Source (one of the areas it really shines in) I’ll likely need an array of programs. I’m still open to suggestions, but please don’t recommend software if you haven’t used it yourself. In my experience, there’s a world of difference between what software is theoretically capable of, and what a non-programmer can actually do with it; kind of like Linux. I’ve made a list of features I’m looking for to help clarify things:

Ross’s wishlist of features for animation software / engine:

-Support for importing motion capture .BVH data*
-Support for lip sync and facial expressions (preferably finding a facial expression capture solution)*
-Ability to create new humanoid characters with facial flexes and be able to modify things like proportions and clothing without it being an enormous undertaking*
-Ability to export footage frame-by-frame (as opposed to real-time)
-Ability to export with motion blur OR at very high framerates
-Some sort of physics engine
-lighting quality at least as good as Source’s
-ability to keyframe object / character movements
-some system that can automate standard movements of characters, like walking and running, including on non-level terrain
-some procedure for importing models and textures from the Source engine
-some procedure for converting Source engine map architecture + textures to compatible format OR robust mapping community for new engine / software
-decent camera controls
-Reasonably low bugs

*very important category, it’s not even worth me considering an engine without some solution for this first

So that’s what I’ll be up to in case you’re wondering what’s taking so long. Check back later this month for more videos!

Hey everyone. I was really hoping to have a surprise Civil Protection Christmas episode out in time, but the time’s passed for me to get it into Machinima.com in time for Christmas, so that’s not going to happen.

I think this may be the most frustrated I’ve ever been in working on a video. I might be saying this because I’ve been awake for 26 hours working on it with only 4 hours sleep the night before, but this video really drained me. I honestly though this was going to be a simple video, a comparatively easy one for Civil Protection. Really in concept, it still IS a simple video, but the problem is a “simple” video with relatively high production quality in the Source engine can be grueling by almost any other standard.

I have no idea how much time I’ve put into this project, but I’m certain it’s at least 250+ hours. This is for a video that’s going to be about 7-8 minutes and involves mainly just dialogue. While I’m actually very pleased with how the video is turning out, I consider this ratio of work to what I can produce to be rather horrible. This video also contains more motion capture in it by far than any other episode I’ve worked on. I was hoping this would be a solution to animating much more rapidly and taking more of the drudgery out of making the videos. After having worked with it quite a bit, I think it has a lot of potential and can save time, but it also has many limitations as well. For this episode, I think it definitely improved the quality of some scenes, but didn’t have a significant impact on production time either way.

I may have hinted at this before, but I really do not enjoy animating. I do it because it’s necessary in order for me to create videos. If I never had to animate again in order to get videos made, I would be happy. I still want to make videos, but not like this. I feel like this is more like a torture exercise where something good comes out at the end of it. I think there’s a real chance this could be the last video I make in the Source engine because of this (then again, I said the same thing after Halloween Safety). While it’s miles ahead of many other game engines out there in terms of customizability, it still has so many limitations and bugs, that I can’t trust it at all not to completely ruin a project I’m trying to work on.

I still want to make videos, but I really don’t know how I should be doing that now. I don’t want something overly simplified so that I have extremely limited options, but I’m also not trying to make a Pixar production either. I just want something that looks “good enough” without being torture to animate in. I’m still willing to put in work animating if I feel like the rate of return is better than than what I’m doing now and I’m not wasting 3 hours trying to get a character just to wall up a damn hill because the engine has decided it wants to glitch out permanently. I’m not a graphics snob at all, though I feel like characters need a certain level of fidelity to them so that viewers can get immersed in a story rather than get creeped out by stiff moving and unnatural looking characters.
I would love some viewer feedback on what software / methods I should use for creating more animated videos. Before this trainwreck, I was actually planning on making an announcement on New Year’s that I was going to start work on a BIG feature-length project in the Source engine. I now think that would be a mistake, but I’m still interested in making a full length movie eventually. Email me if you have experience working with other software that would recommend. I expect nothing will come of this, but I’m cyncal and sleep deprived.
Anyway, I’ll release the Civil Protection episode late sometime after New Year’s, it’s still pretty good even if it misery to make.

ADHD Version:
Ross is pissed at the universe and the Source engine and wants to try different software for videos. He will still continue Freeman’s Mind.