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ekket

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Posts posted by ekket

  2. Posted

    https://deadline.com/2019/02/machinima-closing-layoffs-warnermedia-otter-media-1202547949/

    Quote

    Machinima Is Shutting Down, With 81 Staffers Laid Off

     

    Machinima, which rose to prominence as an influential and lucrative multi-channel network catering to gamer culture, has laid off 81 employees and ceased operations. The company, which was acquired by Warner Bros in 2016 and at the beginning of 2019 was folded into WarnerMedia’s Otter Media, confirmed the moves Friday.

  3. Posted

    AFAIK, Ross does not currently use Half-Life 2: Update (although he might switch to it later), he just uses the stock Orange Box Half-Life 2 with some modifications (e.g. the old vortigaunts). The mod does look spectacular, the gun animations especially, but it would be a little jarring to switch to it outright.

  4. Posted

    This is a quality comment regarding The Movie and UE4, posting it here before it's lost to the depths of Youtube:

    Spoiler

    UE4 is a gem to work with. For what you're describing, do this;
    - Create base 3D character using 3DS max/Maya/Blender
    - Add blendshapes to the face and body for major archetypes
    - Tweak blendshapes in UE4 through blueprint

    I don't know how you're doing motion capture, but I've found the Kinect does fairly high-quality captures for my purposes. It does have a downside in being one viewpoint, as opposed to full-surround captures.

    I recommend using a number of basic animations and blending through them - 'TalkGeneral, TalkEmotive, TalkEmphatic' moving the head in looped motions. Use UE4's AI controllers to just set up the characters to walk around between full-captured animations. Have blended full-body motions too, like 'IdleSassy, IdleWorried, IdleBored' etc.

    Using these methods you can save a lot of time, but it requires a bit of groundwork.

    As far as lip-sync goes, it's up to you whether you want to have a generic mouth movement, a programmatic approach or custom-made animations for each sentence (in order of ascending difficulty). Blendshapes can be used for facial animations as well, for a very quick approach - that way you just specify timelines of phenotypes; 'HH-Eh-Loh-FF-RR-EH-NN-DH'. You just cycle through each facial blendshape.

    The same thing can be done for emotions on the face. Most of what you want can be done through blendshapes and timelines.

    Hope this helps!


    EDIT: I'm very experienced with UE4. Been using it for years on a variety of projects - if you want any advice there are plenty of tutorials out there and I should have time for a bit of help if you need it. My policy has always been 'highest quality, lowest effort', if that's compatible!

    [—Connor M]

  5. Posted

    Regarding what I asked in the videochat:

     

    Opus is an audio codec mostly meant for telephony and streaming, but it is also great at storing music (it supersedes Vorbis in that regard). From my A/B testing, it's indistinguishable at 128k bitrate. It unfortunately isn't used much (Youtube and some VOIP clients use it) because MP3 and Vorbis are "good enough" for most people.

    Dragon's Egg is a hard science fiction book about a neutron star that is inhabited by cheela, sapient creatures the size of a sesame seed. They operate on a time scale one million times that of humans, and the novel is about their evolution and communications with humans.

  7. Posted

    Small change in the forum index: the links for recent posts have been changed, such that the thread title link will now just link to the thread, not the unread posts, and the link showing the date will now link to the first unread post instead.

     

    @RaTcHeT302: I certainly agree with a reputation system not being good for discussion. I think I'll leave the reactions neutral (not affecting reputation), although I would want something other than just a heart there.

  8. Posted

    27 minutes ago, GordonFreeman said:

    How does the new rep system work?

    It doesn't. It's tied to the reaction system, which currently works only for administrators' posts. I've been too busy to implement anything yet, but I would actually like to hear other people's feedback on how it (and the reactions) should work.

  10. Posted

    Great episode, the modding in this episode was spectacular. I think that all the bug hunting was well worth it, so was the choice of making this episode longer. Here's to another year of Freeman's Mind!

     

    That compression should be fixed by the VP9 encoding, I don't recall it being worse than what was on the previous episode.

  11. Posted

    The first two games are probably just asset flips, that explains them being almost identical. That third "Sint Nicolaas" game isn't really Christmas-related. It's related to St. Nicholas Day instead, but I guess it was worth it for the tangent about cookies. Also, I am amazed at Neo-Satan being the actual name for the antagonist in Apocalyptica.

     

    I would have liked to hear more about the game's music (after all, the "Let's talk about the music!" segment is a long-standing tradition that should be preserved). Having the music be in the background would've helped with the episode's atmosphere, since it felt a little like a Let's Play at parts.

  17. Posted

    You could take inspiration from how Stack Overflow attempts to keep all the answers on the site high quality, it has quite heavy moderation and operates somewhat like a wiki. (It does have a reputation of being pretty newcomer-hostile, though. Being a Q/A site, it also mostly serves as an information dump for Google, so not the best fit for something like Gorilla Gong.)

     

    I would suggest letting everyone contribute (after all, we could run into the exact same problems that were had with vetting contributors), while having those contributions be under some form of approval process. For submitting videos, this could be more lax, just seeing if they are worthwhile machinimas.

    Steam's system for curators has worked fairly well, something like that for reviewers wouldn't be a bad idea.

  21. Posted

    5 hours ago, RaTcHeT302 said:

    Could you please make this Opt In, instead of Opt Out? It was enabled by default for me.

    Sure. We don't intend to use that mailing list anyhow, it's just a default option that snuck in.

  23. Posted

    1 hour ago, Veyrdite said:

    There still stands the problem of there being no way for forum members to find what topics are active, without having to click into each subforum.

     

    This sort of page/feature is important if you spend your time across multiple forums, not just the one.

    The Unread Content and All activity pages should solve that problem pretty well, that's what I meant by the "activity streams".

  25. Posted

    @Veyrdite: To answer your complaints on following content, I've added back the follow button, along with the activity stream (which you can find next to the breadcrumbs, under "Unread Content"). That should solve the "latest posts" problem, as well, since you can customize the feeds to fit that purpose too.

    image.png

    It also allows RSS feeds for content, @Woah_G!. Along with that, the sidebar now has a functional RSS feed.

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