Halo bullshittery - Update #3

Happy Friday all, I hope you've all had a smooth week.

Over here it's the end of week 2 (of a planned 4) for Halo bullshittery. And I should have completed about 5 minutes of text and animation keyframing. I've completed 5 minutes and 40 seconds, with some additional phase 2 polishing. Putting me slightly ahead due to positive factors I'll talk about shortly.

Here's a shot of the current timeline:

Having dived into the Halo keyframing job for the first time, I can report that the scenes are relatively easy to animate due to several helpful factors:

• The teams are usually red or blue, and rarely do the environments have competing colours that could confuse the tracker.

• Heads rarely turn or do anything unexpected. And spartan helmets feature easily identifiable features. The visors, for example.

• Friendly players almost always have little arrows above them, making them exceptionally easy to track in an automated fashion. Even through vehicles and debris.

• In general the foreground usually lacks some of the more common things that would confuse automated tracking. Such as overt UI, in game particle effects, or foliage.

By way of example, note how the red square here is easily able to follow the back of the spartan helmet. Also note the extremely clear contrast between it and the colours around it. The software has no issue.

Similarly, note how I'm able to track Rotary in the drivers seat of this warthog using the arrow above his head. Even if this warthogs flips, which it probably will because Rotary can't drive for toffee.

As a result a sizeable portion of the tracking has been entirely automated. Letting me concentrate on things that really need a human's attention, such as masking. Which has been great.

Sadly it's not perfect.

I'm completely out of luck if I'm dealing with players on the opposite side. They have no markers whatsoever.

And any time a spartan is hit with anything, a flashing energy shields or hud effect completely throws off the tracking for a period of time. And as you can imagine that happens a lot. Meaning I then have to manually step in.

But honestly I'm just grateful that what's there is so lenient. I only need to correct the tracker occasionally. It's not at CSGO level of ease. But it's far better than most.

Currently, my goal is to deliver the second half next week. At which point I've begin the process of refining and quality assuring.

I also still need to reach out to an SFM artist for a more complicated 5 second commission. But that also requires a final decision on my part concerning a snippet of music.

TL;DR - animation is going very well and I've finished the first half. I'll work on the remaining half next week.

Annoyingly though this weekend I've got to file my taxes for all this stuff. The deadline loom. Oh...yay...tax paperwork...said nobody ever.

Thank you all.