TheParryGod

Thingies

Been quite a busy past few days so not much progress on the EP1 scene unfortunately. I've been mainly just moving things from S2 over to blender and marveling at how good things look with real-life-esque lighting. Also getting more and more familiar with it and building some good muscle memory.

EP1 scene progress

Learning a lot each day. It is kind of overwhelming but I try to limit tutorials to what I actually need. Biggest challenge here will most probably be the portal cloud and simulating the top getting blown up. I'm planning to have some nice visual flair there by having the explosion fracture the top, then the portal opening which would suck in some of the debris and then switching direction to have it spew the remaining debris away. Sounds very nice in my head.. I guess I'll see how mind-numbi...

Probable final camera placement

It's surprisingly hard to fit a 3km tall thing in your view. I'm certainly still bumbling around in blender but I think I'm getting the hang of it. At least I'm fairly confident I can pull off a still-camera thingy. If it really starts to fall apart I can just export the scene as a model and continue the work in S2. Having the ability to see the lens distortion while working on the composition is such a breath of fresh air.

In case you ever wanted to see a to-scale citadel in Sofia

This is semi-unrelated to the current project and more of a preparation for the movie project. I just stumbled upon a blender addon that lets you extract geometry out of Google Maps data. Since I'm going to use a new Citadel for that establisher shot I posted a while back why not use a new and 100% accurate city as well. 

About that HL1 project...

The past week I've been intensely working on this Citadel model along with the Project 17 team lead. What you see here is the highpoly version (around 600K triangles) that I'm keeping for my own use and then we are still working on an optimized, game-ready version (no more than 100K) that would be reasonable to use during gameplay.

This has been on my to-do list since before I started working on Patient Zero and only just got around to tackle it. And I'm beyond excited to do something ...

The Next Project

I have 2 ideas in mind both of which relate to HL1. One is a HECU POV and the shitstorm in Black Mesa, much like Infestation. The other's a titlescreen type video on probably a section of Surface Tension. I've no idea which one it'll be but it's likely it'll be one of these two.

As mentioned in a previous post I'm taking a short break not to burn myself out plus I have some positive and negative happenings right now that need sorting out before I can fully return my attention to workin...

Quick heads up on early access.

Since I had to reupload the video any comments you left are lost. The link has been updated on the previous post and this one will go live at around 4PM CET.

PATIENT ZERO Early Access

I fucked up the credits so I'm re-rendering the whole thing. Should not impact anything as I'll just update the link here when the new one's up. Going public in 24hrs!

Heavy Project - Last Update

If all goes well the video will be up within 24hrs for early access and a day after that publicly.

I've tested the waters for age restriction and (at the very least in unlisted) YT didn't pick it out thankfully. Let's hope it'll stay that way because I'm not censoring a thing.

Thanks everyone for your support and especially those of you who stuck with me through all this. Safe to say I'll take a short break after this is up. I don't want to kill the fun out of making these proje...

Progress Update VII

Putting on the finishing touches to the sound design in the coming days. Then final steps are matching the lip synch to the dialogue, render those last clips out and final render from Premiere Pro. Fairly confident it'll be live next week.

Just got back the vocoded lines for the big guy

It is beyond glorious. Don't know how he did it but during the test runs he nailed this vocoder by the 2nd try.

I would say it is definitely hard to make out on a first listen, but I think it's not at all harder to understand than an ordinal, wallhammer or APF vocoder on a first impression. Plus there will be subtitles for sure.

Footsteps are fun

(ⁿᵒ ᵗʰᵉʸ'ʳᵉ ⁿᵒᵗ)

Yours truly [SPOILER]

No reverb or dynamic pan on the sounds yet so they stick out quite a bit still. I hope my neighbors didn't hear me panic screaming for 10 minutes in the middle of the night, haha. 

Post Production Breakdown

Thought this might be another interesting BTS tidbit for you. Hopefully Patreon uploads the images in order.

1: raw SFM render
2: barrel distortion that I'm adjusting shot to shot depending on FoV
3: a tiny bit of vertical blur and then re-sharpening the image to simulate an anamorphic lens as best as I can.
4: vignette blur and vignette more toward the left and right edges.
5: film grain that YouTube just can't handle even in 4K
6: basic corrections to shadows, highligh...

Thought this might be interesting.

Yes, I do my sound design in Vegas Pro because I'm a pleb and too used to it.

Progress Update VI

Sound design hath commenced! There are a couple of clips I'll have to re-render because there are always very minor imperfections that only come out with full sample rates. Plus 2-3 clips of closeup talking that I'll have to lip-synch once I have the lines from the voice actors.

As I said in the previous post, this shouldn't take more than about 2 weeks. Final runtime is 7 minutes plus the intro title cards and credits that are not yet finalized.

Progress Update V

Didn't quite make it by the end of Jan but I'm finalizing the visuals today. Those damn leaves gave me more trouble than I anticipated (plus took 2 days off for Dead Space Remake)

A good chunk of the exterior scenes plus the intro transport ride are already final rendered. Some adjustments and final fixes to the interior scenes and it's good to go. From then it's just sound design which shouldn't really take more than about 2 weeks. Hopefully won't run into any major trouble there.
...

Nothing like a 10hr render turning out fucked.

So my "ground leaves" particle is screwed for whatever reason when rendered at a high sample rate. I do remember testing this to avoid this exact situation but apparently it was just a fever dream. Have to figure this out but on the flipside everything else is nice and dandy.

Tore some of mine out making this

but she finally has hair that doesn't look like a LEGO piece put on her head. Boy, Source 2 can be stupid sometimes when it comes to bone rotations and such.

Doing post is medicine for my soul

The full interior sequence is getting closer and closer to finished state. At this stage it's doing very menial stuff like checking if all the CPs' zippers are moving, props are in the same place shot-to-shot etc, so nothing overly exciting to show. I think a couple days of tinkering and it'll be good to go. I'll go over and do final checks on everything and then the final render will probably take a solid 2-3 days.

Feels like a lifetime ago

The intro is officially final-render-ready! And the second half not far behind. I might actually start on the sound design before the end of the month.

L E A V E S

Took a good part of the day to make these particles but I'd say they turned out fairly realistic and with 0% randomness to fuck up a final render.

And that's a wrap!

[SPOILER] Action Scene - The Particleing

That's roughly 105,000 physics based thingies flying all over the place in these 3 clips. My CPU is proper melting trying to run this in real time, haha.

Sweet Physics Based Carnage

Rendering this at full samples will be fun.

Progress Update IV

This week I'll be mainly working on that commission job I mentioned in a previous post so I suspect there won't be any significant progress made. The week after that I'll be wrapping up the animation with the last missing segment between the explosion and start of the action; which will be significantly shorter than the intro-roomclear sequence.

Even now the project sits at around 6:00-6:30 long and adding on the missing stuff + credits this could well be pushing 7:30-8:00 minutes. Whi...

[SPOILER] The whole post-intro stuff

Minus the explosion-action connecting sequence and the very last scene. Still a lot of things to iron out, but the core is very much there. I think I managed to keep a good pacing and am very, very happy how it looks visually even in shitty, low quality test render.

Also, that conversation scene is as janky as it is because a lot will depend on the voice acting so I'm leaving that one for last.

Some material and texture editing goes a looong way

There's some funkyness at the finger UV seams but I'll get back to that.

[SPOILER] From Hologram to Roomclear

Really happy with how this section came together. 2 clips left from the whole Intro-Roomclear sequence and then it's just the post-explosion scene left.

I truly despise finger posing

AK is very floaty but the shotgun turned out surprisingly good.