TheParryGod

New Year Spin

Happy New Year guys and gals.

Less hairpulling than expected

Still WIP, but I'm liking where this is going.

Got the Scent

Janky pre-roomclear sequence. The map here is placeholder as this takes place on a lower floor, but given the layout of these buildings I can just copy this hallway and room to a separate map and mix it up a bit.

Also, I'm not 100% on that hologram. I'll attempt to make something custom for this. Should just be a case of making a very low-poly representation of the apartment building in blender and slapping a holo material on it; but I guess I'll see how hairpulling that turns out.

Manhacks are incredibly fun to animate

Progress Update III

Holiday shenanigans are over and I'm back on the project. Hope everyone had a good Christmas/thing you celebrate around this time.

Currently 2 sections need to be animated to have the entire thing connected. The sequence between intro and room clear. And sequence between room clear and the action. The first one already has some clips down but they're still pretty rough and I've about 10 left according to my storyboard.

I'd say that and the other sequence should be a week each, a...

Claw Scanner Early Access

And here's the claw scanner all ready to use. The rig isn't that awfully good but for the purpose of this project this is all I needed. I'll probably clean it up a bit more before I'll make this public on the workshop.

Installation:

drop the models folder from the zip to: \steamapps\common\Half-Life Alyx\content\hlvr_addons\your addon's name

if successful, the model should come up in the asset browser if you search "parry". There will be some waiting time depending on you...

[SPOILER] Trap Room Sequence Finished (mostly)

There is some jank in there still, but mostly everything's finalized. I'm really glad I got that claw scanner made for this. The hopper makes a lot more sense now and going after a synth distress signal vs a city scanner's makes it a bit more justified in my mind.

This was soo worth the 2 day sidetrack

Scanner Swap.

Cables turned out way better than I expected. Have to fix some small things with textures and have to re-rig the cables but otherwise good to go.

Scanner Swap?

Since this project isn't taking long enough as it is I'll attempt to bring up the Claw Scanner to a HLA-ish level. The shell here is already edited and I'm pretty happy with  it but that was the easy part. If the cables turn out horrible I'll just use the City Scanner.

Room Clear 1st half De-Jank

This is pretty close to final quality. Lighting is still not 100% but I took a break from watching maps compile for a bit. Sounds are ofc just placeholders.

Progress Update 2.0

Not much to show off visually this past week. I've animated 3 additional clips but mostly I've been battling with Hammer to achieve a good final lighting for the apartment interior, and each of those preview map compiles take about 4-5 hours.

I was pretty happy with the lighting shown in the full action scene render, but after doing a 12hr final compile with those settings the results were unfortunately still full of artifacts. I think that happened because I lit the map purely with th...

Deja vu

ignore the scared gun strap

Progress Update

So Heavy Project or PATIENT ZERO (working title) is in a pretty good place right now. The intro sequence interior and exterior clips apart from some custom particles are completely finished; and the ending action scene just needs a lot of polish plus some more custom assets.

Especially glad to have the action down since these kinda scenes are always very taxing on my brain. I always have a storyboard ready before I go into these projects but things don't always turn out the way I imagi...

[SPOILER] Action Scene Complete

That's a 1 minute action scene and a piece of my soul. 2nd half is still kinda jank all over, but imo this is the best I've done so far. Really happy with how the big guy's body language turned out.

Couple more scenes left to do + finishing up the map and adding more disjointed rooms for those other scenes. And then just polish polish polish until my eyes are satisfied. I'd say a late Jan release might be possible but I don't trust myself estimating how long the sound design will take....

Nothing a little nap can't fix

Action Scene Baby Steps

Not that much progress in the animation itself but I have 1 new rebel made (who still needs a gutshot variant), fleshed out a couple more rooms on the map and played around a lot with particles. Heavy now has a new custom muzzleflash, lots of variants of the physics colliding gore/blood bits and an "air suck" for when the shotgun's blue thingies are open.

Lighting here is horrible, but I'm not doing a decent compile until the layout itself is set in stone.

[SPOILER] I Think I'll need a 'graphic content' disclaimer at the beginning

[SPOILER] Action Scene Progress

This is not giving itself easy but I'm chipping away slowly. Still have to make 2 rebel models and need to finish the rest of the map. But once this is more or less done I only have 3 short scenes to block out and then it's just polishing and polishing.

[VERY SPOILER] boom

beep-beep

[SPOILER] Heavy Project - Pre-Action Action

I'm jumping all over the timeline to block out every part of the map according to the movements. It's getting there. Almost everything's in place to start connecting the scenes. I think final runtime will be around 4-5 minutes.

Heavy Project - Apartment Interior

The action scene corridor is taking shape as I go with the animation. The lighting here is very dirty preview quality, but should give a good idea for the abandoned mood.

[SPOILER] Heavy Project - Apartment Fight Draft

A whole lot of failed ideas later I think I finally got a good grip on how to lay out this action scene. Ofc this is extremely early and I'm just blocking out core character and camera movements.

[SPOILER] Rebel had a tummy ache

This video might get demonetized ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[SPOILER] Heavy Project Intro Wrap

Last shot is finally done for the intro/"""first act"""

Now there are only very minor stuff left to adjust. Beautify the scenes, finalize the camera etc. Next in line is blocking out the interior scenes where the rest of this will play out.

Also, the sounds are placeholder for now. They just help me with the shot timings.

Handling Spoilers

Thanks for all the votes! I see that most of you don't mind seeing the evolution and those of you who do, already skip the behind the scenes stuff until the video's live.

I think I'll go ahead and keep doing it as I've been so far, with the addition of marking stuff [SPOILER] in the title for things that I feel really take away elements of surprise.

Spoilers?

Something that just occurred to me. Does it bother you that I'm essentially spoiling each video piece by piece? Should I reserve behind-the-scenes content for stuff like custom assets or maybe a clip or two of teasers or do you actually prefer seeing progress like I've been showing this far?

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Heavy Project - Rebel #1 Done

I'm over the moon how good that shot to hell Ordinal plate carrier turned out.

Heavy Project - Prepping the Rebels

Found this beautiful shotgun model on sketchfab and Half-Life-ified it a bit by griming up the textures and "sawing" off the barrel so it's more compact.

The strap model needs adjusting as it is just a separate model now parented onto the gun. I hope I can meld the strap to it seamlessly because it'd be a really nice visual flair to have this physics based movement.