Xanatos’ Overcast Sideshow Article
This page accompanies the sideshow I recorded for Phil Rice and Ricky Grove’s Overcast Machinima Podcast. Near the end of my particular sideshow, I refer to this article here. You can listen to the sideshow at this link:
http://theovercast.com/sideshow-010/
RESOURCES:
Steam
Garrysmod 10 (a Half-Life 2 retail sandbox modification)
Source SDK Knowledge Base
SHORTCUTS AND IDEAS FOR MACHINIMA MOVIEMAKING – GMOD & MORE:
(Examples and resources that apply to both Garrysmod and other engines)
Page Navigation:
*Lipsyncing
*Green Screening
*Compositing
*Disguised Cuts
*Reverse Shots
*Extra info for Source Machinima makers
Lipsyncing
Making characters mouths move as they talk has been a quality inherited into machinima almost as far back as when the artform itself began. Now with advancements in software, game companies like Valve and their Source SDK editor allow you to make your own ‘custom scenes’ using their faceposer setup. However, this is not something you can learn in a matter of hours, so my shortcut for those lesser demanding dialogue lines is to record the character saying something that is preset in the game or elsewhere, recording the visuals of the character doing that, and then OVERDUBBING this with your own recorded line of dialogue to sync up with the character’s. For example, in Garrysmod, I frequently would use a tool that allowed all NPCs to reenact dialogue scenes in Half-Life 2′s singleplayer, find the scene that best resembled the line I wanted to overdub it with, record them body acting it out, and slap on the audio file in editing. It’s not the best shortcut, but it beats nothing. Note: I don’t do this very often anymore and these days I usually do get the scenes customly faceposed, but this still is an option.
“Soldiers of Misfortune” – a HL2 SP .vcd scene re-dubbed with recorded lines.
For those of you with Garrysmod and Half-Life 2, you can activate HL2 Singleplayer scenes with in-game npcs using the “Play Scene” STOOL.
Download link for this GMOD addon -> click here.
Green Screening
Have that shot that is just impossible to incorporate live within your set? Try green screening it. If you don’t absolutely have to use it, you could try using it leisurely to add some unique detail to the shot in editing. For example, in the HL2 Anxiety screenshot, instead of me just doing a third person shot using the game’s cramped third person controls, I greenscreened that and showed the character veer off a tad from right to left with video editing just for the extra detail – it’s something you cannot do in game. Or, rather, in the Soldiers of Misfortune example, I had no choice but to green screen a certain shot as the difficulty of doing it on set was too great to fathom. Here are the two examples. Of course, these two examples are barely a representation of the wide landscape of things you can do with greenscreening. I just want to show you these examples so you might get a slight idea of the endless number of things you can do with this editing technique.
“Half-Life 2 Anxiety”
“Soldiers of Misfortune”
Download link for Blue/Greenscreen map content & more for Garrysmod 10, I prefer the map created by scope -> Click here.
Compositing
Compositing is just something I started looking into, but it can be an equal, if not greater, asset to Green Screening. For that extra detail or for shots where you can’t film multiple things on your own, try setting up one stationary camera position and shoot different things using that exact same camera angle. Of course, this has its limitations. You will have to avoid the shots you are combining into one to not clip into each other. In my Soldiers of Misfortune example below, there’s a slight problem. The characters movements collide into the other frames – how would you avoid this? Luckily for me, in Sony Vegas, the pan and crop tool allowed me to consistently ‘push’ one frame out of the way gradually to make room for the other shot, to avoid clipping. Compositing can be a great way of eliminating the need for online extras in some cases. Try thinking up ways to composite shots for your potential movie idea.
“Soldiers of Misfortune”
Disguised Cuts
In Half-Life 2 Nightmare I came across a problem with one shot. I set up an elaborate camera tracking movement, and would control two sets of choreographed action for this one shot. However, I could not manage to effectively choreograph both sets of action. I realized, since my camera path stays exactly the same at all times, why not record the first half, stop, record the second half, and then combine the two shots? Since they both are on the exact same camera path, they would seam unnoticed into one larger take. Check out what I mean with these two examples from Half-Life 2 Nightmare and Soldiers of Misfortune:
“Half-Life 2 Nightmare”
“Soldiers of Misfortune”
Download link to make “Demo smoother” style shots using a Garrysmod downloadable addon called the Moving Camera Stool. The setup’s pretty simple -> Click here.
Reverse Shots
In Garrysmod, particularly, doing very specific pupeteering and the such can prove very difficult if you try to carry it out straightforward. So in some cases, it may turn out to be easier to do the shot in reverse! This is exactly what I did in the following two examples: a Garrysmod-done Bungee Jump and a shot with a crowd of soldiers approaching Sgt. Richmond in Soldiers of Misfortune. The reason I did a reverse shot in Soldiers of Misfortune was because when we tried it with our extras straightforward, there would always be one person who arrived late at the semicircle position around our main character. So, to give that extra detail of exactness in choreography, we had our extras get into the positions they were meant to end up LAST in the chronological order, and then had them walk backwards, reversing the shot in editing to make it look like they all walk forward and get to their positions at near exact times.
Bungee Jump
“Soldiers of Misfortune”
More helpful tips for the Source Machinima Moviemaker
One of the most helpful tools for anything Half-Life related is the developer console, or console for short. For Source based games, you have to activate it by going into options – keyboard – advanced. Then, you can activate it by hitting the tilda key (~). Here are some useful console commands to utilize for a Half-Life 2 related production.
CONSOLE COMMANDS
*sv_cheats 1 (activates cheats, which is required to enter some of the following console commands)
*cl_drawhud 0 (removes the on-screen hud. cl_drawhud 1 re-enables it)
*r_drawviewmodel 0 (‘undraws’ the first person gun you are holding. It will still be there, it’s just invisible now. r_drawviewmodel 1 re-draws your weapon)
*physgun_drawbeams 0 (‘undraws’ the physgun beam in Garrysmod 10)
*phys_timescale #0-2.0 (setting this to 0 will freeze the physics in time, allowing you to shoot a physics object, and then when you set it back to 1 for the default physics timescale, all actions you performed on an object when it was frozen will suddenly all happen simultaneously. you can also set it to a decimal under 1 like 0.5 for a ‘slow motion’ physics effect, as used heavily in the bridge/sniper scene in Soldiers of Misfortune, setting it to a number greater than 1 will fast forward the physics)
*phys_pushscale # (1 is the default, setting it to a greater number will make all physics in the game to be ‘pushed’ at a higher magnitude. For example, if you have phys_pushscale 5, shooting a barrel prop will make it fly out five times its normal behavior when it gets shot)
*ai_disable (disables all AI. entering this command a second time will re-enable it)
*notarget (cheat CVAR that makes all NPCs ignore you, but they still may react to bullets you may fire. entering this command a second time will make them notice you again. Also, if your player ‘dies’ in game, notarget will automatically be turned off)
*BIND <KEY> <COMMAND> (if you want to get serious about moviemaking by yourself, you will have to learn how to bind keys on your keyboard to commands, all done in-game with your console. In Soldiers of Misfortune, as one example, I frequently had “phys_timescale” set to “0″ as I prepped a shot, but to begin the take I would have to set the timescale back to 1. Doing this via console as you record would be very inefficient, so I bound a key to phys_timescale 1. An example on how to do this would be bind M phys_timescale 1. Upon hitting M, the timescale would change to 1. You can even get even more complex by combining console commands. For example, if you wanted to remove the hud and undraw the weapon in a single keystroke, you could try bind BACKSPACE “cl_drawhud 0; r_drawviewmodel 0″ and upon hitting backspace, both the hud and weapon would be removed. IT IS CRUCIAL that when you combine commands that you PUT EVERYTHING IN QUOTATIONS and SEPERATE THE COMMANDS WITH A SEMICOLON. Refer to that last example for clarity.
*FOV # (Via the console, you can change how zoomed in you can be in your first person viewpoint. Think of when you zoom in with a CS:S Sniper Rifle, or the HL2 Crossbow. What the zoom actually is, is a DECREASE in the FOV, or Field of View. Decreasing the Field of view means it zooms in more, whereas increasing means it zooms out. You can change the FOV in Garrysmod with the camera tool by holding down the right click button on your mouse and pushing it forward. Or, via the console, you can type FOV and a value. The FOV varies by default depending on your resolution, so try typing just FOV in the console to see what value it’s already set at. Then, to zoom in, you would pick a value less than that number in the direction of zero, or to zoom out, pick a value greater than that number. Works in all source-based games and can provide you with very detailed, in-game rendered closeups and zooms. I highly recommend it. I used it fluently throughout Soldiers of Misfortune, and the Smooth Few guys who make Leet World constantly use it for their Counter Strike Source series as well)
-Xanatos
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