Wednesday, September 17, 2008

FIRST GUIDE OUT!



Breaking news here! The first tutorial is now out! I literally just found this out, I haven't even seen the finished product myself yet! Here's a link to it here:

Machinima Choreography Guide

Being a real cheapass myself, I admit the price seems little high. I didn't set it, plus this is a VERY comprehensive guide. I wrote the whole thing targetted for people with NO experience with the Source SDK. An incredible number of hours went into this, so for all that do buy this, you have my thanks. You can read more about it on the page, but here's what this guide will cover:

-Setting up your scene
-Character movement
-Character animations
-Lip syncing
-Beginning usage of Hammer (enough to get you started with machinima)

To sum it up, this is the technical end of machinima-making in Source. If you want to know how I've done a lot of the more elaborate animations in Civil Protection, this tells you how. This guide definitely teaches you everything I knew when I created "Friday" , and more beyond that.

However this guide does NOT teach things like camerawork, demo recording, audio/video editing, motion blur, all the other things related to making a video. That will be covered in the NEXT guide, which I'm still scrambling to get done.  Also since creation on this began before HL2: Episode 2 existed, this is all done using HL2: Episode 1.  However, easily 90% of what's taught here is applicable to any Source engine game. 

EDIT:  I'm trying my best to get the episode out on Tuesday, though it's possible the audio processing might add another day.

Wednesday, September 3, 2008

quick update

Well I've gotten some good responses about the coder position, so I think we'll be seeing some progress in the future. Problem #2 is still going to be a little bit daunting however, so if you think you can help with that, please contact me.

Progress is going well on the next episode. This one won't have much action (don't worry, that won't be a new trend), though it should be more of a treat visually. This one will involve a lot of different maps, many of which I'm taking from existing custom-made maps online and will be crediting the various authors. Right now the ETA on this is under 3 weeks. It would be sooner, but I'm still juggling the last half of Noesis with this.  As always, once that's over, then things are really going to start moving.