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Thank you for returning!
I didn't think anyone would come back..
Now let me talk about this.. light!
That's right, this is a light because of my Maya problem. Setting a Gobo Texture on a light is effectively
turning it into a projector
and whatever texture you set will be projected. Kind of like the bat signal in batman.
You simply draw a black bat with a white background, make it a .tga file,
import it into VTFEdit and export it as a VTF with a VTM file and then place
it in the textures folder.
I know, sound like a lot but there'll be a link at the bottom to give you more
details.
The light will pass the shape of the bat and then you're ready to call batman.
But there's one terrible problem which I found. When I played with the settings, Radius in particular.
Look what happens.
Pressing the spacebar plays absolutely fine but as I scrub along the
timeline, you get this mad flickering. Unfortunately this is what happens during
the render too so if your lights are acting up try playing around with these settings,
I am aware there's some flickering to do with Volumetric Intensity too so maybe try that out as well. At one point I
was considering a Text Overlay but it wouldn't have let me zoom out without obviously highlighting
the lack of depth,
but this gobo texture really saved the day.
I'd like to reveal another secret,
because of the importing issue and the lack of scaling,
this letter I was composed entirely of...
shelves.
With a neatly positioned ladder to cover the middle.
Speaking of ladder, isn't it strange how this ladder is completely a different
shade to the others?
I copied and pasted from it too.
Anyway! I'm aware that this commentary is getting rather long so I'm going to speed up
the next few topics: Camera-ing. For the motion of the camera, I first tried the graph editor like the
Valve Tutorials suggested, but since I was using the motion editor for most of the time,
it just felt more natural to stick with it. In summary, if you want clean camera movement
I'd go with the graph editor, whereas the motion editor can get a bit messy.
Basically with the motion editor, you can position the camera where you want it to be
and then use round to fill out a motion,
like so.
Timing!
I think this is the best time to show you what my final view looks like,
as you can see.. I had no sense of time when I was doing pose to pose
animation. Shown by the different amount of reds and greens in the timeline. Which is understandable
since I'm new! But thankfully in SFM there are two main things you
can do to help you with your timing.
You can either go into the motion editor and adjust the time lengths between each motion by Alt
dragging the edges. Or if your posing was fairly well paced, you can do it via the
clip editor and shifting the scale using Alt, Shift & Ctrl.
You can even Blade (by pressing B) these shots for even more control.
So to recap on Alt Dragging, Select the Model and the time you want to edit, and then simply drag
from where you want something extended or to contract.
So I've tried a contract and.. the result actually is an improvement, the bobbing of the
head makes it more "realistic". Wish I played around with this sooner (!).
Another method is to control the speed of the entire shot you can press Alt,
Shift, Ctrl in the middle of a shot and drag it to your liking.
Or better yet right click the shot, edit clip and set time scale.
Sounds. I'm not really a sound person, although I'd love to get into voice acting,
but getting the right music composition was a challenge.
There were about four changes in moods and alternating them would just make the
music messy.
Most of the sounds were from Valve's extensive inbuilt library, and you have to assign
a time for each sound. Not the easiest of jobs, but if you're on actor mode by pressing
you could re-enact all the TF2 characters movements and sounds. I used Audacity
for the voices and this brings me to SFM Problem #2. You cannot
set volumes higher than the original file, so it cannot exceed 1. So make sure for
loud noises you record it with a little extra volume because you can always decrease it later.
Also as a tip, if you have music in your piece, try to decide what music to put in
first. Since I was relying on pre-recorded music, I had to chop
a song in half and adjust all the timings, would you believe it was
originally meant to only last a minute?
Lastly, rendering! We are near the end! And this was a nightmare of a task.
Being so close to the goal and not being able to finish it. So you've finished the animation and
want to render. Well here's SFM Problem #3. If Audio is muted on the clip editor
you will not render audio in your final file. Sadly this actually happened
at one point and I wasted about 20 minutes of rendering time. So make sure it's ticked,
not muted in the clip editor
and we're good to go.
Now which format is the best? Well from trial and error, I found that .avi keeps your brightness but loses colour
and doubles the size of a .mp4.
The mp4 retains the colour but is really dark. The H264 codec brightens
it more than mp4, fades the colour and gives a smaller size
- and I can't seem to open it with Windows Media Player, probably a codec problem
but with VLC its fine.
I chose the mp4, and brightened up every shot so that it would be hopefully look normal.
I then passed it onto Adobe After Effects, which messed up the sounds anyway funnily enough so I had to export the
.wavs separately and it was fine
after then. Finally I uploaded onto YouTube which makes it slightly darker during conversion! So up the
brightness and hope for the best is what I'd suggest.
And don't forget to fill out any gaps you have in your clip editor with slugs otherwise
your render will stop as soon as it reaches a gap,
pretty cool term though, right?
Even tiny tiny gaps such as this one!
Helpful Hint... I dunno, 7?
On your camera settings, via the element viewer when it says *DepthOfField* Quality or MotionBlur Quality,
don't increase these too high as they will add on to your rendering time significantly - this lighting
scene in particular caused me hell.
In terms of values, some flickering can be reduced by increasing the quality,
I wouldn't go as high as 10.
Now to finish this, I'll throw in one more SFM problem, #4 - there's no
easy way to crossfade. Apparently there's a way but I've not found it.
And oh I might as well throw in my whole importing problem as number 5.
Thank you guys for watching,
I hope you had found this video helpful at least one way,
if you enjoyed this video please subscribe and I'll be very grateful!
Leave any comments and I'll see you guys on my next project.