Mashenemah
It was my first "official" day at machinima.com today. Fairly straightforward, went on a mad hunt for machinima films all over obscure sites. Found a really interesting HL2 film I've never seen before, called City 17, but I'm not sure if it can be categorized as machinima. It's mostly live action and based on HL2, with some HL2 models edited in. Some of the XFire WoW machinima contest finalists have really impressed me. I think WoW is shaping up to be a fairly respectable machinima engine.
Precedent progress update: Me and Johnny (producers) were to meet with the 2 actors tonight, but somehow things got messed up and we had to delay. Being a pretty short script, I think that 1 or 2 quick rehearsals should suffice. More so than my previous projects, I really want the actors to add their own touch to the characters and see what happens. Though I haven't directed anything/anyone in about a year, so I'm a bit on edge about it.
Being that it's so short and concise, I'm currently designing the map (a rooftop of some building) as economically as possible. When I picture "rooftop", I immediately see a tall building dwarfing the rest of the city. In level design terms, that means creating the whole damn city. So my solution for this is to have the location be a rooftop of a small building, maybe one of those square-shaped office buildings. That would then be surrounded by taller skyscrapers, so no matter the angle, the rest of the city would be hidden, thus, not needed to be made. The dilemna is, how can I make that look cool or interesting without making it look like a big room with no ceiling? Maybe I'll leave one side open, and try to focus the angles towards that.
I also want to experiment with some depth of field effects with this project. After I get my new video card (Geforce 6800 GS) I'm going to run some visual tests and see how it looks. In my imagination it looks great... somehow I get the feeling it's going to be more complicated than I think and won't look too hot.
2 Comments:
Don't worry, I'm sure everything will turn out right with the director jitters. I get them a lot, but it always turns out fine.
For the rooftop model advice: I've seen many 3ds Max compatable files on turbosquid.com and other various websites that are low poly city models, some even with textures. If you just model the rooftop you want with precision and place it high above the rest of the city. If you do decide to go with the smaller building, make it an office complex (if you are going to be shooting inside). With the addition of the Source engine, the physics of the computer monitors and chairs and such flying around from explosions would look pretty sweet if done right.
And for the video card, Half-Life 2 is built for using the ATI Radeon X800 XL (I'm pretty sure that's the one, it says "Half-Life 2 Preferred Card" or something along those lines on the front of the box. I know you can get them for a great deal at BestBuy). Don't waste your money on an nVidia card, it won't be worth it in the long run.
-dave
Thanks, David.
The film is set entirely on the rooftop, so unfortunately no cool physics action.
I have an ATI card now, the 9800 Pro. I simply cannot stand ATI and their piece of crap drivers. I've always liked NVidia better regardless of the speed. Right now anyways, both ATI and NVidia are pretty even.
Yea HL2 runs a teeny bit better on ATI cards, but there's no way I'll ever buy an ATI card again.
Thanks for the suggestion, but I've done my research. :)
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