Cutscenes?

[Nyarlathotep]

Gave it a first go tonight, seems very simple, but characters/complex scenes will be more of a challenge. So far i've just done a typical thiefy city scene, just to test the water. If anyones at all interested (and yes i'm aware of mistakes in perspective etc, its just a quick play around):

 

www.volcbat.com/vids/sofar.wmv

Nice!

[Order of the Hammer Bureaucrat]

sinusoidal shearing? Wow. I never knew there was that much power.

[Gildoran]

Yeah, you can do all sorts of cool things with D3 materials. In fact, as OrbWeaver noted, a lot of the D3 material keywords/commands are based off of openGL commands, so in some ways their capabilities are similar. I honestly believe it would be possible to do many rust-monkey-style cutscenes entirely with D3 materials without resorting to ROQs; however, it'd probably be much easier and less limiting to be able to use video editing software.

[Komag]

that sofar video is pretty cool already, nice feel to it!

[Domarius]

sinusoidal shearing? Wow. I never knew there was that much power.

Haha, for me it's like "Wow. I never knew that word existed."

[Komag]

that's how I feel when my head's all stuffed up

[Gildoran]

Ok, I just banged out a slight modification to the gilsky2 testmap to make it look a little more like a real map. Anyway, this sky is constructed out of textures in a skybox. It may be a little too "cartoony" looking, most people don't much care for the moon, and the clouds are probably moving slightly too fast (to show off the sky), but it illustrates that you can easily have intricate skies if you try.

 

Here are the videos:

A walk around the testmap. (1989K)

Close-up of the sky, showing twinkly stars and shifting clouds. (2846K)

Moonlight being obscured by clouds. (6869K)

For those who don't want to download the movies, here's a couple of screenshots:

[Domarius]

Upload videos for free - www.multiply.com

[Izeman]

Making those cutscenes is pretty much moving/morphing layers with keyframes. You should definitely try Adobe After Effects. Photoshop users should feel right at home (eventually ).

 

Very impressive indeed! Be sure to familiarize yourself with expressions. If you can do the math required, then you can move several layers simultaneously while perspective / parallax effect comes for free.

[OrbWeaver]

I think there is a little more to making cutscenes than simply morphing layers. There's a clue in the name -- Adobe After Effects, i.e. it is a tool that you use after you have scripted, modelled, textured, animated, lit, voice-acted and added sound effects to your scene.

[Domarius]

I think Izeman was just referring to the technical side of it.

 

To be accurate though, the only artwork in the original cutscenes were illustrations, and shots of the mission itself. No modelling, texturing, or lighting. And the animation was the morphing of layers.

 

Though some of the "morphing" animations, like the eye opening up in the forhead or the tail bending, in the intro to Thief 1, was an illustration pasted onto a 3D surface and animated, but that's just a flat surface with the self illumination set to full, and cut up as nessecary to bend in the right places.

[OrbWeaver]

Oh, those cutscenes. I thought he was referring to cutscenes in general. Yes, the original Thief cutscenes were fairly simple as you say, mostly static images undergoing some gradual motion.

[SneaksieDave]

To avoid teasing

Heh, love that. They make it worse! I wanna see.

 

 

Edit: and yes what Spring said!

[Springheel]

I've set up textures which use sinusoidal shearing to appear to sway; with multiple layers and different scaling, you could have a whole forest appearing to sway,

 

I'd love to see these too, if you have them handy.

[Gildoran]

I'd love to see these too, if you have them handy.

Ok, I've banged out a simple texture that has a vague resemblance to grass. Here's a video. With a more complicated table, you could have less predictable swaying. Anyway, the way to do it is pretty much code along these lines (except with multipliers to control speed/amplitude):

textures/gil/grass
{
{
	blend	   diffusemap
	map		 textures/gil/grass_d
	translate 0, 0.5
	shear sintable[time+parm4], 0
	translate 0, -0.5
	alphatest 0.5
}
{
	blend	   bumpmap
	map		 textures/gil/grass_n
	translate 0, 0.5
	shear sintable[time+parm4], 0
	translate 0, -0.5
}
}

Shaderparm 4 is used as a time offset, so that you can have the grass sway in waves.

[god_is_my_goldfish]

Gave it a first go tonight, seems very simple, but characters/complex scenes will be more of a challenge. So far i've just done a typical thiefy city scene, just to test the water. If anyones at all interested (and yes i'm aware of mistakes in perspective etc, its just a quick play around):

 

www.volcbat.com/vids/sofar.wmv

 

If you need any advice or hints, just contact me, I was working on a feature animated in that style a long time ago. http://www.thirdfilms.com/atp or

[Gildoran]

Ok, the videos have been hosted.

 

Edit: I've added an example of sinusoidal shearing.

[Chris]

If you need any advice or hints, just contact me, I was working on a feature animated in that style a long time ago. http://www.thirdfilms.com/atp or

 

Any help or advice you can lend would be awesome. One thing you can definately help me with, (we can take this to PM if the mods prefer?) how did you go about character movement/silhouettes. From what i guess, it's real silhouettes imposed onto drawn background, with details drawn onto the silhouettes in some rare instances. Only i have no idea how i'd manage to record the material i'd need!

[Komag]

Those vids are cool. That sinusoidal junk is all over the place in Oblivion, it's how the whole forest and grass and bushes and stuff moves all organically, very good effect and it's good we can use it here.

 

I like how the cloud cover creates shadow, is that automatic or scripted?

[Gildoran]

It's automatic, since it uses a light texture that's carefully synced with the skybox. But there is an important limitation with the way I did it. It uses a light falloff that's scaled to be infinitely large and scrolls with the same parameters as the clouds. This means that the moonlight can't have an X/Y falloff, and it isn't clamped; the mapper needs to ensure that the edges of the light are in shadow, or you'll end up with problems where triangles suddenly become fully lit/unlit when they intersect or stop intersecting the moonlight volume.

 

Something I'd love to see would be a script function to read a color off of an image pixel and return it as a vector, so a script could easily keep track of the clouds in front of the moon no matter how complicated their shape. This would allow for lights with falloffs (such as projected lights coming from windows) to be synced with the clouds, and also make multiple cloud decks possible (so you could have clouds that shift shape as they move).

 

Edit: Some other ideas for fun things to do with skyboxes... Make a magic compass leading to a treasure. When the player has the magic compass selected as an inventory item, perhaps certain constellations of stars light up to give the player hints, or maybe stars twinkle more brightly in the direction of the treasure. I've also talked to people who wanted shooting stars, or lightning amongst the clouds, which would be possible.

[SneaksieDave]

lightning amongst the clouds

Boom! I've gotta believe that would be a big one among FM'ers.

[Subjective Effect]

The in-game videos are great. People would be drooling.

[bob_arctor]

And what's more we can have cinema!

 

Anyone going for the ultimate in steampunk could do a video to be displayed on a texture in an FM based on the digital clockwork cinema in The Difference Engine.

[Izeman]

Domarius: Yeah that was it that I was implying.

 

Gildoran: Those videos were awesome! I'm gonna go nuts waiting for the release of TDM. Just recently bought Doom 3 for this.

 

Keep up the good work guys! You've already done one heck of a job.

[Order of the Hammer Bureaucrat]

bob, I thought for a while previously about cinema existing in the DM universe. My conclusion: they have acetylene lamps. They have carbon arch electric lamps. They have good mechanisms allowing projection. But, they don't have a photography industry. 300 years ago, some people starting dabbling in photography and chemicals to fix the image on plates. Within a few years pictures of an erotic nature started proliferating on metal plates among the nobles and the underground. The Builders responded with swift action, and since then posession of chemicals which can be used for photography, apparatus or chemicals to manufacture them, are illegal to posess or buy. Similar to narcotics in USA. As such movie projection can only be witnessed very rarely by the thief within secret hidden rooms in rich people's houses. The projectors and film are imported (smuggled) from the far-away nation (who is more technologically advanced) just like oriental novelties were imported into the western world (fans, combs, paper things, etc). That nation is rather small, rather advanced, reclusive, and very pacifist. Their whole culture is based on and reinforces the historical consumption of pacifying herbal things. Most people in the City are aware of the existance of that country only to the same extent as Americans were aware of kazakhstan before Borat became popular or as they are aware of Andorra right now. Should this be cross-posted into the "universe" thread?