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A Few Good G-Men - HL2 Machinima
Alamar3 writes "Just to give an idea of how awesome Half-Life 2 is for Machinima, R. Glass has produced a 6-minute clip of a well-known scene from A Few Good Men." From the article: "All of the camera cuts were done in the game (at least 15 point_viewcontrol entities). When you launched the level it went right into the movie and didn't stop until the end credits. I used Cannonfodder's tools to create the animations (with 3DS Max). There were a few glitches along the way (I'll go into detail later... you may notice that there isn't hand animation in some shots). I plan on doing at least one more cut of this movie with some of the missing details put in (for one, a Marine uniform for the G-Man)."
Just finished watching it, an amazing piece of technical expertise. It certainly shows how impressive the HL2 engine is at speech and lip-syncing.
I thought the depiction of the less cortorted emotional reactions was very nice, but I felt that the "angry" faces just weren't angry enough. (The yelling looked like talking, for example).
Perhaps we won't need "pre-rendered" graphics for truly immersive film sequences any more. I know that a lot of games don't use them, but in thing such as Final Fantasy, the gap between the quality of the pre-rendered and real-time sequences is always quite painfully obvious.
I think the creator(s) could probably find a place at one of the game studios though...
Joseph Farthing
http://josephfarthing.com
This is not impressive. Half-Life 2 was impressive. HL2 had an impressive engine, impressive lip synching code, impressive content. A Few Good Men was impressive. This scene had great dialogue and the actors performed it well. This movie does nothing original, it takes the content from the movie and uses the tools from Valve to create a copy of the scene in a quality low enough that no one would ever want to watch it if not for the gimmick coolness factor of having used an odd choice of tools to present existing content in a new way.
If they had added something to the experience, it could have been impressive and not merely a tech demo showing off Valve's engine and a developer's patience and skill at using the tools. HL2 itself is a much better example of that.
People must find this impressive because they like both HL2 and A Few Good Men and figure that anything containing both contexts is a good thing, without performing any sort of analysis of what it is they're actually seeing. I'm open to suggestions about what it is I'm missing that makes this impressive, aside from the patience and time that may have gone into creating it.
There's no reason for the whole concept of machinima except for people to think, "Hey, that's cool that they can do that with a game engine." But the reason stops there. I've not seen anything interesting ever done with it. I've seen interesting gameplay or physics manipulation videos on the internet, but never fiction.
I was expecting to see new character models that looked like the actors. I was expecting the facial animation to be great, since there's hardly any movement in the scene. When the characters were supposed to have a straight face, it was passable. Anytime they shouted/emoted, it looked awful.
Macromedia Flash is a great tool for artist-programmers to create great animations. Perhaps what we're seeing is that there would be a market for a version of that tool that could create the equivalent type of animations in 3d, with the same kind of ease, or at least as much ease as possible.
The Source engine wasn't designed to be that tool, and the fact that you can take their character models and put them in a room and use a combination of their lip synching tools and trial and error to get the lips to mostly match the words doesn't mean there's any reason to do so, other than a shallow coolness factor, which isn't enough to sustain machinima as an interesting concept.