Space Engineers bullshittery - Behind the scenes

Hello Patrons. Apologies for the very late post. This was actually typed about 1 week ago but the Patreon two-factor authentication system stopped working, locking me out of this account.

I had to go through their support tickets and wait a bit.

The prior week though has been lovely insofar as destressing. For a DayZ server was placed live which let me interact with you, my lovely audience.

For example, here's me interacting with viewer Rico:

And here I am spending time with viewer Superwacker. Oh how we laughed.

So on the bullshittery video font. A more indepth behind the scenes post on what I've been doing in that last edit. So both halves of this bullshittery are very different from each other, as I bought up before:

I made an early decision to keep the first part a more traditional bullshittery. But I really wanted to include a full tour of Tom's underground missile silo and all of the banter it involved. Leading to a mixture of the two flavours.

Interestingly, there is a very similar exploratory tour of a completely separate ice-base from a year prior that almost made the cut. It wasn't favoured because there were fewer amusing moments overall.

It even included a different type of missile with multiple stages. I briefly played with the idea of inserting clips from that quietly into this. But ultimately decided against it. It involved a trip up to space to visit Social's space station. Which I couldn't make work with the continuity.

In order to make things easier to edit, I decided to break the project files into two distinct folders, clearing the whole Adobe Cache in order to work on each half in total isolation. For the sake of editing I have a pair of solid state drives, one of which is left empty entirely for the purpose of the Adobe Cache. Stitching the two halves together proved challenging. The whole video consisted of 134 scenes in lossless .avi form. About 560gb in total. During renderings, my cache looked something like this - https://i.giphy.com/IguL9zRYV20X1QeKuV.webp

Another challenge, Space Engineers editing often vexes me because there's this concept in my editing that I like to call eyeline. Essentially the viewer only has one pair of eyes. Therefore I should try to make sure that I don't overwhelm the viewer and have continuity of where they need to look between scenes. This is why multiple people might be speaking, but only a small amount of that text is usually shown. I want to limit clutter in the frame.

Space Engineers though...god damn there's often a lot of stuff moving in the frame. Or general UI taking up a lot of free space. Such as the lower bar with all the blocks, a tutorial text to the right, spinning blocks in the centre if you're placing something down.

It's for this reason that sometimes the text just eases up, such as with that Lulu scene. As I know the focus of the eyeline is going to be on one thing alone. And putting text in there would only be an eyeline distraction. So in addition to creative use of text, I also had to know when to ease up.

This is where I use a thing I call 'Null Controller action' (none of these are formal editing terms by the way, more just names I use internally).
Nulls controllers are the invisible squares that other nulls are often parented to, so they control everything. Often the footage itself. So when eyeline is tricky, sometimes I just let the Null Controller zoom in by 30% and pan a bit. Or track something in the frame like any normal null- a zoom and track essentially - to be simple about it.

Here for example, I zoom into Birdy. But then manually move the Null Controller around to make it follow her.

Auto tracking for this project has been a very mixed bag.

I want to say that only about 30% of it is automated. The rest is done manually. Quite a lot of the time there simply wasn't anything for the program to properly track with any degree of accuracy. So I had to simply go in and judge it by hand. Such as I did with the frame of Tom's tank.

The hyperspace animation was fun. It went through a few revisions. It was initially supposed to come out from the portal with bolts of lightning. But it proved too difficult to read on a glance. So I went with a steadily building glow for the same effect that people use to make lightsabers, except I made the text shape the core of it. Similar to how I did the Helldivers 2 tesla towers.

Social hiccupping was a little distort set into a circle and keyframed to grow and then sink.

When we reached the space station above our desert build location, it was Bavon was spontaneously broke into song over Teamspeak. I figured it might be fun to do a little singalong thing with some lobster art.

The sentences were all typed out. Then broken into their individual words and given an identical positional bump with a copy and paste.

Then once the timing of each bump was worked out, the little orb that follows the song is simply an invisible null set along a pathway. The 'bezier interpolation' setting giving me nice smooth handles to extend the make the motion more bouncy.

As mentioned in an earlier post, quite a number of the livestream highlights don't actually involve Space Engineers specific gameplay. Usually involving banter between guys on Teamspeak. Therefore I figured it was best to commission some art here and there to show said discussions

Again this is very much shows the different DNA of bullshitteries. For the way in which one can present livestream highlights varies greatly based on the game format. For things such as Space Engineers or DayZ involve long periods of time where players might be separated by physical distance, therefore banter is inevitable.

Something like Rocket League or Divinity II, total opposite. You're always together. The banter is much more focused on whatever is happening in the game.

This scene in the rocket lab gave me a lot of trouble. 3D tracking is particularly challenging. To the point where it became an example of where I just couldn't get it working the way I'd hoped.

The tracking of the little notches on the frame was simple enough.

But trying to get the 3 to 4 orientation keyframes right, especially without a good frame of reference in the form of a visible floor or ceiling. It just proved too much of a struggle. The text always felt full of wonk.

After a few hours of work, I had to admit defeat and keep the text relatively static. Can't win them all unfortunately.

So yes, all in all, bit of an exhausting project. I can report that the Space Engineers master is a bit tapped out. It's going to be best to leave it for a while in order to fill up to fresh highlights. But with Space Engineers 2 coming, I can't imagine that will be much of an issue.

I've no doubt we're going to see much silliness in the sequel.