Arma Bullshittery - Update #6

Good evening folks. Welcome to the weekend. Corr this editing week has been properly challenging. Pretty fun. But very challenging. Here's an update on progress.

My current focus is to try and get the conclusion edited. With less effort on keyframing and more on the assembly. As the final sequence is a bit...bombastic.

Here's a shot of the final minute of the edit:

The joke in this particular finale in that one of our admins spawned a type of modded vehicle called a "HIGH MAC". A type of fighting walker from a mod pack they had snuck into the required download list.

After showing it off, they then made the mistake of leaving it unattended on the airfield during the pre-mission briefing. And me being...you know...me, I couldn't resist the urge to take it for a stroll through scenic terrain.

And by scenic terrain, I naturally mean...on top of my teammates. To the most appropriate piece of music I could find.

The biggest problem I've got though is that whilst the moment was pretty funny, the footage is quite poor.

All players were locked into a first person perspective. Meaning what the audience saw was actually more like this.

Therefore the contrast between the two gifs should show you the tricks I've been getting up to.

I've been going into Arma 3's editor and setting up the exact same map, with the exact same mods. With NPC's wearing the exact same clothes and standing in the exact same places. So I can cut to another camera and hopefully show something that is true to the spirit of how it went down, but from a far less boring angle.

That process this week has been very challenging.

The first hurdle. Getting everything to look the same.

The open part of the week involved going through and trying to match the look of the footage. Particularly the interface. Setting up a squad of NPC soldiers with the same colours and ranks. Armed with the same weapons, etc. Carefully scrutinising every single soldiers loadout.

The squad radar was something of a headache. Being made from a now obsolete Arma 3 mod. And I suspect the admin then made some specific tweaks out of personal taste. But after numerous tweaks I think I was able to get it right.

The second challenge, trying to get the NPC's to follow the precise movements of the human players. As left to their own devices they seem far too robotic. Lacking the panic of players trying to avoid being tramped. Or not frozen in the "Ace Armory", as many of the victims were as I ragdolled them.

To solve this problem, I tried using something called unitCapture. A function within Arma that records the precise position of the unit with you puppeteering it. A sort of in-game motion capture.

The results have been pretty unsatisfying

I think the HIGH MAC is a bit of an illusion. I think its a normal Arma tank with a walking animation painted onto it. As when the motion capture is played back by NPC's you get a lot of this

So it's been a game of making sure that whenever I need leg motion, my player character is in the seat, and I merely switch to spectator cam to get the shot.

But the wheel sliding is actually useful. The guys started grabbing anti-tank weapons to stop me. And I started using the wheels to scoot away behind the hangers, like zoidberg wooping to safety.

The next challenge is trying to make the ragdolls behave in the same ways that they did on the night. This next footage here should be quite illustrative again. Showing why I felt the need to include third person.

This is what I have to edit. I never even saw what happened to that guy.

I was told later that he was catapulted clear of the base.

So with some tweaking (and probably not final, as I forgot the clouds), I can present something much more visually appealing. And cut in sync with the tempo of the music.

As you can probably expect, this sort of thing is at the mercy of Arma 3's physics gods. And just to get a short 4 second shot like that I had to make take after frustrating take.

I'm just hoping the end result will prove worth it.

So what's the status now? It's almost done. There's about 8 shots that are either not quite right, or I'm really having genuine trouble with. Notably the moments where the guys started using anti-tank weapons as I tried to flee behind the hangers.

The NPCs do not shoot like humans...at all. As human players are lightning fast and move in an extremely distinctive manner. And even custom animations on triggers are failing to look convincing. I may potentially request a small handful of volunteers to pop into Arma with me. Or maybe just fire missiles from off screen.

Whatever it takes to get the shot.

But I'm very eager to get the complete video into quality assurance soon, at which point I'll start cleaning up the problems one by one.

Nearly done :)