Team Fortress 2 - Update #7

A proper follow up post for last nights bullshittery episode. Hi there folks :)

So this last week has been one hell of a mountain to climb. As though the editing gods were punishing me for saying that Source Filmmaker was "surprisingly easy". For the program decided it was going to make the quality assurance process as painful as possible.

The troubles began when I went to render the final version of the video. And for that I would need the final cutscene in .mp4 format from SFM.

This would, unusually, take over from After effects (with the highlighted text). Acting as a video "outro". Maybe with a little bit of After Effects subtitles later, if I felt it was needed. 

The problem was first and foremost - lighting. For as mentioned in the previous development post, the Source Filmmaker lighting tools are shockingly primitive for an animation suite of this calibre. Consisting of pre-loaded lightmaps and a handful of spotlights. With very few tools to properly refine them. And a lot of ways to make it look like hot garbage.

Meaning it's very easy to just...get it wrong. In an effort to walk a fine line between three competing lighting goals:

• Light it so the models have shadows, so they're not floating around.
• Don't light it too much so that everything is glossy and shiny.
• Replicate the "washed out" look of modern Team Fortress 2. It MUST look like Team Fortress 2. Or the comedy will fail.

So this required lots of tedious fiddling. And every render seemed to have something wrong somewhere. And usually something had to be sacrificed - often the shadows.

Speaking of rendering, lots of strange behaviour started to occur from Source Filmmaker. As textures that were previously fine would start flickering on and off. In such a way that was immediately distracting in a video that counts on movement to draw eyeline.

And this extended to objects. Some of which would just decided they didn't want to be lit anymore and would flick dark at random in the final render. Instances like this would be solved on a case by case basis, often by removing the offending keyframes. Or in one case, replacing it with a static picture in the foreground, all sneaky-like.

It was creatively challenging. But something of a time sink.

The next challenge became audio.

For whilst Source Filmmaker would handle the animation as a big .mp4 file, it is Adobe Premiere that would be doing the heavy lifting. Compressing it all down into one video. Including all the audio. And it's during this process that the sound became difficult to predict.

It became increasingly common for audio clips to played at the wrong moment, or be far too quiet, or far too loud. Complicated by the fact that a piece of music is playing, potentially drowning it out. And that some effects needed to replicate the Doppler effect and change pitch as they speed past the camera.

Notably the rockets.

Fun fact, the rocket sound is actually the sound of a storm drain that I've pitch modulated. And most of the other sounds have been pulled from the Team Fortress 2 files directly, rebuilding the whole scene one effect at a time. A necessary process. But with lots of trial and error.

So then the final hurdle - very much the main boss for this project.

These lights that flicker repeatedly through the walls are a well-known problem within Source Filmmaker. And there are many forum threads to try and deal with them. With Lazypurple mentioning them specifically in that Halloween video on the project. 

Switching them off involves a console command whilst the engine is running. And whilst this worked just fine in the prior scenes - and even this final one - suddenly this happened:

During the render, the map would just unload itself. But only when this console command is used. And sometimes this would happen without even telling me. Resulting in 30 minute render times that would spit out a video that had frozen in the 7th minute. Utterly wasting my time.

This happened repeatedly.

By this point, Saturday morning - I'd had enough. I took the nuclear option. And I instructed SFM to render each clip individually, so I could verify they were good.

And then rebuilt the whole scene as an After Effects composition. Chucking the outro video .mp4 idea in the bin.

This placed the clips in sequence, one after the other. And gave After Effects control over the whole project, right to the end. And any subsequent changes would see me render only the specific few seconds of footage where the changes applied. Glowy lights be damned if they were off screen.

This required extreme attention to detail. As any change would require verifying it in Source Filmmaker, After Effects and THEN Premiere. It felt like using Binoculars to look through a magnifying glass looking through a microscope. All with their own points of failure.

Such was the complexity that you end up losing sight of the bigger picture. And you fail to notice the most obvious errors.

Such as this close up of the Solder. Can you spot what's missing? Note that this was only noticed 2-3 renders before the final video.

But nevertheless, I persevered. Fixing both these issues. And the myriad of "normal" bullshittery issues that I noted. Such as timing and keyframing of moving text. 

But the marriage of Source Filmmaker and Random Bullshittery very much became a shotgun wedding once SFM stopped cooperating. One that I hope worked out in the end. 

Once again, sorry this video took aaaages. As strange as this is probably going to sound though - I kind of loved this project.

We grow when we challenge ourselves. And this project was undoubtedly that for me. Teaching me a wealth of useful animation lessons that I expect will pay dividends in future bullshitteries. Particularly Team Fortress 2 bullshittery part 2 - if you'd have me do it.

For now though, I'm going to sleep for like...a week.

Thank you for your patience everyone x