Platonic solids

Few days ago I came back from a mandatory university trip which took place in a small village located on the Baltic Sea coast. There all the students were given 2 different assignments which resulted in various installations and performances.

My group came up with an idea of using platonic solids as objects that are moved by wind. I really dig the geometry and contrast between nature and something so mathematical.

These pictures were made by my friend who was part of the group. If you want to see more of her stuff, check out her site.

I also put together a short video. It was quite hard to pick out useable footage but I somehow managed to make a decent clip.

 

I really like the whole concept and one day I'd like to make something alike, but more professionally so to say.

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Anyway, it looks like I'll have more free time on my hands during this semester. I'll do my best to catch up with all my old projects and bring this blog back to life. I know I've been repeating that over and over again but seriously I really want to. Stay tuned!

The afterspray 2 - DreamHack

Woohoo, it's here! After almost a month I finally finished my latest movie. For those who do not follow my blog. It's a Quake Live frag highlight movie from the biggest international LAN event, DreamHack (held twice a year, in winter and summer). Exactly a month ago, 32 quake players gathered there to compete against each other in order to win the tourney. The movie I made showcases the best frags (kills). I always try to do something original in my movies. This time I used the in-game configurations of each of the players to show their own frags with. As a result, while watching you see what the player did while playing. I think it's an interesting approach, but I am also aware that some viewers might dislike it.

Alternative stream: own3d.tv

Download link: MaverickServers

Post on ESReality.com

There's a bonus in the download link, the movie file is zipped along with all the shown configurations, I've also added a little readme file that describes how to install those. If anyone has any trouble with them, feel free to ask.

Now I can get back to my other movie project! More info soon.

Almost done - DH highlights

I'm close to finishing my latest movie. For those that don't follow my blog frequently, I'm working on a quick Dreamhack summer 2012 quakelive frag highlights movie (phew, that was long :)). Initially, I wanted to make it for the recent Republic of Gamers movie making contest, but due to some personal stuff that took priority over finishing the movie, I missed the deadline. I didn't drop the project though, and so I'll be finishing the movie shortly. I'm missing a proper intro, ending, name tags, and some final touches. Other than that, the release might be delayed my current poor internet connection. Heck, I might even might go find a good hotspot to upload it! I'll figure something out:))

Settings

Right now I'm getting ready to start capturing footage from the demos I've picked. Before I start doing that, I have to know what in-game configuration (cfg), resolution and frame rate I want to use.

I already know that the video resolution will be 1280x720 (limitted by the competition rules). I'm not yet sure about the config, as I want to try out something different. As for frame rate, I want to add some motion blur to the video, but not too much. I can achive that in two ways - by using a wolfcamql command called mme_motionblurframes or by capturing the video with a higher frame rate and then lowering it in vegas.

I'm going to try different values until I'm happy with the outcome.

I was also playing around with the codecs. For the first time I made a low quality template for rendering fast previews to check if the video and audio are synchronised together properly, I don't need high quality to check that. In my previous projects I used to render short parts in max quality just to check if something is right. Such a waste of time! With the deadline closing in, I don't have time for that, so these LQ previews will work wonders. ;)  I was also looking for some real high quality settings.. and I found some but it was compressing veeery slowly (5 seconds took 10 minutes to compress), so I'll have to play around some more with different values. Such things take time but they're necessary if you want to make the movie properly. More news soon!

ASUS RoG Movie contest

Yesterday, there was a news posted on ESR about a gaming movie making competition. I though that it could be a nice idea to make a frag highlights movie from the recent DreamHack Summer QuakeLive LAN tourney. I left a comment about it under that news post, and I got some positive response which reassured me about participating in the contest. There's not much time left though - the deadline is 10th of July. So I have 18 days to make and upload the movie to youtube. It'll be a nice test, I wonder how much can I make in such a short period. So yeah, for the time being, I'm putting the DM17 project aside. I'm going to download and watch all the DH demos today (or at least, that's the plan) :)

Stuff!

Didn't have much access to the internet in the last 2 days and I didn't have a chance to write a new post. But worry do not, because here it is! Some stuff happened recently, first of all, I passed LIMBO and I think the game is simply fantastic, playing it is a must for everyone. On a related sidenote, I got a email from humblebundle that they have added 3 more games to their fifth edition, among them there's Super Meat Boy, which is the next game I'm going to check out since it has a cool 8bit soundtrack that I listened to while working on pixelbeat. I'll write some more about it after I try it.

Yesterday, there was a one map: The Longest Yard (dm17) quakelive tourney going on. I wanted to signup for it, but because of all the mess with organization, I gave up on it. Apparently it was kind of successful. Maximzr, the best dm17 player, won the final game against noresz (2:1). I might signup for the next tourney, if they'll hold one. Anyway, I have to find out if any of the players made some impressive frags.
Speaking of frags, I watched all my demos for my next movie project. I found some really nice commands in wolfcamql that speed up watching demos.

• fragforward - which playbacks only frags (5 seconds before the frag and ~3 seconds after it) 
• seekclock - which allows you to jump to any part of the demo (seekclock minutes:seconds)

With these two commands I can go through demos much, muuuch faster. I might start working on this new project soon. With all the experience from my past projects, I make movies faster, and faster. So yeah, expect a new movie this summer.

PixelBeat - quakelive community movie

Finally, after taking many obstacles head on, it's done. My 4th quakelive movie, starring 28 players from both Europe and the USA. It's a bit over 4 minutes long, and features over 40 frags, on average that's 1 frag every 6 seconds . Working on this project took a lot of time. Especially watching the demos was very time consuming. After watching all the demos I lost some motivation, and took a break for a couple of months. Recently I started working on it again and here's the effect!

 I had a really hard time with choosing the right songs. I wanted to make the movie sort of 8bit/oldschool themed, so I was listening to a lot of chiptune and bitpop. Some of the songs were almost painful to listen to, others just wouldn't fit a quake movie. If you liked the music I used, check out the other songs of those musicians, I've put links in the credits at the end of the movie.

I'd also like to thank my good old friend phl for beta testing the movie and giving me a lot of helpful advices and ideas. Without him, the movie wouldn't be the same.

Download link: http://download.maverickservers.com/PixelBeat_x264_720p50.mp4



Here are some goodies for anyone interested, you can use them as avatars, icons and what not. But if you want to use them in some movies, games, etc. Let me know. Not because I have anything against it, but because I'd like to know about it. :)

 Hah, yeah that's a in-game chat indicator there, it almost doesn't appear in the movie, but I think it looks pretty cool:) Also, I've contributed an avatar made of sarge's head on ESR. I'm using it, but I'd be glad to see other people using it.

Anybody out there?

Hah, sorry for not posting anything in ages. I was either busy or without any motivation to work on the movie. By the way, happy zombie jesus day! During this short holiday I began working on the frag part of the movie, leaving the intro in the current unfinished state. Anyway, the frag part is becoming pretty goood and I'm quite happy with what I see.
To be honest I'm sort of fed up with this project. I expected a bit more from the community, like better frags to work on. I guess I'm really strict when it comes to frags.. So yeah, I won't use all the ideas I intended to use on this movie, keep the editing minimalistic (some people like that side of my movies so I guess it won't be such a big deal) and I probably gonna finish it soon and maybe start working on something else

A portal :)

Today, I've made another simple 2D sprite, this time it's a standard q3/ql portal.



I thought of this neat idea today while making these sprites. I want to make a short quake-ish 2D platformer game and attach it to the movie. I already saw some tutorials on youtube. It might learn something useful and have some fun at the same time.:)

But don't worry, I'm still working on the movie. This portal will be used in the intro, and I've also made a background but I won't be sharing that with you. You'll see it in the movie. I'll be making updates more frequently now, so you're welcome to check for news every now and then. :)

Back to work!

Few days ago I resumed work on the movie. It's almost christmas time and I have a lot of different stuff to do as well but I try to spend my free time on movie making.

I didn't start putting the actual movie together yet, but I'm getting closer to that. Yesterday I've put all of the frags I've got into vegas and rendered previews. If put together these previews make up to about 10 minutes of footage. Of course I won't use all of that. In the end the movie will be somewhere between 4 and 6 minutes, or at least that's what I'm planning. I want to keep it short and interesting. Long movies tend to get boring after a while and I'd rather see people complaining that it was too short than the opposite.

I'll probably go back to wolfcam later on to render a recam or two for appropriate moments in the movie.

Also, still not 100% sure about music, and it's been over a year now that I'm thinking about it. heh. oh btw while talking about dilemmas. I have no freaking idea how to name it. Hopefully I'll think of something while editting.

When will it be ready? In 2012 for sure.

Bleh

Well, I haven't posted for a while, the reason behind that is simple. For now, I've lost motivation to work on my current project. It doesn't mean that I'm dropping it. The release is postponed and that's it.
Right now I'm learning 3D modelling in ZBrush. It's a great tool and after learning it I will be able to use it to improve my quake videos as well as start making my own 3d models and animation (with some additional software). I really want to get into this kind of stuff and express myself.
Quake videos have a very niche audience, whereas CG art scene is huge but at the same time very demanding (almost as demanding as ESR users ;))
So yeah, apart from my quake vids, expect some 3d content from me in the future.

The Afterspray - summary

On 26th of August 2010, exactly a year ago, I released my last movie - The Afterspray. So far it's my most successful one. Let me give you guys some numbers. Over the past year it accumulated over 32000 views on youtube.com and over 18000 views on own3d.tv, that equals over 50000 views in total and counting.

The number of downloads isn't as big but considering that not everyone is collecting quake movies and, sadly, people tend to watch only the stream, which is totally not the same thing as watching it from your hdd, but almost 2000 downloads, which makes 5 downloads per day on average, is enough to make me happy. :)

The movie was posted on various sites in many languages and most of the comments were positive. There also was a little bit of constructive criticism and I'll use it while editing my current project, which, by the way, will be very different from afterspray, which I made thinking about making something that the community will like, this around time it'll be about using an original idea/theme for the movie that I thought it would be cool to work on.

Anyway, if you haven't seen The Afterspray yet, or you watched it a long time ago, it's a nice opportunity to watch it again :)

Capturing footage!

Two days ago I finalized some ql config releated stuff, yesterday I cleaned up 100 gigs from my HDD and today I've began capturing footage:) Already captured all the frags that I rated 10/10 and half way through the 9's. Things are going super fast :)

Oh, btw according to my flag counter, yesterday my blog hit 1337 unique visitors w00t!


Pretty cool I must admit. Anyway, I found a nice blog with music that will fit into the movie, so yeah a lot of listening again:) The music that I use in my videos is really important to me.

Expect more blog post in the near future :)

Three dee!

Hello there, it's been a while since my last blog post. Suprisingly now that I have a lot of free time I lack motivation to work on the movie. Some days are exceptions though and I'm close to starting capturing footage. Before that I have to finalize custom stuff, like the hud or in game billboards. At first I didn't have a slightest clue how to make a hud, but thanks to http://visualhud.pk69.com/ it became childs play. Since the hud I'll use will have a custom font / icons, I had to go through the hassle of locating the responsible files in the ql .pk3's. If anyone is interested I might share my knowladge about it later on.

Meanwhile I found and fixed some minor flaws in the cfg and still, as always till the last minute, triend to find a perfect song(s?) for the movie. That's a really hard task considering that the music genre is really niche this time and I'm sure a lot of people will really hate it only because of the music. It will really fit the theme of the movie and there's no turning back now. At least it will be original. :)

Oh yeah as the title of this blog post says I'm starting to learn 3D modeling and animation. I got myself ZBrush and 3Ds max and some ebooks about them. So yeah, if I'll work hard I might learn something and use it in my movies, and more!:) Something to look forward to.

Uh, I'm pretty sure a lot of people is already dead tired of waiting for this movie to be released, well I'm really sorry but I'm a normal human and I also have other things to do then just dwell in front of the screen, also I don't want to rush it. So yeah, it'll be released when it's done.

ding dong!

Today is my last day of work, actually, I'm writing this post from a PC of a friendly local worker, there's a badass laser right next to me, cutting shapes from metal plates.

So yeah, later today I'll have to clean up the dorm and pack my stuff, my father will pick me up in the evening.

Yeeeeah, vacations! Finally a lot of time to focus on the movie. You're probably wondering how's the movie going, and well, it's going slow. Recently I've upgraded wolfcam to 8.3 and noticed this nifty little command that let's you render footage at higher res then your screen supports, so yeah probably the highest res version will be 1080p but I don't think that it's gonna be the 'main version' what I mean is that the size of frag messages and stuff will be adjusted to the 720p version. I also worked a bit on custom content, like the ingame ads, hud etc - stuff that I have to finish before I start capturing footage.

Recently a few nice movies popped up on ESR, I was envious of zeroql's movie crisp and clear quality so I asked him about it, he gave me a link to a youtube tutorial for ultra HD movies or something, heh, to be honest I expected something more than that, like megui presets, bitrate or something, but it's fine as long as I'll get the desired quality :)

In-game ads and stuff

Today I was playing around with quakelive's insides, I always wondered what's the path to the in-game billboard ads. For anyone interested, they're in pak00 and the path is "textures/ad_content", insides there's ad1x1.jpg (256x256), ad2x1.jpg (512x256 - the typical big billboard), ad4x1.jpg (1024x256) ad8x1.jpg (1024x128) and adbrightoverlay.png which is present on space map billboards (special effect thingy, cba to explain). This will be my first movies with custom ads, and that will most probably be it when it comes to custom stuff, I'm not a big fan of these cpma weapon effects and particles, sorry.

cfg, codecs and quality

Today I was messing around with compression and quality. I've finally set up a nice in-game configuration and I'll be uploading a quality preview to youtube soon (download link as well). I'm thinking about making high and low quality versions. The high quality version would be 720p at 50fps, right now I can't render 1080p videos, would need a new monitor. I'm not sure about the low quality version yet, probably also 720p but 30fps.

There's still a lot to do and hopefully I'll find the motivation.

Resumed work.

Yesterday, I worked out a decent movie config on wolfcam. Updated MeGui and noticed that I have to download some presets. I've also noticed that I have some demos that I didn't cut last time. After a while I got bored. :<

Today after work I was too tired to do anything with the demos.

I need some motivation to get into full speed:)

Getting there.

I'm pretty sure everyone who has sent me demos is getting impatient by now. I didn't get to work on the movie yet, BUT! I'm almost done with exams and stuff@uni. Since the 1st of July I'll be working in the weekdays from 7am to 3pm, but don't worry I'll have time for movie making since unlike university, I won't have any 'homework'. So yeah, starting on July the 1st I'll be movie making on full speed. Expect updates, teasers and such.

Oh yeah, btw, I applied to a 2nd course on uni, and guess what, it's about computer animation, movies and montage. :> Perfectly fits my interests. I hope, I'll manage two courses simultaneously, we'll see :)

Slow, slow, super slow

Yeah things aren't going as fast as I'd like them to. I really have a shitload of stuff to do for uni and on top of that I had some personal things happening which surely didn't motivate me to work on the movie.

Since I've already seen and rated all the demos, it pretty much comes down to capturing and putting everything together.

When I started working on this movie I thought to myself 'Ok, I'll work an hour or two on the movie everyday during weekdays and some more on the weekends and it'll be done in no time!' - but now I've realized that I can't work like that, I can't split my attention between movie making, uni and personal life, so to work on the movie I have to really focus on it. I won't have much time to spare until July, and that's when I'll be able to focus solely on the movie.

Also, I'm not gonna accept anymore demos, I think I have enough, or at least I hope so. I'll do my best. Oh and btw, I'll be working on another movie this summer, I'm probably even more excited about it than I am on my current project. heh anyways, probably gonna take a while before I post something again, but don't worry, once I'll get to work seriously on the movie, I'll make up for it.