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First Person Shooters (Games) Media Movies

A Few Good G-Men - HL2 Machinima 37

Posted by Zonk from the pretty-movies dept.
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)."
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A Few Good G-Men - HL2 Machinima More

A Few Good G-Men - HL2 Machinima

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  • Dang (Score:1)

    by KriKit ( 892231 )
    Someone needs a job, bad.
  • Hats go off this is a pretty cool adaptation. I know I don't have what it takes to pull this off. My hat goes off to a job well done.

  • Torrent link (Score:3, Informative)

    by kalayq ( 827594 ) on Sunday July 17, 2005 @01:04PM (#13087195)
    http://www.filerush.com/torrents/fewgoodgmen.mov.t orrent [filerush.com]

  • Very Impressive (Score:4, Insightful)

    by TheRealJFM ( 671978 ) on Sunday July 17, 2005 @01:13PM (#13087227) Homepage Journal
    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...
    • 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).

      From TFA:
      The animations are spotty in some areas and I need to make some of the expressions more fluid, but overall I think it's a pretty decent attempt (I need to work a little more on Angry Tom)...I plan on doing at least one more cut of this movie with some of the missing details put in...

      I agree that this is pr
      • I was wondering whether the lack of highly contortive emotions (ie where the face moves quite a lot) are prevented due to limitations in the engine.

        We'll see how his improvements change this :)

        • Re:Very Impressive (Score:2, Interesting)

          by MuNansen ( 833037 )
          The answer is yes, the more expressive animations were limited by the game. More the model than the engine, though. Valve has an interest in not letting their characters look too odd or crazy, so the models were built with some limitations to how much their faces could contort. The models are very good at subtle emotions, but not so great at more expressive stuff. The engine itself is capable of much more, though.
          • With regard to 'strong' voices - it does indeed sound like the engine has that feature [valvesoftware.com], and it's just missing from the models:

            The emphasis track scales the intensity of phonemes during playback. For certain phonemes, you may want to author a "weak" and "strong" version and add these to the "phonemes_weak" and "phonemes_strong" expression class files. Note that Valve did not actually use this feature in shipping HL2 (but in theory, it should work).

    • ### Perhaps we won't need "pre-rendered" graphics for truly immersive film sequences any more.

      From a graphics standpoint alone we didn't need them basically ever. Just watch the intro of Out of this World (1991), while the character itself is rather blocky and nowhere as detailed as todays characters, the movement is fantastic, much better then what the blended-bone animations of todays engine will give you. Motion-caputured sequenzen today can look equally good like the rotoscoped stuff from back then, bu
      • omputer generated/blended animation

        You mean handmade animation.

        • Re:Very Impressive (Score:3, Interesting)

          by grumbel ( 592662 )
          No, it doesn't have to be handmade animation, motion-caputured animation in-game looks often equally bad. The throuble is that motion-caputre animation only looks really good when it coveres anything from start to finish, in-game however you have seperate animations for everything 'run-animation', a 'walk-animation' and a 'turn-animation' and the engine then more or less brutally blends between all of them when the player runs around and this 'blending' is pretty awefull and noticable. Thats why I called it
          • A problem here is that in reality, a lot of actions have lead times, in a game that means lagging controls (e.g. press jump, your character leaves the ground half a second later) or bad blending (you let the player jump immediately but can't show the jump preparations the character makes). Even if you could make perfect animations you often don't get the input from the player before it's too late.

  • Next Movie (Score:2, Funny)

    by NikG43 ( 247278 )
    Sex seen with Serious Sam, Laura Croft, and a DOA Girl.

  • I don't see the point (Score:1, Insightful)

    by gdulli ( 177638 )
    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 ex
    • The thing you're missing about machinima is that it's another medium for people to express themselves, even if this particular one is just a copy of existing work. If someone draws a painting of a scene from a movie, would you "get" that? Same thing here - in both mediums it's possible to copy existing content and to create your own.

      As for original content, check out Red vs. Blue [roosterteeth.com] or The StrangerHood [roosterteeth.com]. There's plenty more if you look.

      • "The thing you're missing about machinima is that it's another medium for people to express themselves, even if this particular one is just a copy of existing work. If someone draws a painting of a scene from a movie, would you "get" that? Same thing here - in both mediums it's possible to copy existing content and to create your own."

        Semaphore is another medium for people to express themselves in, but it doesn't mean that watching A Few Good Men performed in that medium wouldn't be tedious to watch, or th
        • The GP to this post mentioned Red vs Blue but doesn't mention what machinima genuinely adds to video fiction that nothing else can: gaming in-jokes.

          Other than that it is a bit pointless, especially to someone who isn't impressed with interesting hacks (which it was when it started out) or giving the public wider access to creating entertainment.
    • It would have been cool if he posted the engine files and it turned out to be way smaller than the scene in a FMV(full motion video) format, but no he posted a FMV that's just as big as any FMV for an animation this size. I've long been waiting for the day where I could pan around scenes, download character models and sets and then all stories would be simply animation and sound instructions, and this is not it.
      • "It would have been cool if he posted the engine files and it turned out to be way smaller than the scene in a FMV(full motion video) format, but no he posted a FMV that's just as big as any FMV for an animation this size."

        If there was a free and lightweight viewer for HL2 files, that would be something that would add value to the platform for non-gaming, non-interactive videos. Files would be smaller and easier to distribute and people wouldn't need to own the game or have Quicktime installed to view the

    • "The most amazing thing about a dancing bear is not how well he dances, but rather, that he can dance at all."

      What this video shows is that, given compelling voice acting, video game tools are getting pretty close to enabling stand-alone content. Okay, it's still a dancing bear, but I was moved enough watching this that I could easily see myself sitting through a feature-length presentation in this format. (Of course, the quality is low enough that I'd probably wait to rent it for $.99, but still...)

      • "Okay, it's still a dancing bear, but I was moved enough watching this that I could easily see myself sitting through a feature-length presentation in this format. (Of course, the quality is low enough that I'd probably wait to rent it for $.99, but still...)"

        I would imagine that Aaron Sorkin's dialogue and the performances of the actors is what moved you. And if you've seen the movie, the context of the scene within the larger story. I think you're moved by it despite the medium, not because of it, based
    • Machinima is another medium for people to use to create art and express themselves. Moreover, sometimes it's better to tell a story through machinima because the file size may be smaller and uses game engine technology so it can be viewed in high resolutions. This is all without having to know the ins and outs of programs like 3Ds, Maya, Lightwave, etc. and without rendering every single frame out with your CPU 3-5 times to cover the most used resolution, etc.
  • For somebody who has done this alone in his garage it might be a good achivment, but beside from that its not impressive at all. The movement is still as robotic as ever in video games, the lipsync and mimic might be a better then average, but overall it still looks like your regular CG puppet. Especially when the characters move a bit around or when they get angry at each other it just doesn't look very real. Especially for character movement motion-caputure still gives a lot better results then what we ha
    • Didn't you people see that this was a demo reel to get a job in the videogame industry? Apparently he's been out of work for weeks.

      If his "lipsync and mimic [are] better than average," as you say, then he has a good chance of landing work which is what his intent was.

  • It's not that good (Score:2, Interesting)

    by originalnih ( 709470 )
    Where are the red, furious faces? Wheres the expression? Where's the spittle? This is a scene of conflict and anger played out to its best. Sadly this machinima captures none of that. The basic movements have been mapped to follow the script, but that's it. Hands move and portray basic gestures, but you never see shoulders hunch or the gman do anything other than sit there. It has a long, long way to go yet. For a slightly better example of machinima, check out a game called HalfLife 2. The original, not

  • It's good but not great. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by log0n ( 18224 ) on Sunday July 17, 2005 @11:00PM (#13090342)
    (FWIW, my major was 3d art/design/multimedia)

    The artist has potential, but it's not *wow* yet. A lot of the technical stuff (95%) is there (basic phonemes, synching, tracking, camera work, etc), but the stuff that really makes the wow factor isn't there - the remaining 5% (all the subtle stuff - characters shouldn't be rigid, breatching, musculuture, etc etc). Naturalism vs. realism.

    But for a first attempt and maybe a demo piece, good job. Best of luck w/ finding a job!

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