#creationkit

Finally learning the Creation Kit!!

Fallout 4: TV Effects

For the opening scene in Fallout 4 we had Ron Perlman return and the voice of the newscaster reading the news while the bombs dropped. The task to create the newscast and make it look like it was on the TV fell to me. Unfortunately we were not going to support video as textures in the engine so I had to find a clever way to work around that limitation.

I had previously written a Max script to build stepped UV keys so I could put my flip book textures from particles onto geometry. Using this I could basically get video from After Effects to an animated texture in the game. To prove this could work as our solution I created a test space to record my video, baked out and quickly animated an actor, stubbed in the prop meshes and background map, and then put the resulting animation into a texture on the screen. I added a looping layer of screen warp and high res animating noise to create the look of the old television broadcast.

My first test included still frames as commercial to break up the broadcast because I had no idea yet how much time we had to fill if the player was not progressing the scene.

As the test footage of the news anchor sat in the game it became clear the looping animation was not in alignment with the dialog. I had hoped this would be small enough to get away with because of the crude implementation and lack of control it afforded. In the end it was not because this was something we were directing the player to pay close attention to.

With the help of Rick Vicens and the animation team we created a plan to fill the time with a series on mo-capped animations all ending in the idle pose shown in the picture at the top. The final lines would be one long unique animation mo-capped to match. It occurs to me this may be the only time in gaming history mo-cap was recorded for a texture:)

Along the way I had the idea to add in an old commercial from the Fallout 3 advertising instead of the still frames. Due to limitations in texture space I had to resort to cutting up loops from the commercial and then filling it the timing to match the audio.

Once we had the updated animation I rebuilt my fake actor asset as a real actor with better clothes and a baked out facegen face courtesy of tech artist Felipe Noguiera. Now we could play the animations and have his mouth move without hand animating it. We set up the mocap data and an idle and captured it as video in the engine.

The last step was to use the looping idles to match the Ron Perlman dialog as closely as possible. To do this we used the old brute force approach. I was currently crunching to finish VFX for the game so animator Barry Nardone stepped in to help. He loaded the lines into max and stitched together combinations of the looping idles to match each one.

Here are the final assets in game:

And people found my recording studio as well:)

Skyrim: Alduin Death VFX

Opening up this post with a pics from Ray Lederer’s concept work and Jonah Lobe’s modeling work as a reminder these big set pieces are the culmination of a lot of different people’s work.

The main thought I had going into developing the VFX for this scene was Alduin was stealing souls so he must be a big magical sack full of souls and evil. That idea led me to start trying to have him shed his dry lava looking shell to reveal a putrid under layer.

Once I had that idea stubbed in I started trying to raise the drama in the scene. I added in the meteor storm spell that Grant Struthers had made for him to the script controlling the sequence. I also started fleshing out the sould escaping effect that starts once he loses his shell.

My final addition was an explosion at the end of the soul streaming part that vaporizes the shell bits on the ground. I always looks for the chance to have parts from earlier in a long fx sequence interact with parts that come later.

You can watch a YouTube video of the whole fight here:

And I noticed a few positive fan reactions in the comments as I researched for this post :):):):):):)

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"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Skyrim Special Edition\lex"

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Skyrim Special Edition\Logs"

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Skyrim Special Edition\Papyrus Compiler"

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Skyrim Special Edition\Tools"

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Skyrim Special Edition\Data\Source"

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Skyrim Special Edition\Data\Source\Scripts"

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Skyrim Special Edition\lex\User"

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Skyrim Special Edition\Tools\Archive"

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Skyrim Special Edition\Tools\Audio"

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Skyrim Special Edition\Tools\Elric"

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Skyrim Special Edition\Tools\HavokBehaviorPostProcess"

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Skyrim Special Edition\CreationKit.exe

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Skyrim Special Edition\CreationKit.ini

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Skyrim Special Edition\CreationKitPrefs.ini

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Skyrim Special Edition\flowchartx64.dll

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Skyrim Special Edition\p4com64.dll

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Skyrim Special Edition\Data\Scripts.zip

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Skyrim Special Edition\lex\accent.tlx

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Skyrim Special Edition\lex\ssceam.tlx

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"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Skyrim Special Edition\lex\ssceca.tlx

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Skyrim Special Edition\lex\ssceca2.clx

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Skyrim Special Edition\lex\tech.tlx

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Skyrim Special Edition\lex\User\correct.tlx

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"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Skyrim Special Edition\Papyrus Compiler\antlr.runtime.dll

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Skyrim Special Edition\Papyrus Compiler\Antlr3.Runtime.dll

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Skyrim Special Edition\Papyrus Compiler\Antlr3.Utility.dll

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Skyrim Special Edition\Papyrus Compiler\PapyrusAssembler.exe

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Skyrim Special Edition\Papyrus Compiler\PapyrusCompiler.exe

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Skyrim Special Edition\Papyrus Compiler\PCompiler.dll

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Skyrim Special Edition\Papyrus Compiler\ScriptCompile.bat

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Skyrim Special Edition\Papyrus Compiler\StringTemplate.dll

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Skyrim Special Edition\Tools\Archive\Archive.exe

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Skyrim Special Edition\Tools\Audio\xwmaencode.exe

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Skyrim Special Edition\Tools\Elric\xg.dll

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Skyrim Special Edition\Tools\Elric\xtexconv.exe

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Skyrim Special Edition\Tools\HavokBehaviorPostProcess\HavokBehaviorPostProcess.exe

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Skyrim Special Edition\Tools\HavokBehaviorPostProcess\readme.txt

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Skyrim Special Edition\Tools\HavokBehaviorPostProcess\UpgradeHavokBehavior.bat

詳細TXT

"https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Qz_xKJlKZ5nsrBWCh7u0vczKkJ_C23Lg/view?usp=sharing"

I was chatting with another mod author yesterday sharing some quality of life tips for improving your level design experiences and thought I’d share them here as well. 

Hiding Objects

Most people know to press 11 to hide selected objects such as those ever present 654545155 invisible misters preventing you from clicking on the piece you aimed for. If you check the Layers window you can often find a layer just for the misters and other invisible clicking hazards and click on the eye icon to hide them all. You may find other useful layers to hide as well such as second floor layers.  The M key can also toggle markers off hiding even more objects that may get in your way. Alt+1 will unhide everything you’ve hidden using 11.

Removing Objects

The person I was chatting with was doing some area cleanup but didn’t want to break precombines. He was trying to be good about not deleting objects and setting things he wanted to get rid of as Initially Disabled by checking the box in the object’s edit window. However this approach was causing unintended errors as objects which had linked references were being disabled.  One of the most basic rules that mod authors learn early on is to NEVER DELETE objects for good reason. 

However in this case the safest and easiest way to remove vanilla objects you want to clean out of an area is to sort the Cell View window by either type or name on the right side and outright delete the objects you want to get rid of in bulk. Any object with a linked reference that you attempt to delete will give you an error message so you can then choose not to delete that object. Then open your mod in xEdit and use the cleaning procedures to convert deleted objects to disabled objects. This approach also reduces the likelihood of stray edits made by clicking things in the Render window that must be manually cleaned from your esp file in xEdit.  Search for videos from GamerPoets or many others to learn how to clean your mods in xEdit.

If you also don’t want to break precombines you can then manually go through all of your edits in xEdit and remove any items that say [Placed Object] with the brackets included. The brackets indicate those are objects in precombines which become broken when changed.  

Finding Error Messages

Skyrim Trailer: Part 1

At the end of 2010 Rick Vicens started the effort to create the first full trailer for Skyrim. The plan was to create an all in engine trailer and cut it back and forth with the teaser Todd had shown to announce the game at the 2010 VGAs. By early 2011 several more of us with differing specialties had been pulled into the team creating the trailer. By the end of the work I had touched many of the shots in various ways including a ton of work on the infamous shot 27 (see part 2 coming soon).

The dragon flying low shot lacked a sense of speed so I built a cloud layer into our scene we had branched off to “film” the trailer in. To add a sense of danger to the unseen force behind the camera I created the fleeing flock of birds and pitched it to the team. They were happy with it so I built it into the shot. All animated assets in the shots had to be built with their timing in the animation because we had no tool for building the timing of the shot. The workflow for capturing each shot was to have a batch file to set the stage (swap armor, move actors) and then a second one to start all animations... brute force at its finest.

For the running to the edge shots I did a bunch of landscaping and FX placement to decorate the cliff edge paying special care to improve the closeup without introducing any “bullshot”. I added snow footstep FX directly to the player for the full body shots.

The dragon shadow shot was causing the team a lot of trouble because they were trying to use a real dragon actor to cast the shadow but the AI and other systems in the game were making it hard to get it perfect and repeatable. I built a simple rigged dummy dragon that we could animate just enough to get the sense of wing motion we needed for the shot.

For the closeup shots I added breath to the hero to show how cold it is in Skyrim. At the time the plan was to port this into the game for all actors but we never had time for it. The dragon fire was pretty much as is from the base game. Mark Lampert developed the sound FX for the fire breath for this trailer before it was ever in the game. As soon heard that sound over my FX I was sold.

I spent a lot of time layering in the details for the hero on fire shot until it was just right. Even capturing it was a process because of the random nature of particles. The second shot shown uses Grant Struthers’ shout FX.

This water shot is the only shot I am including in this breakdown from the generic in game footage shots cut in between the dragon shots. Most of these included very little or no custom work from the trailer team. When this shot was included I begged for time to polish the assets because they were not finished. I was told they looked fine and not to worry. When the trailer dropped this one one of the shots I saw the most criticism of. That really stung since it was full of my assets.  From that experience I learned to always trust my gut especially when it comes to FX quality in highly scrutinized work like a trailer. The first thing I did after that was a pass on every heavy waterfall/rapids piece in the game.

The sword fighting shots all needed blood. I attached a blood particle emitter to the sword itself and built in custom timing animation offsets for each shot. I added a second layer of the skin geometry that was pushed out a but from the surface and covered it in blood splatters. I could animate them on as the hero covered himself in glory and dragon blood. This was a know “bullshot-ish” asset but we had no decals in the trailer because the system that added those requires real damage to happen. In this case I was subbing in a faked system for a real one that would fill that slot in the game so I felt ok with adding it. We worked really hard to put our best foot forward and keep the trailer accurate to the players experience when the bought the game.

Takeoff FX and blowing snow added just to keep the energy up for the ending of this fight.

Final money shots for the hero fighting. I was really happy with the way the slice to the dragon covered the hero with blood and the breath and his heavy breathing takes the focus. The dragon crash in the second shot is just the one from the base game (see my previous post covering the dragon crash FX).