Good evening everybody, hope you're well. Thank you once again for your patience. I come bearing the first 10 minutes of the PEAK bullshittery - https://youtu.be/XtUwnU9mRhQ
I was rather hoping to have this done halfway through last week. But it ended up slipping to this week due to complicated edits (mostly involving particles, which I'll talk about in a moment.)
The plan is to spend the next 2 weeks animating the next 10 minutes. Then similarly get that polished and released here on the 3rd week.
Then on to the final 6 minutes before I stitch it all together for the full 26 minute video.
So a behind the scenes update.
As you've probably noticed, I decided to do away with the traditional white & yellow font for this bullshittery. Opting instead to go with colours that match each of the individual players chosen skin tones. I think it worked quite well in the end.
I did experiment initially with using the in game font. I believe it's called Darumadrop. But frankly it didn't look very good. And looked even more rubbish when giving it strokes (strong outlines).
Instead I went for a middle ground of the usual bullshittery font in bold, with consistent colours depending on the speaker.
So automated tracking wise, it's mixed bag overall.
After Effect's automatic tracking worked well up close. BUT that has the trade off of making characters block each other. Leading to time saved tracking being lost through complicated masking work. And PEAK is a surprisingly intimate game. In that the characters spend most of the time in each others faces.
Furthermore, a lot of the geometry for the foreground elements was quite complex. With the gif below probably being the most extreme of the examples. Lots of foliage that needed cutting out as the characters moved around it.
Again, all had to be manually done using shapes. For the automated masking stood no chance with such extreme complexity and swinging cameras.
One thing I fancied doing, was making the trumpet seem a bit more animated. So to solve this, I turned to Sliders and Particles.
See in my little box of tricks, I like to keep a "00-00.aep" file. A little template composition containing all the little things I'm likely to repeat in any given edit.
Regular bits of text, pre attached to Null objects or given special effects I might need often, etc. Then I simply import it quickly and paste in what I need. Speeding up my work dramatically. And custom configured for each specific game project.
In this instance I started including little .png icons of various game items, given very clear backgrounds and parented to Null objects with "Slider" bars.
And what I could then do, is have a Null Object (invisible square), controlling the "Scaling" (size) of the trumpet, linked to a series of keyframes autogenerated from the in game audio. Meaning each blow of the trumpet would make it move automatically. Getting bigger and smaller.
Bugger my luck though, for we decided to use the IN GAME audio for PEAK for the sense of immersion. And in doing so, baked all of the voices in with the in-game audio layer. Ruining what would be a perfect little idea. Doh!
So instead, I had to turn to After Effect's graph editor. Painting them in manually and then moving the levers to make it bounce smoothly with each sound as I heard it. A compromise.
Lastly, the particles. Oh my god, what a headache particles can be. I've mentioned them a lot before.
Basically, After Effects lets you define a "producer" that can spray out little shapes. At custom made velocities. They can bounce off things, fall, float, etc.
But crucially, it lets you define what those particles can be. Meaning you can have your own custom pictures appear in a spray pattern. Very useful. And far faster than doing them yourself by the dozen, as I used to do.
But it does continually surprise me how...primitive the overall controls for those particles can be. For whilst After Effects does give you directional controls, it won't let you keyframe them over time. Nor will they send the particles in the direction you might want them.
Therefore to play with particles and a constantly moving trumpet, I had to get creative.
What I did was manually keyframe the end of the trumpet particle "producer". That was simple enough. But then, I made three different particle effects:
One flies forward with high velocity and stops.
One goes down hard, with the artificial floor moved up and given a strong bounce effect.
And one has very low velocity but very high anti-gravity. Making it look like the particles FLY up.
And then I just cycle between them based on where Quebec is pointing the trumpet. I basically switched between whichever particle producer was pointing in the right direction to give the desired effect. Leaving an inactive "ghost" version on screen for the fade out.
And I repeated this trick through the whole video.
So this is merely the first part. After this, we have more scenes in the TROPICS. Then we go to MESA and get impaled by every cactus. Then to the CALDERA where we burn in fire. Then finally the KILN for the climax.
The work continues immediately. Give me 2 weeks to get the next 10 minutes animated? Thanks all.