Raxter on DIGM

Left 4 Dead Mapping

Ok, so the past 2 days have been my first attempt at using Hammer to create a L4D map. I shouldn’t be surprised (having prior experience with making games and animations) that this process is in fact QUITE tedious. That said, the tedium is worth it for that moment when you click “launch” and all of a sudden you’re running through narrow halls getting vomited on by boomers who spawn right behind you (still working on nav mapping). 

Well, negative experience aside, it’s still a lot of fun. Now that I’ve got the basics of brushes,entities, and nav mapping down, there’s a huge amount of potential for what I can do in the next week. Overall I’d say Hammer is pretty accessible if you’ve operated in a 3D space before. Especially nice is the extensive use of grids and snapping (Math = win). All of this from about 4 hours of experimenting and a really good tutorial:

http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/L4D_Level_Design/Getting_Started

Closing Times

This has come up a few times recently, and I thought I’d share my experiences. A lot of people have been complaining about businesses that post one closing time, but actually close earlier (sometimes 10 - 30 minutes early). Many people think that this is a matter of lazy employees just trying to cut out early (and despite what I have to say, this might very well still be the case sometimes). However, I do know that it frequently happens that a manager will schedule an employee to work a specific shift until closing. i.e. The business closes at 9pm. The employee needs to punch out at 9pm. The fact is, in most businesses there is a lot of work that needs to get done between serving the last customer and closing down for the night. It’s unreasonable to expect any employee to accomplish all this in essentially zero time, especially if there’s a high volume of customers right up until closing. Most employees decide that it’s less likely they will get into trouble if they just close early opposed to punching out late (and the vast majority of the time, they’re right). So next time you get turned away before “closing”, blame the management first.

Final Progress

This week I took the advice we were given last Tuesday and tried to make those improvements to my shots. Sadly, some things ended up being out of reach. I did manage to: add a finer noise to the bricks, match the speed of the brick shooting shot closer, make it slightly less lambert-like, and repaint the window rim texture again at a higher resolution. I was also in charge of collecting the renders out of Nuke and putting together the final touches in AfterEffects. 

Week 9 Progress

This week I managed to get good renders of both the window break and the brick rising scenes. I also think that the animation of the shooting brick shot is pretty solid. I was also the one who collected the footage to assemble the rough cut. It was a long week, but I think we’re in a good place for this last week.

Week 8 Progress

This week involved a lot of hair-pulling. I managed to get a pretty successful first render of the window breaking (after a few hours of starting over due to dynamics not working the way I’d like them to). Also for that shot, I went out and got the new picture of the window sans-blinds. I then successfully(I think) matched the new window to the old footage. I’ve also been working on camera matching the last 2 shots. The close-up is as good as I can get it. The wide shot of Mike shooting the bricks has been slow-going at best.