Blue Star Episode 3 - Rendered Early-WIP Action-Scene Preview (Patreon)

So, I'm a bit behind what my originally projected schedule was, in terms of the action scene, BUT! Things are progressing nicely. Today was split pretty evenly between doing research and experiments on the best way to do muzzle-flashes in Source Filmmaker, and putting together animation.

To be specific, the new animation done today are the shots of Liara grabbing the pistol, taking aim, and firing. I also grabbed the original gun sounds from Mass Effect 2, and do all of the sounds you hear in this preview.

This preview also has the only bit of motion-captured animation in it, in Liara's turning around. I might end up increasing its speed between now and the final render. Also note that this is only the very beginning of the action scene, with a longer scene of Liara spraying bullets and tossing biotics, and generally just kicking ass and taking names planned.

Please do note that this is absolutely not final-render-quality work! The camera is not animated at all, and none of the characters other than Liara are animated. Liara's animations are more or less final, but no other animation has even begun. And similarly, there are still huge swathes of the soundscape to be done, including foley for the keyboard and feet-shifting, ambient noises, and music. This is a very early preview!

With that being said, click here to watch! 

I hope you all enjoy, and as always, I will keep you all posted as I continue to make progress.

For those curious, the classic solution to muzzle-flashes is using particle systems (which is what the Source engine natively uses). The issue with particles in the SFM, though, is that you can't control when and how they play with any granularity - something like this would require 4 separate particles, each only playing for a single frame, and each timed individually with the shots. Using particles, any change to timing would require all 4 particles to be edited separately.

Instead, I elected to use sprites. I converted the muzzle-flash particles that Left 4 Dead 2 uses to transparent textures, and then made a simple sprite model to utilize them. The muzzle flash here actually consists of two sprites: the cross-bar flash, and the cloud flash. Only 2 sprites are used in the entirety of the firing scene - I simply have them snap into position when the flash is active, and snap off-screen when not, and animate them moving back and forth for each shot.

The effect is complimented with a pair of orange-yellow lights that are animated to snap on and off at the appropriate time - one "bright" light focused on the muzzle of the pistol, and another "soft" light giving the gentle fall-off on the rest of the gun.

Combining the animation of these two sprites, these two lights, and the firing sounds, all with a special render of the scene with no motion blur, results in the crisp, smooth firing animation seen here. It took a bit of experimentation and research to figure out this winning combination, but now that I have it hammered out, implementing it for the rest of the scene should be relatively straightforward.