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Hello friends. As promised earlier in June, here's the video about that one other video
that I made. Well, as usual, I'll be explaining the thought & design processes behind everything,
I'll be doing shot breakdowns, and, hopefully, this time, I'm gonna try to make my video
more entertaining and more condensed than my previous ones. You can make it even denser
yourself by using the playback speed option! Let's get into it!
Before we jump into the thick of it, a quick word on why I made this in the first place.
It was a few things coming together. First, back during The International 2015, the two
finalists for the yearly Arcana vote were Queen of Pain, and Zeus. The latter won. Second,
at the time, I was also listening to a band I hadn't paid attention to since I was 4:
The Police... back then, in elementary school, we'd have this sort of games fair at the end
of every year (called "Kermesse" in French), and there were prizes to win; I won an audio
tape of the Synchronicity album by being really good at fishing for plastic ducks. Third,
I saw this old drawing by a friend... and all of this kinda clicked together and I started
getting lots of ideas really fast.
Character design is a tricky thing. In the case of Dota, while the game features, in
my opinion, much better designs than its competitors, it compromised certain of them for fanservice
purposes. And so, in setting to create the male version of Queen of Pain, I figured it
should be, in the end, as clean of a gender-swap as possible; much like the Queen is this attractive
succubus that's pandering to guys, the King should be pandering to women,
and bi/gay guys as well.
After showing the drawing that sparked the idea to a dozen-or-so people representative
of this target audience, what became very clear was that it wasn't attractive; it came
off as more of a parody, a joke, than anything else. What came back the most was
"it's too drag". In hindsight, it was quite obvious: he shouldn't have the exact same clothes as
his counterpart.
And so, the design was iterated upon and upon, until the final result. We settled upon a
Magic Mike kind of stripper body, not too muscular; guys often think that a hundred
pounds of muscle mass is what is sexy to most women, but it's really not. Well, no one,
especially me, a guy, can speak for all women, of course, but my conclusion after this empirically-driven
design process is that "fanservice for women" leans a lot more towards the "Edward Cullen"
end of the scale; nice, sharp facial features, deep eyes, a toned body (not necessarily "muscular"),
an apollo's belt, and of course, a defined butt with shape. The body only does half the
work, though; what makes someone attractive is how they behave, and so that other half
would be defined later, in animation.
I've seen a lot of guys assume that the male and female characters of Dota are equally
sexualized, equating the gratuitous cleavage on most female heroes with the fact that heroes
like Axe, Beastmaster, etc. are shirtless hunks of muscle. But it's a staggeringly huge
false equivalency. Really, if you want to make fanservice for women, it's not hard...
all you've got to do is ask them. Involving them in the process is even better, of course;
it's Stephanie Everett, who most Dota players familiar with the workshop know as "Anuxi",
who modeled the King.
Overall, the design was treading quite a few thin lines; being a parody VS. being something
badass that can stand on its own, being fanservicey enough VS. having substance (not that the
two are mutually exclusive, but they tend to repel each other), and having an actually-sexualized
guy VS. not getting too much of the latent homophobic reactions that tend to surface
when you have sexualized male designs. There's a lot more I could say on the subject, but
I'm not sure how to phrase it, and I don't think it's this video's place
to linger on it for too long.
We could have gone a bit further and made him more scantily clad, especially for the
pants; and we could have given him some more muscular thighs instead of going towards lean,
in order to maximize sex appeal; but when all's said and done, I think we settled in
a place that's reasonably close to the ideal goal. And in their current form, the pants
allow this gem to truly shine. I love this gem. I really do. You can make so many puns
with it. "They're the family jewels". "Diamonds are a girl's best friend". And, of course,
"hard as a rock". And, I've gotta say, I have really polished the hell out of this gem.
Two custom shader masks and a custom cube map just for this bad boy right here. It's
the equivalent of whatever the hell these two things are on Queen of Pain's belt.
The King's head is loosely based on Sting. Who is Sting? Well, you've heard him in the
video, because he's The Police's lead singer! And, to be more specific, it's loosely based
on how Sting appears in the music video for "Synchronicity II". And I don't mean just
his facial features, but his hair too. Except it's encompassed by horns now. And black.
But still, the aim was to have a loose resemblance, a bit of a connecting thread of sorts. Side-by-side
you can KINDA tell, and that's the point! Now, something else that's more vague, but
hopefully you see what I'm getting at: the Queen's face is unmistakenly feminine, but
it also has more masculine features than the other women of the game. Likewise, I wanted
the King's face to blur the lines a bit, and then make up for it with... make-up. More
on that in a minute. It's a part that I find interesting; both characters are the gender
& sex binary taken to an extreme, EXCEPT the face. By the way, we also referenced Sting
for the body; it was based on his appearance in David Lynch's 1984 adaptation of Dune.
Last thing to mention here: they have the same eyes. I remember Anuxi tried different
ones at some point but it looked really odd, so I reverted to the original ones at like, 90%.
Eyes in games are notoriously tricky; remember the Mass Effect: Andromeda issues?
You need to have the glint, these reflections in the eye. However, Dota 2 has no eye shader,
unlike other Source games. Back then, it was special shaders who were in charge of going
all-out on the eyes, adding reflection maps, bumps for the cornea, ambient occlusion, and
glint. The glint is very powerful. Eyes are shiny. And so, thankfully, even though Dota
2 has none of the eye shader fanciness, all you really need is to paint the glint straight
into the eyes. Observe what happens if I take it out... creepy, right? And even though the
glint moves with the eyes, which it shouldn't, and that the glint is straight-up mirrored
across both eyes, which it really shouldn't be... it doesn't matter, because that's enough
for our brains to not see their eyes as creepy lifeless things.
Akasha (that's the Queen's name, by the way) has these things on her face. Make-up? Tattoos?
Face paint? Whatever it is, the King needed those too. But we had to come up with something
original and which felt distinctly masculine, while also highlighting his features, artificially
"sharpening" them much like how make-up could. Christian Gramnaes (whom you might know as
"ChiZ", the artist behind many great sets) designed a bunch of tattoos. I picked a mix
between 3 and 8, with a couple of small tweaks. I liked the result so much that I asked him
to design tattoos for his chest as well! The reason for this being, even though he has
this sort of mini-leather jacket top thing, his chest is... more empty. Well, that's kind
of an awkward phrasing, but you know what I mean. The chest tattoos serve as a way to
bridge the gap a little. Through shader masks, I also added some subtle glint to them.
Now, onto the arms... his shoulder pads are pretty much a verbatim copy of hers. And,
I'm not sure what she's supposed to have on her forearms; could it be latex gloves? Something
vaguely fetishy? Either way, the more masculine version of that ended up being hand wraps.
They end in this way to mirror how her whatever-they-are things tear apart here.
The wings... are the same. Wings are tricky to make, rig, and animate; so why bother making
new ones when hers fit him just as well? Doing this allowed me to re-use, mix, and match
QoP's wing animations in some places. His are actually scaled up a bit, to reflect the
fact that he's taller than her by about a head. Unfortunately, he doesn't have the weird
boney back thing that the Queen has... I forgot about that until it was way too late. So we
just added those flesh bumps under the bone parts.
Facial animation is still tricky; not much has changed since my first short, "Enigma's
Exasperation". While there's a DMX plugin currently being developed for 3ds Max, we're
still unable to write facial animation rules metadata into our models. So it was best to
keep it simple, otherwise I'd have to start tracking a lot of different animation channels,
including for right and left parts of the face. So I omitted that left and right separation
for a bunch of the mouth shapes, and, in general, kept the set of shapes narrowed down.
While tech artists, these days, do all sorts of really fancy things in order to set up
facial capabilities as fast and as accurately as possible, I did it all by hand. It was
a bit tedious, because you want to make sure you're going to do the right thing as closely
as you can. Any "error" that sneaks in will be compounded when many shapes enter the playing
field at once, which, believe me, they will. I had to be especially careful with regards
to the tattoos; any deformation must fade away from its "main area" very gracefully,
especially near the tattoos.
In summary, for the design process, the priority was to reason according to the final original
Queen of Pain, and then, try to get as close to the exact male equivalent that could have
been produced. I would say that was the core principle: if he was official, what would
he look like? Of course, I don't wish to pretend for a second that our art is up to the quality
of what Valve staff can do, but it obviously doesn't hurt to, in a way, try to "think like them".
In fact, with a couple of exceptions, he was made and set up the same way as a regular hero model!
However, with all that polish made on the King, his counterpart also needed some attention.
I've pointed out before that the rigging can be sub-par on some older Dota heroes, especially
those that were released during the initial "catching up with Warcraft 3 DotA" period
of the game. Unfortunately, Queen of Pain is among those affected. For example, her
fingers are very incorrectly weighted. But there's also... well, let me go on a tangent
here, for those among you who may not know this already.
Remember what I said earlier, how Dota doesn't have an eye shader? Hero meshes also don't
have eyes... in the conventional sense. It's very much an optimization thing; after all,
it's a top-down game, so there's not much point in fully modeling out the tiny things,
right? And it's a decision that does make sense, as far as the top-down gameplay camera
angle is concerned. I personally disagree with it, because, you only need the fully
modeled eyes in the LOD0, and the gameplay uses the lower-detail LOD1 anyway, so they
really could have stuck a couple of half-spheres in the LOD0. It's not that many triangles.
With eyes topologized the way they are, they can't be moved around without distortion.
But there's another decision that compounds this problem. You see, facial morphs are automatically
generated, with, as far as I know, fancy internal Maya tools that were created by Bay Raitt.
It's a time-saving part of Dota's character creation pipeline which, again, makes sense,
but was sometimes not cared for enough. So the morph shapes can behave oddly on occasion.
The most recent heroes DO have fully modeled eyes... but things can still look kind of
weird.
Anyway, to get back to Queen of Pain: her eyes do NOT work. At all. Thankfully, I was
struck by an idea which, quite frankly, I'm embarassed for not coming up with sooner.
The idea is to duplicate the eyes, and then move them a little bit outwards. Then, creating
an outer loop that will be the equivalent of the rest of the "sphere" of the eyes. It
doesn't really matter what UV space is associated to that outer loop of geometry, but it's a
good idea to use whatever padding Valve artists left. And last, the eyes will be rigged to
three bones: the head, and one new bone for each eye. Eyes with bones are pretty useful
because you can drive them with aim constraints; while the same can be achieved with morph
targets, it's a much more fancy process and one that's outside the scope of SFM2.
Using aim constraints in SFM2 has some limits, though. It offers nowhere near the same amount
of control that you'd get in dedicated 3D animation software, it can be a little off,
the aim center is based on the rotation at the time you hooked the constraint, and the
up vector is considered to be the same as the target, instead of the parent of the bone
that is constrained. In layman's terms, that means rolling the head results in, uh, interesting
results. Although it's a bit troublesome, there's a way to "filter" the offending axis
out, by using a second copy of the eyes, locking it to the first, then unlocking those transforms
as a way to "bake" the final constrained data onto itself. Then the graph editor can be
used to zero out the data on one axis.
It's not a perfect solution, and it's definitely a gross hack, but, much like how simple painted
glint on the eyes makes a world of difference, being able to have actual eye motion is an
enormous upgrade, even if it's sometimes a bit off. To further prove my point, check
out the difference it makes on the intro sequence.
You want me?
Come to think of it, where's the pleasure in that?
The Queen is dead.
Long live the King!
Unfortunately, there was nothing that I could do, at the time, about her hands. I discovered
a solution while making my TI7 short film, but I'll talk about that in the behind-the-scenes
video for THAT one.
It's time for the shot-by-shot breakdown! I'll be, well, breaking down every shot into
its individual components in SFM, so you can get a good look at the nitty-gritty sleight
of hand tricks that are happening. I'll also be showing you every shot from alternative
camera angles so you can see how beautifully everything falls apart when you do that. And
of course, I'll be providing commentary as the video goes on. My original plan had the
video split in three kind of "parts", the introduction, the hallway, and then the fight.
Then again, my original plan also had the video be a minute and twenty seconds long,
so...!
Well, this is the first section: the introduction. I wanted to pull off a bait-and-switch with
the King. This is also why the video was initially called "what if Queen of Pain won the Arcana
vote"; I wanted to trick people into thinking it was going to be about her. Unfortunately,
that didn't really work out, because people thought I was seriously making a case that
the King should *be* the Arcana. Anyway! My regular partner-in-crime, Alexandra Kern,
whose work you have already seen in my previous shorts, came back and knocked it out of the
park more than ever. I knew I wanted to have the Queen talk directly to the viewer, from
a throne room, and after a lot of research and discussion to narrow down my goals, we
started iterating on a concept. Then she did some color keys, and I settled on the sunset-ish
orange one, in order to contrast with her blue skin. It also offered a much easier source
of lighting to manage than torch fire, which has to be omnidirectional, and that's very
tricky to make in SFM.
The dialogue was spliced from existing lines, and it was motion-captured. Yep, I acted that
out in the real world. Well, I'm not too happy with how some of the arm motion came out,
but all in all, it's serviceable. Something I forgot to account for was that my chair
is not as wide as a throne... and I couldn't adjust the animation too much, so the throne's
armrests had to be adjusted to meet me half-way, almost literally speaking. Then, as you'd
expect, the mocap was heavily animated over, by hand.
This environment set is made of the same pieces as the hallway later on, except for the bit
that stands out the most; the pillars and arched ceilings. The idea is that this place
is some sort of dungeon, where, perhaps, brutish mobs took as a stronghold... maybe with Wraith
King as their leader. A thing about this movie is that I really wanted to push my limits,
and go ham on what you could call "worldbuilding", so none of this is a typical Dota scenario,
and it does not take place in the Dota map or anywhere near it. So all environments in
the video are custom-made, but some are more than others; the throne room and the hallway
are 100% original assets. The models are all very high-poly; they're pretty much just decimated
out of Zbrush, and not retopologized. Not only because, it's a movie, so performance
doesn't matter (to an extent), but also because having all this detailed high-poly geometry
allows the low-key grazing angle lighting to actually get caught on the edges of all
this stone... which looks pretty nice!
Unlike my previous shorts, I did not use sky domes in any way, but only cards, because
they're far easier for Alexandra to make. This makes things a little bit less flexible
on my end, but it's a worthwhile tradeoff. In this case, I wanted to fit the background
mountains in a particular way, get the largest peak aligned with the throne, so I use the
pillar over there as a way to hide the seam between the card and its flipped copy. I am
doing this sort of trick in a LOT of instances, and if you keep an eye out, you'll keep seeing
me putting conveniently-placed props that reach to the top of the frame.
Here's the problem though... for lighting reasons I've mentioned before and will mention
again later, the far-clipping plane of the camera, that is to say, the maximum distance
the camera can "see", the FarZ value, needs to be as short as possible. Therefore, the
cards are really sticking to the cliff's edge of this room. So you can tell it's a backdrop.
How to solve this? By making the cards move the exact same as the camera. In a way, it's
akin to the motion matching that old-school special effects artists had to do. But here,
it's much more simple; I create a copy of the camera, and, without touching its motion
data, I move it so that its first frame matches the location of the root of the card set.
(The second card, the copy on the left, is locked to the root of the first one, therefore
they move as a set.) Then that root is locked to the movement of the copy of the camera,
and there we go, it looks just like a regular, infinitely-far-away backdrop. Obviously, all
this motion transfer has to be done once the motion in question is final.
Let's talk about the lighting setup in this first shot. As every set for this movie is
custom-made, tweaking the global light settings from scratch was a necessary step. Here, the
light itself isn't used, but the ambient and specularity are. Every other light is an SFM
spotlight.
Now for a quick reminder: it's usually better to use the global light source for everything
whenever possible, because it's the only one that has true control over how the heroes
are shaded. However, the shadow map will wrap itself around everything the camera can potentially
see, so its accuracy drops off near-exponentially with distance covered. SFM lights are also
much more flexible, you don't have to go in the Hammer Map Editor to edit their properties,
and they also can be area lights, that is to say, you can give lights a disc-based radius,
so that they don't occupy a single infinitely small point in space, giving you "true" soft
shadows.
The biggest thing to know here is that I decouple the light that casts shadows and the light
that casts volumetrics. The reason for this is, I want the volumetrics to be nice and
sharp, but the shadows should be reasonably softened with distance. This can't happen
if I don't separate the two.
Those two lights are very far away from the scene, and have a very low field of view,
1 degree vertically and a bit more horizontally. I want to ensure that they don't cover the
"outside" of the scene too much, and really maximize the resolution of the shadow maps
that way.
Then I have a few more lights, carefully placed and tweaked to fake radiosity, that is to
say, the way light bounces off the ground and onto the rest of the room. And then, a
few more lights to highlight Queen of Pain's silhouette. Hey, you see those dust motes?
They make a comeback in greater numbers later on. MUCH greater numbers. I hope you're ready
for that. By the way, the lettering on these banners is legible... can you figure out what it says?
Last thing about this first shot, and also a bit of an SFM lesson / reminder while I'm
at it. Here, at the beginning, you see an exposure change as the camera adapts to the
brightness of the sunset flooding the room. Whereas this could be done directly in Source
1 SFM, this is all done in post here, because the Dota 2 rendering pipeline is not built
with HDR in mind.
If something is pure white, in Source 1 SFM, there is still lighting data that exists beyond
that peak white point, to really represent just how bright it is. While it may not be
directly displayed to your screen, it's still stored on the back-end. That information is
used while blending progressive refinement samples.
And before I can explain the difference with the Dota 2 SFM, let me explain what progressive
refinement samples are.
In order to render motion blur, depth of field, and area lights (the ones I mentioned earlier),
for every frame, SFM re-renders it slightly differently a certain amount of times; those
are the samples. If you have 4 motion blur samples, and a frame at 1.00 seconds, it will
render it internally four times at times that cover the shutter speed of the camera, and
then blend all of those together.
Of course, only 4 samples for motion blur is very coarse in terms of temporal resolution,
and for this video, I went with the maximum of 256 in almost all cases; only in a few
shots did I drop to the next step down, 128. Depth of field works by moving the camera
in a disc-shaped area, and, as you might expect, it's the same for area lights. The distribution
is uniform, otherwise the blurring would be biased. You can see this process in action
here; I've created a very powerful, but very focused light, and given it a large radius.
This allows us to see how it gets repositioned across refinement samples. Refinement samples
are also used to do jitter-based anti-aliasing as well as smoothing out ambient occlusion.
Now, let's go back to explaining HDR and the lack thereof. Here's the Source 1 SFM. I'm
lighting Queen of Pain with a spotlight which, in real-time, is right onto her and strong
enough to clip her into pure white. However, it has a large radius, so only one or two
refinement samples will have the light shining onto her. Once refined, she's darker, and
the light is not clipping anymore. If you try the same thing in the Dota 2 SFM, though,
she will appear washed out.
Let's assume we have 4 samples for the purposes of explaining this. All the samples are, in
a way, blended together and "averaged"; they're not additive to each other. So if we have
4 samples, they will contribute 25% each to the final refined image. Now, remember: in
Source 1, we may be seeing Akasha clipped out on our screen, but internally, lighting
data exists beyond the pure white point of our screen. So when we "reduce" each sample
to 25% of its "original luminance", the data is not clipped. In Dota 2, there is no high-dynamic
range rendering, so there isn't anything beyond the pure white on our screen.
What I've just said is not 100% technically accurate, but for most intents and purposes,
this means that there are certain things that will never "look as good" as they would in
the Source 1 SFM. If you remember how I showcased the distribution of samples earlier, with
that tiny but extremely focused light, well, that's one of such cases. The amount of "visual
energy" per sample is effectively capped in the Dota 2 SFM, so our circle will always
be quite dim. In Source 1, though, it can be anything your heart desires. Here, I'm
creating two of those example circles, with the right one having 20 times the intensity
of the other. They both show up as pure white on our screen, but the proper amount of luminance
exists internally, so once refined, the difference does show up. In the Dota 2 SFM, to reiterate,
sample data goes as far as what's represented on your screen, so both circles look the same.
And practically speaking, here are examples where this limitatation has affected my lighting
work and resulted in images that are partially washed out.
With careful planning and balancing of your lighting, however, you can make the most out
of this standard dynamic range. Color grading also helps with this limitation.
In the next shots, the lighting setup changes a bit. I do use the global light, and you
can tell because the shadows across her face and in the background tend to jitter a bit.
There is a way to mitigate this, and I do use it for a couple shots later down the line.
However, I didn't consider it to be worth the effort here. I'll mention a little trick
I've applied in all of my sets now; see, you don't have control over the global light in
SFM. If you want to tweak its properties, it all happens in the Hammer Map Editor. All
you can do from SFM is toggle the shadows on and off, ramp the global lighting's intensity
from 0% to 100% (all of it: light, ambient, and specular), as well as transition from
day to night, where 0% is night and 100% is day. Day and night are just two sets of values
that are arbitrarily named; and so I exploit this to control only the global light; my
"night" in this map is just the "day", but with the light off. The first shot was set
to "night", and the others to "day".
The volumetric light here moves much closer and only encompasses what's visible to the
camera; this is, of course, totally breaking the rules, but it allows me to have the camera
clearly pass by the parts where it's occluded, so the effect stands out a little more instead
of looking just like some sort of broad haze. When her wings block out the sunlight, it
becomes much more clear. It was a careful balancing act to tweak the effect so that
it wouldn't be too strong, and would blend with the background without revealing that
the volumetric was way closer to the camera than it should be. In hindsight, I do think
I might have weakened it a little bit too much for the cool part of it to be visible,
but at least it's still there and it's subtle, so it's not that bad of an outcome.
A fun detail is that her wings are translucent and the light and shadows received by the
back show up on the other side. I'm actually not entirely sure how they set that up, as
I don't believe her in-game model has one-sided geometry, but I could be wrong.
I am still doing one of my favourite tricks for wide-angle shots; after rendering a wide-angle
field of view, you only need to distort it back using optics compensation. This really
helps make the render feel a lot less gamey, and even a bit more "movie"-like.
At first, there wasn't any transition to the next bit. Then I figured, since I have her
raise her arms ceremoniously, that's a great excuse for a motion cut.
---
This is the second section: the "four scenes". Except, really, it's three, because the fourth
one is the hallway section. The lyrics of the song describe four things. Because the
last one is "a skeleton choking on a crust of bread", I knew it was gonna be them killing
Skeleton Ki—I mean, Wraith King. And so, the other three ones might as well be assassinations.
That's probably what they'd do, that's a fun couple activity, right? My original idea was
to fade out all the lights in the throne room and have some sort of static set-pieces fade
in and out from a black void... think something like the Dishonored endings, but going one
by one. However, that proved too cumbersome, and the idea of building three mini-sets instead
was much more appealing. Let's get to them in order.
"There's a king on a throne with his eyes torn out". Since Wraith King is the fourth
target, I had a choice between Monkey King and Sand King. But Sand King has like 16 eyes,
depending on the cosmetics you're wearing, and he doesn't exactly strike me as the type
to be sitting on a throne. This set was an exercise in wrangling the water shader of
Dota 2. There are inconsistencies between the game and SFM, there are inconsistencies
between the Hero shader and the GlobalLitSimple shader which is used by the world... it's
all a bit messy in an intangible way. I'm not exaggerating when I say it's intangible.
Look! Things shift around based on what I'm doing in this scene. Even the color of this
rock has an influence?! Water is horrible, it's awful, and much like real life, it's
best if you stay away from it.
You see this thing above the pedestal, out of frame? It's there to block the global light's
shadow on that specific area. Because the global light needs to be on for water to work
properly. Also, water completely ignores the existence of SFM lights, just like how the
Source engine ignores the sanity and psychological well-being of its users.
Speaking of lights, the way the "caustic" effect is achieved on those volumetrics is
with a gobo (more on that later if you don't know what they are), and then simply rotating
the light.
While it's the Queen holding the dagger, it's the King holding the head. The idea is to
slowly introduce him in a sneaky way, but still hidden until the proper reveal. He's
in the other two environments as well, as well as in the background of some of the rapid-fire
hallway shots. For this shot, however, I used a... simplified version of him because things
were already pretty messy behind there as they were.
"There's a blind man looking for a shadow of doubt". Blind man, who's got no eyes? Faceless
Void. He's from Claszureme, a dimension out of time, so I figured, maybe I could have
these two shots set on a kind of other planet that could be in Claszureme... but on second
thought, I do have to say, there are two issues with this premise: 1) how would QoP and KoP
get there, lore-wise, and 2) as much as I like how it came out, it does have vibes of
a low-budget 1960s Star Trek TOS version of an alien planet, really... though, to be fair,
now that I remember, I had just gotten into Star Trek at the time and was binging the
original series, so it was likely an influence. If every shot so far hasn't given you a clue
as to how much I abuse volumetric lighting in this video, this set should definitely
give you strong hints now. I experimented with getting water in there, and even exploiting
the water fog as height-based fog to make it look like there was heavy gas accumulating
in pockets in the low parts of this craggy terrain. Unfortunately, none of that worked
out, because I needed the global light to be out. I iterated on the second shot quite
a few times until I decided it would just be a lot better if I stopped trying to do
something super fancy with the camera, and also kept Faceless Void alive, make things
a bit more interesting than panning over a completely lifeless scene.
"There's a rich man sleeping in a golden bed". My initial idea was to have this very rich-looking
bedroom, but it would take too much time to model and iterate on everything. So I went
the way of Scrooge McDuck. I modeled a single coin, then created a few thousand copies of
it, then physically simulated that in three different ways. The scene was then populated
with these three different stacks of coins; they were duplicated, rotated, scaled, all
over the place. It's a little silly in terms of performance; up to 46 million triangles
end up going through the pipeline.
Anyway... rich man, golden bed, it obviously calls for Alchemist, since he generates so
much gold. And beneath his treasure is his final resting place. So it's his bed. Or his
tomb. Euphemisms! See, that part works really well, I wish I'd found something like that
for the "blind man" bit.
Man, though, I wish I could linger on this a little longer. It's one of the shots I'm
the most proud of, I think it came out looking really nice. Of course, I say that today,
but in 5 years I'll probably want to reach into a time machine and slap myself as I say
those words. Because continuously improving as an artist is, in my opinion, a lot about
constantly looking at your work from all angles and think "what could I have done better,
in what ways, how..." etc. anyway, you get the idea. What makes it satisfying to have
it somewhat nailed down is that gold can be pretty hard to shade, and I think it came
out nice, not just on the coins but the atmosphere itself... the little shades of rose gold in
the air... all that. Rose gold is a color with lots of associations in my head... because
I used to play the trumpet, and my trumpet was rose gold. It was shiny. And nice. I haven't
played it for 10 years. But yeah.
Speaking of lighting, there is an absurd amount of lights going on in the second shot. Take
a look. This giant underground vault is not lit much; it's a cubemap that does the heavy
lifting on the coins.
See what's on the coins? This compass rose symbol. I tried to have nothing on the coins
at first, but it looked awful, so I figured I should at least try and add some detail.
Why a compass rose? It's a nod to a game show from my childhood which has resonated through
a lot of my work indirectly, as it shaped my tastes in music and my desire for... places
that go beyond, just, this feeling that there's something out there, waiting to be explored.
It's complicated to explain, but I remember talking about this feeling in general, in
a previous behind-the-scenes video. Hopefully you see what I'm getting at.
This is the third section: the hallway. A lot of challenges in this part. But, also,
a lot of dustmotes. Honestly, it's hard to know where to begin, but since there's so
many dustmotes, that's a good place to start. But even for that, I'm not quite sure where
to begin. You'd think dustmotes are simple, right? Well no, they're not. Just like in
real life, dust is troublesome, especially if you're allergic.
The particles aren't lit; they are self-illuminated. Therefore dustmotes shouldn't stray outside
the light shafts. The self-illumination is constant, but the shaft is somewhat of a gradient.
The difference can look weird, but it's not technically inaccurate; consider that a dustmote
is a big object, but we "see" the light shafts purely because the light would be hitting
billions of very very tiny things. It's the same principle as concerts using smoke machines
because they want their spotlights to create beams; here, the hallway is filled with not
only dustmotes, but... the air is foggy... or whatever. Or maybe it's not. Artistic license
and all that.
Half the reason the dustmotes are here is to create some sick bokeh, but this requires
them to be big. If they're too small, they will not create sick bokeh. If they're too
large, they will stand out too much and not look like dust motes when in focus. There
was a careful balancing act of size as well as tweaking some very useful particle parameters
that can clamp maximum screen-based size. There was also additional cheating with copies
of the particle system with different sizes set, and those were used based on distance,
camera aperture, etc.
Okay, let's switch to talking about animation for a while. Here, you see Wraith King choking
as hard as I do when playing as him against Anti-Mage. You'll note that King of Pain is
still hidden, and that he's the one holding him in a chokehold. I'm not very proud of
this animation, it was quite hard to make him look like he was struggling while not
moving too much, and this whole ordeal ends in a snapping motion that is not a neck snap,
yet it's a snap, and that doesn't make sense. But I guess it doesn't matter that much. I
am however much happier what the right side of the frame, with Queen of Pain being subtly
lit by the green glow, as well as her acting in general, the "oh, you're disappointed?"
look followed by the sadistic face, then the smug look. This gives me an opportunity to
mention, that canonically, Wraith King has been trying to seduce her for a while, and
he has — if you'll forgive the pun — tried to bone her since the days when he was still
known as Skeleton King.
The rest of the animation in this sequence are walk cycles. I don't have much to say
about the King's, I just tried to make it look determined and confident; as for the
Queen's, it was inspired a little bit by fashion catwalk. Her boots would be very uncomfortable
for a human, but hey, she's probably got hooves in there. Last thing... jiggle physics. If
you'll allow me to be pedantic for a moment, this is often a misnomer, as very little physics
are involved in these systems, in the sense of the physics engine that may be used by
the game engine. Anyway, bouncing, jiggling, etc., that's fine; after all, these do have
weight, perhaps more than you'd expect. So there has to be some amount of secondary motion;
being completely stiff doesn't look right. Likewise, there shouldn't be too much bounce,
otherwise you end up with the Dead or Alive series. She only has one bone for both sides,
but that's not an issue. Some parts were animated by hand, the rest was using this 3ds Max controller
setup where the chest bone is not only using the procedural jiggle, but its rotation is
also constrained to an invisible box ahead of the chest, whose position jiggles with
different parameters. This results in different positional and rotational animation.
The idea with the next shots was to get them in rhythm with the music, switch to lots of
different angles, most being fanservice-ish, and progressively sneak in shots that are
in fact, not the Queen, but the King instead, up until the reveal point. It horrendously
breaks the 180° rule, I know, but it also allows me to really go wild; my favourite
shot is this wide-angle one from below. At a 130 degrees, it might be the widest I've
made yet. What I like about it is that it frames her entire body while also showing
a huge portion of the scenery even though it's a very wide 2.37:1 aspect ratio; it also
highlights her features in a nice way without being a stereotypical fanservice shot. I will
say, though, it would have looked way kinkier had the video been in the 16:9 ratio! My second
favourite shot is this one... it has this movie-like quality, atmosphere, look to the
image, and it would make a great "dialogue while walking" kind of thing.
Now, speaking of lighting, let's go back over all those shots and break it down. There are
a lot of shots to look at, so while this is getting started, allow me to toot my own horn
for a minute. I have to say that I'm pretty damn proud of the lighting in this part. Remember,
in this branch of the engine, there's no HDR rendering, there's no proper handling of overbrightening,
there's no baked lighting, and all the important shading settings on characters are global.
With all that considered, I'm really glad that this is the final result. However, in
my opinion, that's not even the best lighting I managed to wrangle out of the Dota 2 SFM
so far; that distinction goes to the classroom in "What does a hero truly fear?"; I think
it's in that set that I've truly managed to fake global illumination and radiosity to
a point where it looks convincing. You have no idea how satisfying that was, and still
is. Anyway, here's how things are set up: each window has its volumetric shaft, then
its actual source of light, then another light to properly light up the edges of the window,
then a fill from the bottom wall back towards the window to emulate the bounce. However,
that bounce was, most of the time, severely toned down, or tweaked to only illuminate
the environment and leave the characters alone. The characters had a rimlight each, as well
as what I call the "bottom bounce"; a light that is exactly under them, and with a large
radius so that it will basically do this [show me with flashlight illuminating bottom of
my face]. You might think, why bother with shadows and radius when all I need is a subtle
source from below? Well, using shadows is the only way to ensure that the light will
only hit their bottom-facing parts; without shadows, the light will fully wrap around
the character, in a half-lambert kind of way.
At first, the reveal shot was like this, but the feedback that I got was that it felt too
distant, and one member in my test audience didn't even realize what was going on until
the close-up on his face. While I liked the contrast in that shot and how I thought it
showed how they were, well, each other's counterpart, it didn't work. So I brightened up things
a bunch, and reframed him to be closer and more towards the center. That eliminated the
confusion. The following shot's goal was really to "crawl up his body", and that worked really
well, especially the smirk; the feedback on that was unanimously good. However, I cut
short the following shot of them side-by-side, and replaced two-thirds of its time by another
shot which crawls up his body, though it's a different enough perspective to not be redundant.
It also helps highlight the gem a bit. I would like to once again extend my special thanks
to the women who helped me refine the first shots of the King to make them as appealing
and attractive as possible.
The last shot with the door came out the best of this whole section... man, I wish I managed
to reach that level of "movie-like" treatment, and, as I've said just before, that sort of,
y'know, aesthetic, everywhere. You might have noticed, the door crack is not centered. I
tried that, but, it turns out, visual weight and symmetry are concepts that often diverge.
In fact, as I'm recording this script, one example that caught the internet's attention
is the new Google logo breaking a few rules for the sake of visual weight.
Though, I think what makes it really nice is a combination of three things... 1) The
rimlights look really good, for once, they almost look like they're out of the Source
1 SFM, which is a miracle. 2) The dustmotes are there in layers, and even though there's,
well, so many of them overall, they work nicely here, they don't dirty up the image, and kind
of help read it by giving it depth; the way they disappear into a nice bokeh as they fly
towards the camera is satisfying. 3) The lighting that leaks through is not uniform in a lot
of ways, and its hue shifts with intensity. In my opinion, subtle hue shifting in lighting
gives a nice feel. I love that.
One of the things behind that hue shifting is also how some light shafts flood my scenes
in rays. It was accomplished with the use of custom gobo textures. A "gobo" is, in a
way, a mask for the light source. You might also think of it as a texture. In SFM1, it
was possible to overlay noise on volumetric lights, on top of the gobo. In fact, it was
even animated! It emulated the effect of smokey air quite well. This feature is missing from
SFM2. I made my own noise texture, and added a bit of "chromatic aberration" to it. This
is done by shifting the color channels a couple pixels away from each other. Controlling the
sharpness of that noise, and therefore the rays, becomes a very easy process. Remember
what I told you way earlier; light radius has a large effect on volumetric lights. Just
adding a little bit of it "blurs" the gobo enough for the noise to vanish away very fast.
Anyway, one last thing to bring up here with regards to lighting. Remember when I was explaining
progressive refinement to you earlier? Well, you see, at maximum quality, you have 1024
depth of field samples, 256 motion blur samples, and however many are used for the subpixel
jitter anti-aliasing. If all of those had to be rendered "on their own", you'd need
to apply the 256 motion blur samples to each depth of field sample. So you'd have to render
262 THOUSAND samples overall. Thankfully, SFM doesn't do this. Samples are shared across
operations. However, this creates weird edge cases. While I tried to minimize them, one
of them appears in the background right here. When you have an area light and depth of field
at the same time, it is possible for the two to cancel each other out. Don't ask me how,
all I know is that it happens. This results in out-of-focus shadows appearing to be way
sharper than their surroundings. One way to work around it is to tweak the radius of the
area light, but that can be problematic, as you might want the large radius to get very
smooth and soft shadows in the foreground. There's no One True Solution™ to this.
This is the fourth section: outside the dungeon.
Unlike any previous shots I'd made in the Dota 2 SFM before, this one covers a vast
amount of distance, especially vertical. And having the backdrop elements be fully in sync
with the camera had the feel of an old FPS map, where you can too easily tell how different
the skybox and the 3D level are. So instead, the backdrops only move about 90% like the
camera, in order to have a bit of "parallax". That really helped, but not enough to my liking,
because we were still dealing with entire backdrops, not many separate elements like
in my TI6 short film, "Lanaya is mine". Tree cards were the solution. And likewise, they
match the motion of the camera, but not entirely. The further away something is meant to be,
the more it does; the closer, the less they do. (insert schema here. insert comedic "very
conspicuous thing that reaches all the way to the top of the frame, totally not to hide
a seam in bg tho)
Here, only having volumetric lights as "fog" wasn't enough. The trees over here aren't
lit by the setting sun; they're in the shade of the mountain. However, a certain level
of light is bouncing off of the scenery and onto the trees; that's ambient light. Ambient
light has a directionality to it that's very diffuse, but patches of fog tend to be high
frequency detail. Think of it this way... clouds really just are big thick patches of
fog, but in the sky. So I needed fog over there, in the shade, to give a sense of depth
between the 3D scenery and the 2D trees. Volumetric lights wouldn't work, because they're additive,
and can't effectively convey high-frequency detail over an *area*. Remember? Volumetric
light + detail + radius = all detail gets lost. The solution was particle-based fog.
Much better. These subtle atmospheric effects really are a huge chunk of the atmosphere
you can give to 3D environments. Just good old simplistic planar fog alone conveys distance
and scale extremely well. In particular, I want to point out that Nintendo is a master
of atmospheric particle effects, especially in the Zelda series. Fog is not something
uniform, it very much has texture and variation, and the way light interacts with it is also
variable to a degree.
All those cliff rocks are the same model from the first act of Siltbreaker. It's a very
versatile model. The dungeon itself goes quite far back as well... the throne room would
be over there in the back.
The last shot of this section has a sweeping vista towards the next location . I do believe
I could have probably blended 2D and 3D better here, but regardless, I'm happy with it.
This is the fifth section: the meadow. In the distance, you can still see the dungeon
they came from. While it's minor, I love that kind of visual continuity, being able to see
both places from each other.
The lighting here is very simple: global light + two volumetrics. Much like before, they're
far away so that the "beams" are reasonably parallel. The second one is there to create
a few more rays on the right side of the frame.
Now let's talk about this map. You might remember me talking about how having uneven ground
in the Dota map is impossible because it's all made with a tile-based system. If I wanted
to have non-flat terrain in the Dota map, I'd have to remake it from scratch. Which
I will probably end up doing some day, if fate pushes me towards it. Well, none of the
maps in this video use this tile system, only the good old tools. In order to place all
this vegetation, I had to use the Asset Sprayer. It's a very nice tool where you define a list
of models, and all the different ways in which they can be placed; do they follow the direction
of the terrain, what are the bounds of the random scales and rotations they will be created
with, etc. However, because it's not abstracted behind a tile-based system, every single piece
of vegetation is a full- fledged prop entity. And you know me, I'm a very reasonable person,
so I only have, uh, a very small amount, you know, just 16,105 of them. When entity counts
get that large, the process of spraying new entities progressively slows down to
a horrendous crawl. It's bad.
You might be thinking, wait a second, Max, why isn't your grass the really nice grass
that we have in the Dota map nowadays? Well, I tried to figure out a way to bring that
system over to "regular" displacement-based terrain, but it seems that the grass is completely
tied to tiles. Maybe I'll figure out a way one day, or maybe, if a miracle happens, Valve
will document the system. The substitute is all those grass models and bushes. They're
not set up to shake with the wind, but well. At least they're there. They make up half
of the overall vegetation prop count.
This is where I re-use the particle fog effect from earlier. Again, I can't stress enough
how little subtle touches like this really help. The lighting setup is the same, the
lights were just moved a bit to make the beams longer and more defined.
So here, he actually goes along with the song, right? As if he were its singer. I mean, his
face is loosely based on Sting's, so he would probably have the same voice as well. And
the song is about him, in the first person, so it's as if he were the "author" of the song.
This is part of the reason I went ahead with this project in the first place; the
lyrics were flexible enough to be interpreted in a whole bunch of ways, and while the song
was originally written to be about, I believe, Sting's divorce, it fits a story in a fantasy
universe just as well. It's the "same old thing as yesterday", something's happening
again, maybe they've been here before, but they forgot something?
Ok, now, in this transition to the next section, I have to introduce the thing I mentioned
earlier: multi-pass rendering. This is done to get around the low resolution and accuracy
of the global light's shadow map when the camera's FarZ plane is too far away. The trick
is quite simple: the shot is rendered as usual, with the full distance camera. Then, I duplicate
the camera, and on that copy, I set the FarZ distance to be low enough so that the shadows
won't look garbage. And thankfully, when the background is empty, Source Filmmaker can
output the "void" as a grayscale alpha channel. However, there are some limitations with this
technique; the color of the "void" is still there in the image; motion blur or depth of
field will exhibit gray edges when blending the second pass on top of the first one. I
looked into this issue, and this is probably something to do with pre-multiplied alpha,
or maybe the lack thereof. Either way, this is 95% solved by choking the matte. In summary,
if you're familiar with the concept of cascaded shadow maps in games, this is kinda like doing
the same thing manually, and without a nice soft transition between the two. In fact,
another issue to watch out for when doing this is the SSAO; it shows up at the edge
of the FarZ plane. However, it's easy enough to get around that; you only need to tweak
the ambient occlusion settings so that the "seam" will be small enough to be choked out,
or not show up significantly in the first place.
This is the sixth section: the meadow, but in the past. Like I've said, I'm pretty much
just going along with the song and trying to make something that fits it. "It's the
same old thing as yesterday", yesterday. The past. Long ago. You know.
This building's a special card; I topologized the drawing in order to give it depth. In
a way, it's the reverse of the usual modeling workflow; instead of making a model from concept
art, I... made a model from concept art? [pause] Ok hang on. What I mean is, where the
3D model dictacted what the original art would be rendered as, here it's the opposite...?
Yeah, I'm not sure how to describe that. Whatever. The reason we did it that way is because...
I've had this idea in my head for a while and I've always wanted to try it. Also, it
was way faster than actually modeling and texturing a building. Unfortunately, one thing
I didn't realize until too late is that the building should have been drawn without perspective,
in an orthogonal way; that's because the only perspective you want applied to the drawing
is the one that happens once it's 3D. But if you already "draw it in 3D", then the perspective
happens twice and it kinda looks off. Anyway, it's on screen for less than two seconds and
it immediately explodes so WHATEVER.
If you're gonna ask me to describe what's happening in terms of narrative... the idea
is that there's this temple of Warlock-like priests hidden in this valley, and they do
demon summoning as their Sunday hobby, but this time the invocation goes wrong, because
they wanted a big-ass demon to chain to their will, but they got more than what they bargained for.
The invocation left an evil rune or marking or whatever in the ruins of that place, and
that's the King was looking at a couple shots ago.
To further highlight that it's a different time, there are slight changes to the environment;
the ground uses a different texture set. I wish I could have done something a bit more
obvious like having the present meadow clearly have orange, autumn trees, vs. the spring/summer
trees of the past, but unfortunately, sometimes you've got to make do with what you've got.
The cracks going up the building is a pretty simple trick; using the same mesh, this time,
the magical glowing cracks that signal impending doom are drawn onto the existing drawing.
Then they're exported separately as a transparent texture, which is applied to a copy of the
building card mesh. This copy is slightly angled away from the camera and pulled towards
it across a few frames, so that it looks like the cracks are going from the ground towards
the top, instead of appearing all at once. It's the cheapest way to do it, and it's all
in-engine, so I don't have to do it in post, which, in hindsight, I could have,
but perfect is the enemy of done.
The exploding rubble is a more-than-reasonable amount of copies of various particle systems
that usually happen when the Dire ancient explodes as you lose 25 MMR. Both building
cards are scaled down to nearly 0% and disappear under the terrain, a bunch of lights appear,
etc. it's all very messy. A tricky part was getting enough rubble to appear so that it
would look like a reasonably plausible explosion. Unfortunately, a lot of effects in Dota, including
this one, assume that they will be landing on completely flat ground, so there was a
bunch of scaling, rotating, and animating of all these sets of rocks so that they wouldn't
land in mid-air despite starting high up there.
Some of these rubble explosions have an element of randomness to them, too, and I got lucky
that, instead of having rocks throwing themselves at the camera to clip into it, I had these
cover the lower half as I refocused and zoomed, just as I hoped.
The global wind properties are also animated to obscene extremes to have the trees get
"pushed back" by the shock wave of the explosion, but it's not very noticeable. From another
angle, though, it's a neat effect.
Now let's talk about this awful weather we're having today. Moderately strong winds, heavy
rain, it's not a deadly storm, but I wouldn't take a stroll outside. Ok, how does that work
in SFM? Obviously, particle effects, but there's something else.
The global light has the ability to control not only the amount of specular that comes
back from materials, but also the broadness of the reflection. This is a global control,
so if it's set, all world elements take on those properties, including props. This is
how everything looks wet and soaked.
I based myself off of the rainy weather particles. I greatly increased the amount of pretty much
everything in there, and tweaked the sub-systems to get the rain to look nicer from all these
non-top-down perspectives. Now, if we pull back away from the camera, the magic trick
is revealed; there is only rain around the camera. Just... a lot of it. Because having
the rain everywhere would absolutely murder the Source engine. Thankfully, because the
lifetime of a single rain drop trail is very short, it's ok for the system to be parented
to the camera, even if it moves a bit fast. For example, this wouldn't be possible with
snow, because while a single rain trail has a lifespan that averages half a second, a
snowflake would have a lifespan of minimum 5 seconds, as they fall slowly and need plenty
of time to fade in and out without it being visually obvious. The atmospheric fog effect
from earlier makes a comeback in a modified form to emphasize wind, and also represent
the "misty" part of the rain.
I wish I could have had scrolling droplet overlays on the characters, but back then,
I didn't know how to override materials for existing models. Even then, I think that kind
of detail may be outside the scope of the Dota hero shader without some heavy compromises,
or really weird tricks. That said, the particle droplets are pretty nice as they are. They're
based off of the stock particle system that is applied to characters under rainy weather,
but tweaked heavily; I've also got like 4 different versions of it because each character
needs different properties, max counts, scaling, and emitting rates. Even though particles
are supposed to be able to be spawned directly on models, it turns out that either this is
a broken feature, or I've got to do a weird summoning ritual with virgin goats under a
new moon to get it to work. Instead, they're spawned along hitboxes. Thankfully,
Queen of Pain has the proper hitboxes set up.
I set them up manually on the King, and as accurately
as I could since it can be a little tricky to properly encompass all these non-boxy shapes
with boxes. The Hellsworn Golem, though, had... these. If I wanted to fix this, I would have
had to reimport it from scratch. Sylei, the creator of that Warlock set, saved the day
and provided me with the source files! On top of being able to create the proper hitboxes,
the texture resolution was greatly increased, and the material settings were enhanced to
have nicer metal, as she originally desired to have.
This is also the only scene (besides the "blind man" set) where I use the game's own sky domes.
However, they're affected by fog, which I am also heavily using here. But color grading
allowed me to pull out detail from the flattened gray tones. A cool thing about those sky domes,
however, is that you get to rotate them around manually! I do that in order to vaguely simulate
the fast-moving clouds of stormy weather.
I simultaneously hate and love this shot. I hate the first half and love the second.
The way he starts to fly is awkward, and when he gets punched, it's too cartoony. But the
Queen flying in looks super badass. I... I don't want to look at this shot anymore.
Anyway... I've had people ask me whether this was a reference to Shadow of the Colossus.
It wasn't! At least, not deliberately. It's possible that it was a subconscious influence,
as many things are... but I've never played Shadow of the Colossus. Or ICO. I did, however,
play and really enjoy The Last Guardian... and I want to play Shadow of the Colossus
whenever its next remake comes out.
Technical trivia time. What's happening here is that the golem is scaled up, then Akasha
is locked to its rootTransform, so she inherits its scale. So I then have to scale her down.
Then the camera is locked to her rootTransform... but something internally doesn't like that,
manipulating transforms becomes a little weird. And because of this, I have to resort to something
which is usually a last resort: splitting a shot into two. Because you see, that knife
has to switch hierarchies in the middle of the shot, but doing it the usual way is pretty
much impossible due to the scaling shenanigans that happen twice before reaching the knife
down the hierarchy.
A cool thing about SFM is that, when you modify the order of transforms, by locking or unlocking
a transform to another, the animation will not change. However, scale is, with the exception
of One Weird Trick™ (that I can't remember at the moment because it's vague and counter-intuitive),
always inherited from the parent. Given the weird scaling things that are happening in
this hierarchy, I'm sure you can imagine where this is going. So the hierarchy switch is
"performed" across a cut, and I manually matched the scale and the rotation of the knife as
closely as I could across the switch. Thankfully, the particle systems played nice across the cut.
When she drops back down, a happy accident occurs; all the droplets underneath her makes
it look like she is splashing a lot of water upon landing. It's not something I did, it
just looks that way. It also happened when the King was running towards the Golem.
This part where she lifts her companion off the ground is something I wanted to have since
the early days of this idea floating around my head. In terms of stereotypes, it's another
gender-swap. In fact, this is kinda the trend of the video; at first, you think it's about
the Queen, then it turns out it's about the King, but then, it's about her again. This
is another way to give her more depth than "well, I guess she seduces people and kills
them in their sleep afterwards...", like, nah, she can probably kick their ass too.
I gotta say though, that scene was a royal pain to animate (no pun intended). A pair
of wings is bad enough as it is, but another that has to look floppy without intersecting
with the ground or both characters...
This is the... seventh section? It's just the ending, in the present again. Technically
it's still the fifth because it's in the same file, but whatever.
Remember when I keep saying that I'm really bad at estimating how long my ideas are gonna
take... I actually almost outlasted the song, to the point that it's a little awkward that
you're still not supposed to be hearing what they're saying, as the song is fading out.
AH WELL. What's done is done.
Now, I didn't touch on this subject until now because I believe that this is very much
a "show, don't tell" kind of thing, and that what's portrayed in the video should speak
for itself, but hey, I'm also here to talk about as many things related to this video
as possible. The thing in question is, how do these characters relate to each other?
Well, they are definitely not related, but I like to think they'd be literal soulmates;
for demons, hell, demons that do what they do, I think there'd be a certain beauty in
them being very loyal and loving to each other. Either way, I wanted to bring some humanity
to them, and not just treat them as sexual objects, especially Queen of Pain.
Now, before we wrap things up, I'm gonna quickly bring up every little thing that I didn't
manage to work into a previous section, as well as additional questions that were sent
to me for this video. And actually, it turns out the first question deserves its own section!
The question in question for this section is "how long did this take you?"; so I figure
it'd be fun to try and lay out a project timeline that's as complete as possible. But to answer
the question directly, you could say, two years, since I got the idea around The International 2015,
but of course, that's not an accurate answer. Progress was really on-and-off, intermittent,
irregular, for a long time, and I only worked on it full-time during the last couple of weeks.
I have an extensive collection of WIP screenshots, files, and chat logs which happen
to have time stamps! However, this will not be 100% exhaustive as I'm going by the traces I left.
The King's model started being worked on in November of 2015. Here are screenshots from
between December 1st and 6th. Then, the following February, he was looking like this.
The face tattoos were concepted on the 15th. I started rigging him at that time. The intro mocap
was recorded on March 26th. Then nothing happened for a long time. Things picked up again in
the middle of October, where I got around to finishing the King's rigging. A few days
later, I started looking into how I'd make the facial animation shapes. I had considered
bones for a while, due to the lack of blending rules, but went with morph shapes in the end.
Before that could start, teeth had to be modeled by Anuxi, and that happened in early November.
Then nothing happened for a while. This is how the model looked like at that point, and
how it would stay until early November of 2016, when the tattoos were refined a bit,
and the chest ones added. In the next few days, I started actually making the first
facial shapes, and also doing the first engine imports. I also started hooking up the wings
and doing the weird arcane crap that comes with rescaling an already rigged mesh. Towards
the end of the month, I started doing the more troublesome part of facial animation:
the mouth.
Then, nothing until late February of 2017. I imported the mocap data that I had acted
out a year prior, for some basic engine previsualization. You can see, here, how it progressed, as I
(re)animated over the mocap. In the middle of March, I did the eyes hack for Akasha.
Hey, you know who this screenshot reminds me of?
Dril.
And in the last few days of the
month, a lot of things happened: the facial shapes were finalized, the throne room set
was blocked out, and I started working on walk cycles.
First couple days of April, I started working on the second section and its set. Then nothing
much for a while, then I got started on the "blind man" set.
On April 18th, this was how things were looking.
May comes around, I get started on the hallway section.
May 7th, this is the current draft.
Then not much happens until the end of the month, which is when Anuxi started working
on the environment art. Now, the pace really picks up, so I'm going to narrate it
a bit more like a list.
June 1st: environment art is in. I start lighting it. I also look into exploiting water fog
in the "blind man" set, but it doesn't work out. I go back to the intro section and animate
Akasha's eyes. Besides polish, that was one of the last things to do animation-wise. The
environment art is still missing there.
June 2nd: experimentations with giving the tattoos different shader parameters.
June 3rd: animating the struggle a bit more, lighting it as well.
June 5th: experiments with color grading on the intro section. I try a couple more ideas
in the "blind man" scene before settling on the final one. Also starting to light the
entire hallway with a defined set of lights for each window. 43 seconds are content-complete,
that is to say, the vast majority of the work is done in all steps of the process, animation,
lighting, color grading, etc. "Content-complete" is a bit of a misnomer; after all, remember,
"art is never finished, only abandoned"!
June 6th: working on the hallway section's rapid fire shots. This is the day when I polished
the gem. While tweaking the shader, this really cool-looking accident happened.
June 7th: the final environment art for the throne room is arriving. I start tweaking
the lighting and color grading to adapt for it.
June 8th: still tweaking lighting and color grading for the intro.
June 9th: besides a few minor color grading tweaks pertaining to saturation of certain
ranges, the intro reaches final state.
June 10th: I reuse the throne room's ground tile in the hallway, scaled down and flattened.
All the hallway shots are in.
June 11th: I notice that, when rendering at 4K, SFM2 doesn't smooth ambient occlusion
at all. I look into mitigating the issue in After Effects. 60 seconds are content-complete.
I start building the set for the exterior of the dungeon.
June 12th: Most of the work is done on that section.
Here's the draft render; notice the
lack of tree cards in the first shot, as well as the unfinished vista card in the second.
June 13th: I rework two shots from the King's reveal moment after receiving more feedback.
I also use the opportunity to plump up his behind a little more.
June 14th: I rework his texture to highlight his apollo's belt more. I also get started
on the meadow set.
June 15th: preliminary render of all present-time meadow shots. You can see my first idea for
the transition into the past kinda coming together; I was thinking about having a close-up
on his face as lighting shifted by, then when the camera pulled away it'd be the past. However,
after realizing it was not a good idea, I ended up doing it the way it is now.
June 17th: testing the rain in the meadow's past.
June 18th: replaced the transition shot with a new one. It becomes clear I'll need to figure
out a new way to tackle the inaccuracies of shadows.
Still not sure what the monster they're
gonna fight should be! Then I see the awesome Hellsworn Golem again and I realize it's the one.
June 19th: meadow explosion previz.
June 20th: 1mn25s are content-complete. Messing around with a cool sweeping shot idea.
I discovered that a certain combination of parameters on the Hero shader prevents fog
from being applied to the material, and while I didn't use this newfound trick in this video,
I did use it in my TI7 short film.
June 21st: making this cool threatening shot of the golem. Then realizing that it would
make a lot more sense if he was showing off some cool magical powers. Then also realizing
that it would be a lot better if he faced left, because when the King walks towards
him, he is facing right. That way, they'd face each other, and it would look more confrontational.
The shot was already done, so... I flipped it in editing!
June 22nd: animating the bit where the Queen picks up her boy off the ground.
June 23rd: same.
June 24th: making the ending section.
June 25th: finishing the golem fighting shots. And releasing!
You might have noticed, towards the very end, information got more sparse. When making a
little bit of progress every so often for so long, it makes sense to share it, screenshot it,
make draft renders, all traces that I could go by to establish a timeline. But when
things were at their busiest, that didn't happen. What I do remember, however, is that
the two pieces that were missing until the last moment where this shot, as well as the
Queen up on the golem's face.
Anyway, I hope you found that timeline interesting.
Do you do storyboards?
I can't draw and I picture everything in my mind, so I don't have much use for them. Storyboards
are great and sometimes necessary for team collaboration, but I worked alone; the teams
that I get together to help me on my movies are there for custom assets. Besides, when
it comes to work that is derivative like this, and also takes place inside a game engine,
you could argue storyboards aren't as useful as they'd be in an environment where everything
is made from scratch. You know what I mean?
How would King of Pain sound when he screams?
So yeah, in summary, I listened to a song, I thought the lyrics were cool and could fit
a fantasy universe such as Dota's, I wanted to bring a bit of personality to these characters,
I wanted to make something a little subversive, and I liked the challenge of seeing a character
through to completion, from the very beginning to the very end. I hope you enjoyed this labor
of love, and if you didn't, I still hope you enjoyed this breakdown video. If you have
any questions that I didn't cover here, please feel free to ask in the comments;
I'll do my best to answer! See you next time!
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