Real Heroes of Half-Life 2

We decided to take one of the Bud light commercials and use it to create a Half-Life 2 machinima. This machinima uses custom models, textures, custom maps and custom animations. It also interchanges predefined animations between several of the characters. Originally we stopped work on a project called: The Madness of Brother Grigori thinking it would not take us long to produce a machinima around a one minute commercial. That turned out to be wishful thinking. Because of the complexity of this video one month soon led to two, until finally after four months we finished.

The video also has a section where it pays homage to the movie "American Beauty". It was not my idea to interject an already insane video with more insanity. But this is a two person team so occasionally I have to do something my partner wants, even if it's unusual. I'm going to go through some of the more interesting aspects of this video below to give you an idea of the work that went into it.


We will start with not only the hardest model but also the hardest model to texture. As you can see the wine glasses though crappy looking in this picture were actually quite pretty in the engine. They were a hard shape to model but the biggest challenge was the texture. We weren't even sure at first if you could have a concave transparent model. I believe we used the lens in Kleiner's lab as a guide in the end. we ended up with some very unusual settings in our vmt but it helped define some shape to the glass.

I guess I should move on to the rest of the alcoholic beverages since they were also difficult to model. We used XSI if anyone is interested. I highly recommend the Noesis Interactive Videos. You can find a link to their site on the side panel. The bud light bottle was tricky because of the neck but the texture ended up being the hardest part. We have a new admiration for texture artists. The wine glass is there again and towards the back you can see the Guinness glass. I feel like I'm running an advertisement campaign for both Guinness and Bud light. By the way neither of us drink Bud light.



I should move on to the star of the show, which of course is the toupee. This texture to the right is a simple retexture of Kleiner's facemap. I actually used Barney's hair with a bit of a recolour for it ;) The toupee you see running around on the floor is a model which was hard to create and even worse to texture. I hope we pulled it off.

This next picture is from one of my favourite scenes in the machinima. We call this poor guy Kenny. In our last video we killed him several time over and in this one we made him a gay 80's singer or something along those lines. You have to have some idea of what you are trying choreograph. I ashamedly admit to also using Stevie Wonder as a source of inspiration in this scene. Really it's just plain wrong. One thing most people will miss is Barney's expression. Watch for it when you view the video. We tried to make him look completely intoxicated.