Dragon*Con and the Cambridge Film Festival.

Real Heroes of Half-Life 2, which used a Bud Light commercial and an American Beauty reference was shown at Dragon*Con and the Cambridge Festival. It was quite a surprise to get invited and a big boost to our machinima efforts. I hope anyone who saw it at the festivals enjoyed it and had a laugh. We enjoyed making it.

My First Movie

I debated on whether or not I should post this. Mainly because it is far from being produced. I feel like if we are not careful we will continue to create the same sort of thing again and again. It's fun but not fulfilling. I want to create a movie in HL2 engine. But I want it to be something everyone can enjoy regardless of the creative medium. I've focused too much on using known characters from the HL2. So I want to work on a real animated film. I don't want to go into too many details right now because I'm paranoid someone will actually read this blog and get an idea from my idea. I'm not conceited just paranoid.

I'm a woman by the way for those who keep e-mailing and calling me dude. :) My name is Kim Lockwood and I also work with Ross Scott and help people in the modding community. My strongest points are facial expression, gesturing and working with decompiled models and vertex animation. That's what I do in case anyone is interested. I hope I will eventually be able to take these assets and make a proper animated film.

Noesis Interactive

I'm in the process of making three DVD's for Noesis Interactive using XSI. They are as follows:

1. Decompiling Source Characters-- This is a step by step process on how to decompile an HL2 model, such as Magnusson, and make it game ready. I cover rigging, weightmapping, decompiling HL2 EP2 models. Basically, I show you how to fix all the problems with the model and at the end provide you with a working model.

2. Vertex animation -- I go through the process of vertex animation, everything from making clusters to creating the shapes needed for Faceposer. This will be essential information for anyone out there with a custom model or a decompiled model. This information applies not only to Source users but Garry's mod as well.

3. Custom Gestures -- I'm going to show you how to create your own custom gestures for Faceposer. This means making an animation in XSI that you can then import into Faceposer. It will add a new dynamic to your mods.

Science Guy Photos

I've decided to put up some photos of my models. There is a picture of Kevin and The Russian Guy. The Russian Guy was incredibly hard to texture but I think he turned out well. I hope the pictures gain some interest in the production.

The Science Guy

We are knee deep into our newest production: The Science Guy. This machinima will feature a brand new map, two new human models, plus a host of new props and some custom animation. The two stars of the show are Kevin Loveberry and his assistant 'The Russian Guy'. Our beloved Kenny will be holding the camera, but alas you will never see him. We've finished the modelling, rigging, weightmapping and vertex animation on our models and are currently working on the choreography.

So stay tuned and send positive vibes our way. We need them.

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.

Confessions of a Security Guard

In case anyone reads our blog I wanted to add a note. When this video is played on Youtube it's out of synch. It is best to download it from machinima.com. Next time we will give them a Youtube ready version. Lesson learned.

Confessions of a Security Guard was our first machinima as well as a steep learning curve. We had never used Hammer, Faceposer or Garry's Mod. We had fun creating and experimenting with the game engine and it was a great stepping stone to our most recent machinima: Real Heroes of Half-Life 2.

If you're intersted you can find a link to the Hi-Res and Low-Res version of Confessions of a Security Guard to the right under Our Machinima in the menu.

The music is by U2 and Van Morrison. Most people ask what the U2 song is....it's Elevation. We didn't intend to use this song for the video. Actually I happened to have it on my computer and decided to use it to learn lip syncing in Faceposer. After investing so much time in it we decided to go ahead and use it. One of the most disappointing scenes in our video was the graveyard scene with the zombies. It looked great in the engine but once it was compressed the darkness just made it look flat. My favorite scene is Barney in the rowboat. That scene was originally shot on the crane but we decided to put him in a rowboat with Mossman so that it looked like he was wooing both Alyx and Judith.

I think it was a good first start but we are hoping to keep building our skills with each successive video.