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blog: from yesterday is more inspiring to me and the song is so dynamic i can see images when i hear it.. but to me.. the perfect storyline to this one would be some kind of.. disaster movie i guess.. which would be cool but I'm so not working with over 20 sims at a time!
I already had an idea for The Kill, but then I reconsidered one of my movie ideas I got ages ago. I was always fascinated with AI and when Open For Business came out, I made my Servo look like a real sim, I thought it'd be cool to make a movie about an android, so I started thinking further in that direction and that's how I decided on From Yesterday song.. Chapter 2: The Genre ...was completely influenced by the song actually. My very first idea was supposed to take place in the past, but 30 Seconds to Mars has this progressive sound, you can't just walk away from that, so it had to be somewhat scifi-ish. I still couldn't turn away from the classic drama, and in my opinion it' still turned out pretty old fashioned in a way blog: other thing that's been bothering me.. is..hm.. i'm making a sci-fi film.. how actually scientific does it have to be? okay i'll be honest i know very little about AI.. been interested in it since I was a kid, but all my knowledge comes from other films not the reality.. so you know.. the question is.. can I just make things happen without any scientific grounds/explanations? well my general rule is.. do whatever you want as long as it looks good and captures peoples attention. well can't say i'm proud of that rule but it's been working for me so far lol
Chapter 3: Preproduction Actually I spent ALOT of time on this without even getting to the filming part. As I was on this 2 year break and wasn't too interested in what was going on in Sims modding community. But when I started all the catching up, I was like, wow. The quality of the custom content got better, new hacks were made, new animation tools were developed. It all got so much easier...or if you look at it from the other side, much more complicated... Chapter 4: Character Design. Blog: you know what is really weird about me as a director? i never know what my movies will end like when i start them.. well i'm really open to possibilities.. i mean it's even more fun this way.. like i end up kinda watching the movie myself in a real slowmotion wondering what happens next..
That's why the character prototypes were so weirdlooking XD Later I was just re-editing and re-editing those sims till I settled with the versions you can see in the movie. Jesse's personality was supposed to be very different..obviously  And funny fact about Simon's character, at this stage he wasn't even in the story. Just after I made that sim, I kinda liked the overall vibe about him and thought he could be more than just a side character. I couldn't quite find what I was looking for, so I ended up making Ethan's outfit myself, which took me a while, as I wasn't that experienced at skinning and meshing, as I couldn't even find a mesh which I'd be content with... Chapter 5: The Custom Content While making this movie I also realized how crucial the custom content was, because I never paid that much attention to the quality, partially because of the fact that I couldn't even tell a bad piece of cc from a really good one. But the texture quality of the content you decide to put in your movie just will directly influence the detail and realism of your movie. Yeah it's a really obvious fact, but somehow it's overlooked by many people. so well i’d love to make a flick about that its’ just.. one problem:
the CC!!! damn.. alot of cc i have is just crap. or…lets
put it this way..alot of cc that is out there IS crap.
Sometimes it even could look good.. say i like long hair on guys so
i’d deal with lousy textures while i’m playing..
but… never in my movies. i just want to make sure that every
little thing that gets into the view is the best quality which
package texture size could afford. so..i don’t even have that much
'best quality' stuff… and..all the electronics stuff
i will need lots of gadgets, wires all those weird looking scientific things…
it would be cool if like part of the face of the guy was detachable or
sth..crap so even if i was lucky to find some robotics stuff.. there's not much
guarantee it’s actually good.. in fact i’ve tried to find sth already..
and well nothing that interesting.. i’m talking about open
parts of the body with electronics coming out.. i can’t mesh
clothes..so i guess i’m screwed?
So yeah, in fact I ended up making alot of this myself. Of course I couldn't kill too much time on making all the things I had in my mind and which i couldn't find anywhere, I'm a moviemaker, remember? But still there was alot of experimenting involved.. here's how I did some of the things... Chapter 6: Moving Hand  The hand belonged to a real sim. . I used the invisible skin on him, that's why the head was invisible. I edited the Exobot mesh by Brasstex from mts, deleted all body parts, except the hand and this is how I got just the hand part without anything else showing. Then I used Animesh Exporter to animate the hand and put it into the right position...so the actual animation looked..like this...  Chapter 7: Ethan unfinished
Chapter 8: Rotating Platform Yep, that one was very challenging, as I've never made any custom object animations, as they became possible not too long ago. I did have something very complex in my mind, but it all came down to just a simple rotation, as I couldn't export the bone structure that I created in milkshape into simpe, so I just had to choose one of the existing objects, and the swing was the closest to what I needed. I edited the seat mesh, as you can see and deleted the swing frame along with the chains. Sims automatically 'snap' to the seat so I just had to use Bon Voyage sunbathing interaction and the sim would rotate together with the seat, which was animated.  Chapter 9: Lighting.txt And yes, if you noticed that lighting seems unusual, you're right, as I started looking into those lighting.txt files and basically they weren't as complicated as it really seems. You can do so many things with them, you can make all sims appear black like silhouettes, or you can make them very bright like ghosts, you can create shadows(which look very bad on sims faces though) you can control the angles at which lighting is falling. So the lighting system in sims is not as bad as it seems. The defaults are like beyond bad.  Tweaked vs default lighting For those who are interested, these modifications are done in D:\Program Files\EA GAMES\[latest ep]\TSData\Res\Lights And then you use 'setlotlightingfile Lighting.txt' cheat [or put any other txt file name that you created to see the changes you have made.(the cheat will work with nightlife) ] Chapter 10: Interactions Choosing interactions was really hard for this one. There would always be some problem with certain things not looking right, and especially since like the main theme of the movie is pretty much running away.. the thing is that maxis running animation is so ugly, I won't even start... and the problem is that you can't even create one since it would be a locomotion type.. and they are complicated /impossible? I duno, I just said i'm not going in there... BLOG: don't u just hate sims running animation? seriously why couldn't it be at least a bit..
better? why sims always open doors with their feet sometimes not even touching them?
it just sucks! and the transition(meaning stop doing one thing
get to another) animations?!
they are so artificial and glitchy they just have to be cut out.
and the stairs! have you seen the running up the stairs animation?
when i saw it while playing I at least laughed, but now I really don't feel like laughing
dammit.. i need a sim to turn around and run up the stairs and.. what do i do? i can't
use maxis retarded turn around and run up the stairs, so i’m pretty much screwed you know.
and why make stairs with railings when sims don't fXckin use them anyways?
it’s so natural to run up the stairs while holding the railings.. but. of course. no.
wtf do i do now?
So yeah now you know why I had nothing else left to do but shoot their feet lol But looking at it from the other point, actually at times I felt quite overloaded with the possibilities... well i finally came to realize I'm just really getting lost in there..
well i mean first you get the feeling like the interactions are too limiting..
but now i get a feeling like there’s too many.
well it’s not easy to achieve the effect you're going for, but it's
possible now.. i just mean… things really evolved since my very first movie..
i remember all the interactions i used were either from paul's reaction tester or
i had to think of the way to play them using moveobjects on.
i had no idea wtf overlay was .. so in a way.. things were simple,
because there was not that much of a choice. and if it was a bad
choice,
it at least wasn't that hard to make since there were just base game
and university interactions.
well in over 2 years.. so many hacks with interactions/alterations have been made..
like tons of boxes with ep anims, Decorgal came
up with a way to 'overlay' animations in her talk overlay hack, the new animation tool came out,
then using Decorgal's hack, i made several overlay animations which
would block certain parts of body from moving.. so basically. now you can do about anything you can, it’s just not always easy to find right interactions for it.. like you may pick a facial expression from one interaction and play it during the other, you may tell sims do any action while laying or sitting or even walking if it’s overlay..well they wont always look good.. but.. still there's a way.. it’s just i’m really lost in all that.
Chapter 11: Overlay Overlay is awesome :D If you are creative enough you can achieve so much with it. It's hard to explain, although the idea of it is really simple. Overlaying interactions often include just only one part of the sim skeleton and the rest just stays unaffected. It could be just a simple head rotation, or a hand position, or it could be something more complex like a whole upper body animation. So overlaying some animations you can make sims do things while walking or laying, sitting you name it.
Chapter 11: Custom animations If I couldn't find something I needed among maxis made interactions, I would make some of those myself. Some of them were simple overlaying poses, some of them were a bit more than that. Here's a list of the ones I made: 1. Hand movement; 2. Look at hand; 3. Cover face with hand overlay; 4. Custom hands position + Sunbathe from Bon Voyage; 5. Point gun and shot; 6. Look over the corner; 7. Grab hand and pull; 8. Hold gun overlay; 9. Hold robot overlay.  You can learn more about custom animations and get the tools needed for that here. Chapter 12: The gun As I couldn't find the holdable accessory gun I needed (I was actually really surprised at that one myself) I've decided to turn one of Vampcat's guns(see custom content list) into a holdable object. So I took a sword I downloaded somewhere from modthesims and replaced it with the gun mesh. Sure it took me a while to get the gun positioned in the hand right, but that's how it was done. And shooting was an animation made by me, also as overlay so this is how I made him talk while pointing the gun. Chapter 13: The Street  Boring, but I get asked about how the street was set up also.. So well as you can see... the lot which appears kinda yellow is the one i shot everything on. And the road where Ethan gets hit by a car was a 'fake' one made with invisible driveways and road-looking floortiles. I used 'Take a spin' to make cars drive on that road. Chapter 14: The Roof For those who don't know, you can put your sims on the roof using moveobjects on cheat. That scene was still pretty hard to work on, as I couldn't just place my sims where I wanted. They'd just stick to a certain floortile and even snapobjectstogrid false wouldn't help :/ The interaction of sim dangling from the roof was from the Obstacle Course career reward. I also changed the lighting settings alot in the scene, as I made shadows use a different angle and added a strong yellow light coming from one side to achieve the sunset lighting effect. A funny detail: you thought it it was Ethan who saved her? well haha not so much lol  Chapter 15: Bedroom Scene  I made a sim hold keys similar way as I made a holdable gun. So see the chapter 12 for that. And then used 'tip' interaction to make Jesse give the Keys to Ethan. And balcony jump was an obstacle course animation as well.The animated door was the object (you can get it off modthesims) which you could kick the same way as pink flamingo one. I just recolored mine. Chapter 16: The Sequel?  the original concept of the movie was so different from what it turned out.. The time of action was supposed to be several
days at least. But i just couldn't afford it because of the song length,
so that's why the movie is 'supposed' to have a sequel. But I'm not
sure if it ever will have one. I'd love to do it, but 1. I don't have this much time. 2. sims 2 is... okay i'll say it: crap. takes too much time to load and is very limiting modding wise, not mentioning the quality of animation..but it's all almost in the past since sims 3 is coming out. But will it have all the moviemaking/modding tools I need? I guess no one can answer that as for now.
and as a mild warning, if I ever make it, it actually might be anything, as I like to change things around and it might be more like a stand-alone movie, meaning some of the storyline elements could be dropped/not taken into account.. Yep, I just really don't like the 'sequel' tag. Thanks for reading! :) |
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I made him using the same principle as making the hand one. Sure thing it was a real sim, just with no legs and arms. Also the custom skin and eyes made him look more like a robot. 
A very simple example of it would be when Jesse got out of the car. The getting up animation I used sure didn't have the head turned in that position. So I made a simple neck rotation animation and now I could make my sims do anything I want with their head turned to the right. And the facial expression was created with Decorgal's model poses hack. 
Same principle would apply to more complicated interactions. Say the one I used on the woman in lab consisted of 2 different interactions... Get down on the knees one and 'get fired' which was an overlaying one
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