Hello everybody, this is my first article on the Daily Click and I like to write about
how to get you, your friends/family or Pamela Anderson into your own click game, by digitizing them. Allright, that Pamela Anderson part was just grapping your attention

A clicker named Gus Stevenson had the idea that I should write about this stuff, as my re-release of Deadly Tournament got quite some attention the last days.

So where to start, I guess the best is I refer to my game Deadly Tournament as a show case for this article and tell you a bit about how it was made on how I WOULD MAKE it with the knowledge I now have.

The whole Idea to my game started more or less as a joke between a friend of mine and me. At that time I just bought a TV card for my PC which was capable of capturing analogue video onto the PC. We both were fans of the Mortal Kombat series and I always thought of making a clone of this game with MMF. So my friend came up with the idea to film us with my dadīs camera and then put the animations into the game like they did for MK. I already had the basic engine for the game and some crappy drawn stand-ins. We decided to do some test shoots in our backyard to see if this is possible at all. After he did some stuff in front of the camera, we went back in and captured the material, after that I took a few snapshots from the videos to have a basic animation of him walking, jumping and punching.

So it was possible, though soon enough I was sure itīll be a pain in the ass to do this whole capturing stuff for each character. But still we decided to give it a shot, as the idea itself was more than appealing to me. So I call upon friends who likes to be in a PC game and told them what they would have to do. Most of them liked the idea very much and joined the project (the oneīs you now see in the game).

Allright, letīs come to the technical part of the process.

What we used:

Hardware:
- an analogue VHS PAL camcorder
- a tripod
- LOTS of camcorder cassettes
- a TV capture card

Software:
- the capturing software of my TV card for taking single snapshots from the footage
- Paint Shop Pro 5 Shareware for cutting out the single frames
- MMF you know the rest

After we recorded all the needed animations for each character I started taking snapshots of all the moves from all charatacters. Then I loaded them into PSP5 and started cutting them out by hand, frame by frame. THATīs the ugliest part of the process, it takes ages to do...

Now that I had all the single frames finished and saved as single BMPīs (you noticed my time jump from approx. 2 months of cutting out animations, do you? ) I imported them into MMF and made them into the corresponding animations like walking, standing, jumping, punch, kick whatsoever.

So you see, IF you have the equipment, the process itself is quite selfexplaining, but still a whole bunch of hard work. Iīm not going into how I programmed the game itself and all this as this is just focusing on how to get the persons into MMF etc.
Just one advice for some of the more complicated moves you most likely donīt want to perform in front of the camera: For the mid air role in the jumps just film your character sitting on the floor pretendig to be right in the middle of a salto and then use this image and just rotate it (if possible not with MMFīs built-in rotate feature). For mid-air jump kicks grap yourself a chair or anything like that and let the character sit on it and do the move that way, that gives you a clear image of him/her without any motion blur.


Anyway, thatīs how I DID it almost two years ago with Deadly Tournament, if I ever make a similiar game like that again, I would for sure use another way.


As some of you know, Iīm also still in the works with my first movie, a star wars fan film, more or less a fun project to get some skills for movie special effects and CG compositing with live footage etc. But as a matter of fact I therefore, bought a used version of Adobe After Effects 5.0. A wonderful post-production software loaded with effects and great possibilities like BLUESCREENING. Yeah thatīs right, you see where Iīm heading, right?

To save A LOT of work and of course time I nowadays would go for shooting the characters in front of a bluescreen using After Effects or any software that does the job to key out the blue, smooth the edges etc. and then just import that movie into MMF as an animation. That way you can easily get a complete series of animations done in one day and it most likely will look much better than what I did in Deadly Tournament. Once imported that movie, you can delete unwanted frames to cut the file size down and also get rid of useless inbetween frames which would not look good once the game is finished.

The disadvantage of this process clearly is that software like Adobe After Effects or any comparable software does indeed costs a lot of money (a few grands, even with students discount) and is only worth the cash if you really plan to use it a lot (I myself do so, as Iīm planning to do a few more films with my friends).

Apart from the costs-factor, bluescreening definitely is the way to go if you plan on doing something like this.


To add few more tips, hereīs some advice what to do and when to do it:

- before going out and recording all the animations, be sure to have your engine finished and working and stuff you want in it already either working or at least properly planned out
- make a complete list of animations for each character to perform so that he can do it all in one run
- best thing is if you record outside, to wait for a really cloudy day that gives you some nice diffuse light as this delivers very "neutral" pictures, nothingīs worse than having the sun shine from a particular side, itīll make you character look totally different compared to the other folks
- make sure to get the conditions for shooting as similiar as possible for each shooting (camera placement, weather conditions for outside shooting etc.) to have the characters look all the same in regards of lighting, size whatsoever
- at all costs avoid later shootings of animations for a character because you forgot it beforehand, itīll look different for sure compared to the rest of his animations
- use better costumes (or use costumes at all) than we did in Deadly Tournament
- it sure helps if you actors have a basic knowledge of martial arts or at least are in the right physical conditon to perform martial-arts like moves (none of our Deadly Tournament had either the one nor the other *lol*)


Allright, I think thatīs it so far. Iīm honestly not sure if this is of great help for anyone outthere, as it really IS a bunch of work but still I think our work payed off when the game was finished and we could see ourselves as an animated computer character in a PC game.

Any further additions and comments are welcome!

Best regards,

HetH
heth@clickcorps.com
http://www.clickcorps.com