DOUBLE RELEASE: OnRide + Dusk (2022)

In this post I'll share some news about two recent releases: ONRIDE and DUSK. The former was released around three weeks ago, and the latter just a mere couple of minutes ago. Both films take place in the Left4Dead and Left4Dead 2 universe, but have been made with different tools. ONRIDE was created with the demo smoother inside of the actual game. You record a demo, and then adjust it with the demo smoother, a piece of software inside of the Source demo player that allows you to cut, play and edit demo's. DUSK was created with Valve's Source Filmmaker and uses assets from Left4Dead and Left4Dead 2. Instead of capturing gameplay in a demo format, I was able to place assets, props, characters, camera's, particles and lights in real time inside of the map and adjust things on the fly. The source filmmaker also had better camera support with various lens presets and proper depth of field. Both films have been released on 4K resolution; a big leap forward in quality. Two very interesting releases with different perspectives and contents. Let's take a look at them.

ONRIDE

OnRide is a one minute machinima taking place in the Left4Dead universe and places the viewer in the frontseat Point of View of the Screaming Oak Rollercoaster found in Left4Dead 2's Dark Carnival campaign. Considering the player is never normally able to ride the rollercoaster in-game, let alone pay much attention to it due to the ever spawning hordes of infected that need to be dealt with, I thought it was an interesting perspective to place the viewer in the front seat of the rollercoaster during a post-apocalyptic/zombie infestation setting. In a sense, this particular point of view is a stark contrast with regular rollercoaster point of views. This particular point is what, at least in my eyes, makes this short so eerie and powerful as post-apocalyptic rollercoaster rides are extremely uncommon occurrances in both real life and videogames. During regular POV's, you hear the many different sounds found within a themepark, such as screaming riders, the sounds of the machine, ambience sounds, music and environmental sounds. In OnRide, it's awfully quiet. Only the sound of the lifthill and the low frequencies of the coaster running on the wooden tracks loosen the tense environment a bit. There's no happiness in this otherwise happy place. There are no screams, there is no music. The situation has changed a complete 180 degrees and places the coaster outside of its normal and mainly positive-laden context.

The film was shot entirely in-game with the aid of a number of console-commands and the Source Demo Smoother. I started off by enabling cheats and loading the level. Since enabling the rollercoaster is a major in-game event which normally would spawn a lot of infected, I installed a mod to mute the player in order to prevent them from shouting in-game voice lines. The rest of the teammates were kicked with the 'kick' command, and the in-game AI, known as 'the director', was fully disabled. With the director fully disabled, no hordes of infected nor special infected would be spawned during this so-called 'panic event'. Now I'd be able to fully explore the level without issue. I noclipped towards the coaster and bound a infected spawn command to a keyboard key. With this I would be able to spawn infected at any place where my crosshair would be pointed at. One of the last things to fix was the vision of the infected. By changing the vision, the infected would ignore me unless I would literally stand right next to them. I probably have added a couple of more console commands, but I seem to have forgotten which ones they were. Once ready, I started demo recording and stood next to the control panel and waited 2 minutes for the coaster to run.

Once in the demo smoother, the player becomes the actual camera. You cannot see yourself standing in the level. Basically, you're gone gameplay wise and you as a player become a 'camera override'. By adding a few console commands I was able to hide the HUD and the weapon as otherwise they would be visible in the shot. After turning on the drive function of the demo smoother, I was able to manipulate the camera anywhere in the level. It took a couple of hours to place camera markers inside of the rollercoaster and to fully make the point of view of the full rollercoaster track. Especially if you think about the camera resetting to its original position all the time, which means you have to travel across the rollercoaster tracks every time you have placed a keyframe. Once done, I used some of the smoothing techniques found in the demo smoother to smooth out the camera path and rendered it as a 4K targa sequence in order for me to add the additional effects in post. The end result is highly interesting as I had never seen anyone else do this with the demo smoother. While the rollercoaster has been such an important aspect of the Dark Carnival campaign (the level in question and the corresponding campaign are favoured by many L4D fans and are often considered to be one of the best, if not the best of the game), I had never seen it anywhere from this point of view before and I'm really happy with the result.

DUSK

DUSK was originally intended as a Source Filmmaker experiment and a so-called warm-up for more projects made inside the Source engine. I did share two blog posts about it and I considered it to be done. I recently realised that there is more potential to be found within DUSK. Within no time I managed to visualize a experimental short with it. Considering the arena of the shot was already highly interesting and perfectly usable for the narrative I came up with, I decided to follow up on the 10 second 'mute' shot of a camera zooming in from inside a car on two zombies and to make it a 45 second experimental film. The original name for the film was INFERNO, but literally five minutes before upload I decided to call it dusk. Dusk, as in twilight. Twilight, as in limbo; between the stages of death, alive and infected.

The film takes place in the truck depot finale of the original Left 4 Dead. I had to recompile the map as originally Source Filmmaker had a bit of an issue with properly reading the map. All of the lights had to be taken out, together with a couple of other entities. Once the map was loaded and I had picked a spot, I could start making the shots. I added fire particles inside the building, blinking volumetric lights in the traffic lights, many props such as the car, the traffic lights, pallets and of course the zombie models. The zombie models were assigned some of the walking animation sequences that were found in the game. Lighting was done with a combination of spotlights and volumetric lights. More information about the lighting can be found in my two previous posts about my Source experiments. These contain a couple of screenshots of the entire project in question.

I extended DUSK by duplicating and cutting the shot found in the original animation, and adjusting lighting, props and models accordingly to fit to my liking and deleting assets that were not required for that particular shot. Production took around a week for all the shots combined, rendering idem dito as they were also rendered on 4K resolution. The audio scape was made with only game sounds found within Left 4 Dead 2. I extracted these from the game with GCFScape, a programme that allows you to read and extract vpk (valve package files) and their contents.

If you pay close attention, you see mentions of depthmaps in this film. That is because the Source Filmmaker also has a option built-in to render the corresponding depth of field map alongside the original shot. That's all I am going to say about that for now. I will most definitely do more with this in the future.

Both films have been released on YouTube and Vimeo. Full HD versions are available on Vimeo, and both Full HD and 4K versions are available on YouTube

More release news coming soon. Enjoy!