A Pixelated Point of View

Last week I found myself at an amusement park while supervising a school trip to celebrate the upcoming end of the current academic year. It had been about eight years since my last visit. Too long. I forgot how much fun they are.   Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra · Expert RAW · Edited in Snapseed    

  Did you know that depth of field maps are present in certain Source games by default, such as Half-Life 2 (2004)? By using a console command 'r_depthoverlay 1', your in-game view changes to 'depthmap view', or how Valve likes to call it: a depthbuffer. Not all Source games contain depth of field information (like Left 4 Dead for instance) and so far I have only gotten it to work in Half-Life 2. There is some interesting information on the Valve Developer Wiki about this topic, yet I must say the information remains highly technical. It would take me quite some time to decipher everything that is on offer on the Wiki. Luckily, I don't have to decipher anything, as much of this information is obsolete (at least in my eyes if you take the purposes I use depthmaps for into account, as depth of field maps are implemented by default in the Source Filmmaker. So, in a nutshell, what is the Source Filmmaker? First I'd like to give a bit of context of Source machinima-m...

 Allright, some more Source and Source Filmmaker updates. Also a post with some more technical stuff for those interested. I've started experimenting with Source in early february, since I wanted to do more in Source Filmmaker, wanted to experiment with the Source Demo Smoother (basically the only way to create cinematic playbacks of demo's pre 2012, before SFM was officially released by Valve) and eventually I wanted to move on to making my own maps and models for machinima in Source. Learning Source and understanding Hammer has been a very interesting process so far. And to be fair although I've experimented a lot I have not yet built a custom map of my own. For some reason that's just the way how I like to do things. Just spending hours on decompiling maps, reading books, watching tutorials, reading mapping forums/discords/blogs, loading game maps in Hammer and understanding how they consist of various brushes and in/outputs is more interesting to me and also in addi...

Source Filmmaker is a perfect example of a piece of software that I really wanted to learn to utilize, but never got around to actually doing it. Back in 2012 when the beta was released I was extremely eager to dive in like many, but then I discovered how steep the learning curve of the software really is. Every couple of months I would boot it up, put a few models in and close it. Now that I have been exploring the Source engine for the past couple of months by learning Hammer through books and tutorial video's, the SFM does not seem to be that daunting anymore. The tutorials shared by many on YouTube actually make sense now. I remember I'd watch a particles tutorial on Source and the SFM and I would just be left speechless at the end because I had no idea what step 1 was again. Now I'm finding my way around it. Yesterday I finally created my first tangible piece in the SFM with Left 4 Dead assets. The scene was filmed in L4D_garage02_lots (better known as the Crash Course...