Saturday, April 27, 2013

Dam(n)

Without DoF:


With DoF:

I couldn't decide which one was the best version of this picture, so I put both of them up here.

In the lower one I've applied a Super Depth of Field effect. I'm a bit dissatisfied with the colours, (after all I did try to make it look like night on a daylight map, so it's my own fault,) as well as the fact that you can't see very clearly that the cars at the bottom of the dam are supposed to look like police cars, but looking at the picture as a whole I'm pretty content with how it turned out. I wanted to have a helicopter that was aiming a spotlight at the guy hanging from the edge, but when I tried it it didn't look good, so I abandoned the idea entirely. It was for the helicopter I left so much space on the right side of the picture, and I didn't bother to change the angle after I removed it.

This picture is supposed to look like it's taken from the climactic scene of some action movie. The "hero" of the nonexistent film is hanging from a ledge and the villain is about to kick him down. Usually in this kind of scenes, something unexpected happens and the villain gets thrown down instead. (Though there are many exceptions to that "rule".)

When making this picture, I did some work on details that aren't really that clearly visible. For instance, this is what the congregation of "police cars" and "police officers" looks like from down on the ground:


Yes, I used metrocops to represent standard cops. So what? You can't tell from up there, can you? However, something that I discovered you can tell is how they are standing. First, I threw in a bunch of NPCs and let them stand in their starting position, but you could clearly tell even from the top of the dam that they were not looking upward. Therefore I flew up and positioned my player character some distance up along the wall and turned on the AI, hoping that they would point their guns at me... That's when I realized I had the NPC weapon override setting set to Default, meaning that they weren't carrying guns - they were carrying stunsticks, so they just held their hands in the air and stood in a pose that from the top of the dam looked very monkey-like. Damn. Therefore I had to remove all of them and replace them with new metrocops that were carrying pistols, after which I repeated my hover-in-air-activate-ai-deactivate-ai-process once more. Next, as you can see in the image, I moved them to better positions.

In case you wonder why the lights are hovering above the cars instead of being attached to them, I can tell you that they actually are attached to the cars. The collision box is much larger than the visible model for some reason.

Apart from all of this, the guy hanging from the ledge actually isn't hanging straight down. I tried that first, but it just looked weird, so this is what the final version looks like from the side:


I first intended to use a ragdoll from the Suits and Robbers pack as the "villain", but they were too flingy, so I used a ragdoll from the Metropolice pack instead.

UPDATE: While I'm at it, I might as well throw in a version of the picture that has all the posing done, but lacks the NPCs, fog and colour modification:


Addons used:
gm_Valley
Enhanced Citizen Redux
Tesla Model S
Metropolice Pack (NPC's, playermodels)

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