Yep. It’s finally here (If you are new and don’t know what’s happening, please do check out the vodcasts in my blog). I’m so sorry for the delay. I did make a promise to some people who contacted me on YouTube, that the vodcast will be a weekly affair, but these two weeks, I’ve been swamped. I’ve had dinners, barbeques and I played (and reviewed) Crysis. But here’s today’s vodcast:

Also I’d like to have a note. There might be confusion with my numbering system. This is VideoLog number 3, but Episode 2 of the Real Headcrab Zombie Vodcast. V-Log #1 was Episode 00 - a test video for responses to it. V-log #2 was Episode 1, the first proper episode. And this, obviously, is episode 2.

Technical Information

Produced with: 3DS Max 2008, Adobe After Effects CS3 and Sony Vegas.

Stock Footage of blood: Courtesy of Andrew Kramer (I actually bought the stock effects DVD, so what the heck)

Sound effects: Courtesy of Valve. All sound effects were extracted from Half Life 2’s GCF file

Music: Composed by Jien. From the Web of Lies OST.

Total 3D Rendertime: 44 hours.

Total time spent on animating the stupid headcrab: 2 hours (I got bored at the end, so it looks shoddy)

Trivia:

• The Osama mention was added in after the recording because someone mentioned I look like Osama waving his finger around.
• The part that I curse Gordon Freeman was replaced with the jihad statement.
• The video was split into 3 parts for easy management of 3D addition
• The part I worked on first has the lamest quality (because I had dinners and bbqs to attend and prepare).
• You can’t see it, but the texture’s been changed. Again. This time, to fit the theme, a less bloody texture was used (see below).
• Also, in the proper high quality version, you can notice that I’ve added subsurface scattering to the headcrab
• Some computer game in-jokes: Brown and bloom. Did you notice them?
• I decided that the fake pretentious accent didn’t work in the previous vodcasts.
• There are some parts of the video where the sound and image doesn’t quite match. This is caused by the lack of RAM when rendering (I have 2.5 GB of RAM, but 2GB was used to render on 3DS Max, leaving something like 300MB of RAM to render on Vegas.)
• If you watch carefully, you’ll notice that I didn’t mask the crowbar at all. I was lazy actually, having just came back from a post-Election party of sorts (it was more of a walk-around Suncorp Stadium to find Kevin Rudd).
• The crowbar is not a model from the game. It’s just a box with a bent edge. I figured if it’s going to be motion blurred anyways, no one can see it. So there.
• The final scene is just copied and pasted from the first scene, and it’s just reversed. I was too lazy to animate my actual recorded final scene.

Here’s a compilation of headcrab zombie pictures rendered, from past to present (Click to enlarge).

From right to left:

1. Current design and texture of the headcrab zombie
2. Previous still picture version
3. Previous video version
4. First render version (for Episode 00).

Coming up next episode: GLaDOS makes another appearence.

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