What?! After all the effort and waiting you guys have been putting up with and here I come, announcing that there is no vodcast? Is something up?

Yep you bet. Watch this week’s video to find out why.

Technical Information

Production Tools: 3DS Max 2008, After Effects CS3, Vegas 7, PFTrack and FumeFX plugin for 3DS Max 2008
Number of Shots: 1

Number of Takes: 1

Number of reiterative renders: n, where n→∞… nah, I was just kidding. n is more like 30 or so.

Total rendertime: 32 hours. (Compare it with 44 hours for my 1.5 minute Episode 2)

Number of voiceovers recorded: 0

Total HDD space used (inclusive of intermediary files): 2.2GB

Credits

• Ellen McLain as the voice of GLaDOS
• Dan Castellaneta as the voice of Homer Simpson/The Headcrab Zombie
• Special thanks to Miss K. Dahl for appearing as the burning headcrab zombie. Proves to you that headcrabs are not misogynists when choosing their victims.
• And also to all the wonderful people at Valve Software for making Portal and Half-Lifeverse
• No thanks to the Weighted Companion Cube who stabbed me.

Trivia

• Believe it or not, this is actually the most difficult vodcast I had to make so far, despite it being quite short.
• I worked on it continuously for 3 days (not inclusive of render time, or sleeping times, eating time and defacting time)
• For one, only one shot can be taken. The rest of the shots had to be digital effects.
• I tried recreating the portal from Portal - it worked, but it required so many layers that I could only afford to render one still frame.
• As a result, only the inner, brighter layer was used.
• The reason why portals in Portal looks thus is because they are prerendered textures.
• Also, due to an oversight, I forgot to make the portal expand (with a lot of particle effects). Instead, the portal just appears.
• I had to render the same video with different iterations about 4 times each, not inclusive of the amount of test renders I made.
• For this vodcast, I changed my workflow. I mentioned it in Varied Thoughts.
• I started using .mov files as my test render file (I used to use .avi files for my test renders)
• I toned down the quality of fires (anyone who worked with FumeFX should know how high quality it can get, and how sluggish your computer can get) by the time of the final render.
• Anyone whom I’ve discussed visual effects with before knows I hate masking. I had a whole load of manual masking to do for this video. Check if you can see where I started getting sloppy.
• The Weighted Companion Cube is hand animated. I thought of using Reactor to allow a more natural feel of things, but the thought of setting it up and doing repeated test-renders put me off.
• Again, hair was something that made the video look pretty bad. I should have realized hair moves! (Note to self: Watch more Superman Returns, not Superman I and II)
• The headcrab was tracked about halfway using PFTrack. I hand animated the rest.
• You may notice the return of the blue tinge. This was because for the majority of Portal, there was a blue hue (to make it feel like a cold, alienated experiment kinda area). I replicated that as well
• As a result of the blue tinge, the the portal background is indistinguishable. Damn.
• The original shot was longer. The headcrab zombie (me) was supposed to rise up from below, and say ‘Mmm… cake’.
• But to do that, it would mean another 3 layers of rendering. I had even gotten to the point of animating it, but I cancelled at frame 750 because I can’t wait any longer.
• So I replaced it with just an empty screen. Just like the Simpsons’ Hungry Jack’s ad
• And the following is an excerpt of a conversation with a friend of mine:
  

  A says:
  What’re you doing now?
  Chewxy says:
  Burning K [that's the girl who is the headcrab zombie]
  A says:
  Cool. I wanna watch.

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