Jenko

Alright, here we go. Just focusing on the landing and take off videos. (Though I did recreate the dream on Dantooine for KOTOR: Episode 1: A Familiar Path... these cutscenes would be easy to replace too...) There are some that will be substantially more difficult than others (escaping Taris for example, or crashing on Malachor V). No, a BIK would still be the best option. Otherwise you'd be making a stunt module including space and the planet for each planet. Plus as of this writing - we haven't found an option to have glowing engines in the game. Now, the best option would be to use the HQ skyboxes and record the game at the highest possible settings using Fraps and create a new BIK that way. The Ebon Hawk would be animated in 3ds Max and placed back into the game using cutscene animations or as an animated placeable. We'd have to record twice and do some After Effects work to get the glowing engines on the back of the Hawk. Doing it this way, in game fixes a lot of issues with doing the BIKs entirely in 3ds max. While we can import areas, they don't look right, the lighting isn't the same. Compositing the Ebon Hawk generally produces the same result - inconsistent lighting with the background taken from in-game footage. Basically - cameras and animations created in 3ds max for the atmosphere portions of the landing videos. Not sure about the vents and such for the Hawk, that might be a question for JC. Entirely 3ds/After Effects created CGI for the space portions. An early example of the atmosphere portion would be found in KOTOR Episode 1, where we animated the Ebon Hawk leaving Dantooine in the level itself. The camera is a little rough, could be done better now. But, the point remains. Example. Anyways... I'd try and contribute, but a lot of my free time has been given up to working on our next movie project. I have the 3ds and AE knowledge to do cameras, animations and CGI. Examples of my animation and CGI work can be found here (I created all the space shots in this sequence aside from the ones inside the Hawk's turret view), and here (Everything outside the windows was created in 3DS max). If the scope of the project were to expand past the landing and take off cutscenes, we'd have to start thinking about more complex scenes like the space battles or unique character animations. I'm half-decent at the latter as seen here for DarthYcey's film.

Oh! Just the landing and take off vids? That wouldn't be as bad, then Kexikus was talking about all the cutscenes, but yeah, landing and take-off wouldn't be that massive of an undertaking, then.

The scope of that kind of project is very ambitious. I would also contribute if this was a group effort. There's certainty a few large obstacles to overcome, such as the Ebon Hawk model - or other models that we do not have access to like the escape pod and the ejection port on the Endar Spire, or the Taris city that can be seen during the escape. The actual animation would not be terribly difficult per say, just time consuming. I made more than a few CGI sequences in KOTOR: Episode I: A Familiar Path™. The trickiest cutscene ever to remake would be the KOTOR 1 Revan's death cutscene. It would require either substituting unique animations with generic game ones or hand animating new ones. There are unused animations found in the game files for the Dantooine dream (though unusable without a lot of 3ds work), but not for Revan's death.

I believe JCarter426's comics were done in game with screenshots. Really, you'd want to do it in game as loading modules into 3ds looks a little.... crazy. Maybe a character or something in 3ds and composited over top if you needed a custom pose or something. Either way, I haven't heard of anyone else doing comics with the game assets. I created almost all of the posters for the KOTOR Trilogy films and did so by rendering each character in 3ds max and compositing them into a final image in Photoshop.

I'll look into using simple shapes like cubes to see where the issue is, as well as shadows. Thanks for the ideas, guys. And yeah, I thought about using lower-poly versions as a mod release. Like you said, it'd be better than the cardboard cutouts. I get why BioWare did that, obviously, since I'm having severe lag issues replacing the cardboard cutouts with full character models. But still, they're uh... Fantastic. Heh, good eye. I've actually already got a good result for what I need by slowing the game down artificially and then speeding my footage up again. But I figured if this was an issue that could be worked around, why not release a mod to eliminate Bioware's crazy bad cutouts?

It's an animated camera, found on m13aa_c01_cam. Last time I imported one of these cameras into 3ds max, it didn't import correctly or didn't convert to ascii correctly. There might be some trickery that could be done with it, might take a lot of trial and error. Either way, you can only have one camera model for the conversation so you'd have to replace the camera model or update it as needed in 3ds. Of course, you could try opening the m13aa_c01_cam file in Anicam and updating it there, but you'd have to figure out which camera animation it is and would have to work with anicam...

well, the crowd in this scene are not UTCs or creatures so there's no scripts or AI at work, they directly replace the Stunt_Crowd0x and StuntDroids models. The silver sith troopers actually just that, there are about 15 lined up in one model to replace StuntDroids. I also tried replacing the models without animations, so the models T-posed, but the lag was just has bad.

This is definitely a long shot. The other day I was working with the dark side ending, trying to eliminate the cardboard cutouts used for the crowd. These are also used in the light side ending and the Taris Dueling Ring. I found out that they are just models with a "default" animation to simulate movement, if you can call it that. Once I replaced the models and gave them a simple animation, the job was done. Or so I thought. In discussions with JCarter426, I know there was an assumption that the game would lag with a lot of NPCs due to their scripts. Since these were not actual NPCs, there were no scripts for them. Regardless, my game lagged hard - down to 10 fps. And I've got a powerhouse of a computer, so we're obviously looking at some sort of engine limitation. While looking at the resource monitor, the game is barely using any of my system resources. Again, pretty sure this is not possible, but does anyone know of a way to overcome this limit? Or is it hard-coded in the engine without any way of fixing it? https://imgur.com/SDfyI0u https://imgur.com/Jym2jxD Either way, it works fine for what I was doing, but it would have been nice to release as a mod

Which shots does the character clip through objects? It MIGHT be fixable through modifying the cutscene animations used in that scene.

Yes, mostly. We've used Anicam in the past but that has been made redundant recently. The problem is that most of the time with the movies we've wanted to make the scenes different than the ones from the game - so I'm not sure how useful our files are for mods. Almost all of it is either not usable or very specific to the movies. I've got some stuff I'd like to convert into mods when I have the time, but that's a topic for a later time.

I agree with Kexikus, the TSLRP camera is really jerky. It looks like it was cooked up with Anicam. And I don't envy whoever made it, making cameras with Anicam is such a pain. Nice work as always, guy.

KOTOR_Trilogy, JCarter426 and I made another movie - going back and finally bringing the first film up to the standard we set with the other films. And for fun, JC and I tried to figure out how to push the games in some really crazy directions... In other news - JCarter426 and I are going to do an episode of KOTORadio together, and anyone is free to drop some questions in here for us to answer "on the air"!

That'll probably be the plan, along with a stunt module option... I have to finish another project before I can put any work into that. Mostly just need to create the stunt module and test things out to make sure it works during the course of the game. That way people can choose how they want to install it. That's right. Plus, cutscene animations are kind of janky and hard to work with. They're built entirely for the cutscene and can't really be used elsewhere. Even trying to take parts of the cutscene animations would be a ton of work. So i don't think if it would have helped making those animations at all. I did some more looking through all the game's files, as I was taking an inventory of all the cutscene animations for... projects, and I don't see anything that could contain any of K1's other pre-rendered cinematics. Unless I'm missing something. I'm still surprised that the animations existed at all for BIK 09, honestly.

Haven't forgotten about this. Went to revisit work on it, while helping JCarter426 work on cutscene animations for something else. Anyone know how putting a new .BIK into the game works? Does it need to make the resolution of the others as well as aspect ratio? And do people want the same vision effect as the others from the game, or what?

Not sure about K2, but this does happen in K1, doesn't it? With the Mandalorian that shoots the "wife and kids" settler in Matale Grounds. dan14ab_mand01.dlg is the dialogue file in question - it triggers script "k_pdan_mand56" when the Mandalorian shoots the NPC. Obviously the NPC doesn't talk after that. That script can be decompiled in DeNCS - it's pretty simple. It changes the Mandalorian to faction 2, the settler to faction 4, pauses the conversation and has the Mandalorian attack with an assured hit. If you had a node where the dead NPC tried to talk, yeah - it would break the conversation. (Though I have seen a character speak a line WHILE dying, it was a good laugh). A dead NPC can't be the speaker in a node. I believe the conversation will break if the player or party is damaged, but I'd have to check. I think this also happens on the Endar Spire with the lightsaber battle - the Dark Jedi dies and then the Jedi dies. All in convo. Though in that one an invisible placeable (end01_sceneobj03) is the speaker so that both NPCs can be killed off.

Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe those animations exist on one of K2's models but are not used in the game. (I think on one of the Kreia models to be exact?)... There's five or six of them, not sure exactly what they were mean to be used for originally, though.

Here's a rough WIP. I'm trying to fix an issue with Malak's face not animating, so one of the shots isn't quite there yet. The camera and animations were hidden away - it seems as if BioWare maybe started this scene as a stunt module or something... I know the area underwent a lot of changes during development so who knows what BioWare was up to. Maybe this was an earlier version before they went to a BIK. Either way, if the animations exist for other pre rendered scenes, it'd be awesome to eliminate the needless BIK files.

I'd definitely do a less... Drastic vision effect. But still have something. As far as the revelation goes - the mask removal is a stunt module. But the rest of it is a .bik movie. All of it appears to be animated just like this scene. Even Bastila talking on the Dantooine plains. But it isn't any of the regular animations. Like I said, hopefully those animations exist somewhere. But it's equally possible that they do not, and I just got lucky to find these left behind for whatever reason.

Here's a pair of screenshots to showcase what I'm trying to do. I'm debating whether or not to release it as a new .BIK video or a stunt module... Still got a little ways to go, need some to finalize new LIPS and need to fix the timing of the star map opening via my script. http://imgur.com/a/g2Gno Basically, the camera and stunt animations exist in the game - just a matter of getting it to work in the game. Not easy, lots of trial and error. Been converting other animations from stunt modules to be useable for other applications and stumbled across these animations. Like I said, I was hoping someone found the ones from Revan's death somewhere. Or the revelation. It's possible they don't exist out there - but that's what I thought about these animations.

Hi all, I'm working on something - trying to recreate some of the particularly bad, low resolution BIK videos from the first game. When I was digging through K1's files, I found Malak and Revan's animations (m15aa_c01_char02 and m15aa_c01_char04) for the Dantooine Star Map vision. I looked around a bit, and it seems like BioWare set the Dantooine vision up much like a stunt module - the same kind of naming conventions for the animations, character models, cameras. But it's a BIK video for some reason. Still, really useful stuff for what I want to do. However, I couldn't find the animations from the "Revan's Death" cinematic. I'm just posting in hopes that they might be hidden somewhere obscure, and that someone may have come across them at some point. I figure it's a long shot - I never thought I'd find Malak and Revan's animations hidden away, but I guess you find something new everyday. Thanks!