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3.05.2012

New Item "Jar Jitsu" [basically bees]


Short Video:
 










For the  2 people that scrolled down; hi.
Budget: 6,500 (actually says 8,000 on another page, not sure which one is correct)
Used: 6,436
Bones: 25
Animation: 48 frames at 30 fps
Time spent: about 2 day

In Flash, there is this thing called symbols, which lets you use the same...basically it's like calling an item from a library to use without duplicating/recreating it. Save on memory, speed etc. I have no idea if Source has something like that, could have cloned bees. The budget per bee would have been 8 times more. Also, I think I saw a "loop individual bone animation" function somewhere on the Valve Developer page. The way I duplicated the wing keyframes is pretty bush league. For the wings I kind of cheated and used the glass material, I wasn't sure how may texture maps I could include per item. the Jarate uses 2 main ones, I was going to add one more at maybe 128x128 to make the wings nicer.

If there is any interest in the item, I'll make some updates/tweaks.
About the actual look, at first I went with wasps, since the sniper is from Australia. But I didn't like the look, so I switched it to a realistic looking bee, then tried a fatter version and really liked the cartoony look. As far as the urine animation, throwing, and "BLEED FOR 6 SECONDS", I'm assuming that'd be a Valve thing.

Due to the modified first/3rd person POV in games, the orientation of items are always off, I was actually really impressed on how they faked the pee being leveled. But I think the "physics" are "turned off" when you are in 1st person, if you look around, the pee will not always look leveled. I think that might have something to do with the dead bee not wanting to bounce up/down when jumping, but I could be wrong.

Overall, an okay weekend. Oh also, the audio [buzzing sound] in the video is something I just got for like $3, I'm sure if Valve were to do it, they'd do it in different languages also since it's a global thing...

Last thing, I was gonna list a bunch of puns or "possible dialogue" for the sniper w/a nice background and TF2 font, but it's 3:22 am and I got work in less than 4 hours, so: "Behave", or "go to your queen" as he's throwing it. ...also really wanted to use like twice as many bones to make the bees look more natural, but that's really easy to do, I'm just not sure if using this may bones is actually acceptable

Thanks for reading. I'm gonna go crawl inside my sleeping bag now.

Workshop link