Thank you all for the positive feedback!
soulfax444;n7010760 said:
Looks awesome, cant wait to try it out my self.
Quick question, how many mods will I have to jugle to make a short video, like the one you showcased?
The YT description did not contain much information and some news sites didn't find their way to this thread in the forums. Hence there is some confusing and wrong information about the involved tools in the wild. So to answer your question I'll expand a little on the tools and the creation process.
In addition to a normal texteditor the only W3 specific tools used to create this scene were
- a small skip-all-videos-and-load-directly-the-last-savegame Mod for faster startups (that's optional but recommended)
- a minimal witcher script to start the scene (as a separate mod)
- the storyboard UI Mod (as seen in the 2nd and 3rd vid)
- w2scene encoder (not a mod but an external CLI application)
- w3speech tools (a phoneme extractor, a lipsync animation creator and encoder, a w3speech packer - all external CLI applications)
- the (patched) modkit for packaging the scene as a DLC mod
- wwise to convert the audio from wav to wem (that's easy but unfortunately there is no simple converter utility and you have to install the software package)
The audio was stitched from existing lines in the game but multiple words were mixed solely from phoneme snippets (with varying success). I used audacity for the stitching and
Dahlialynn offered some help with the audio afterwards. She adjusted some parts with some other software (although we had a discussion about the necessity
)
As seen in the storyboard showcases (which are by the way best case scenarios for a conversion to a scene!) the result is a textfile with definitions for the scene. For the above scene almost all of the definitions needed to be adjusted by hand in multiple iterations as the storyboard UI does not support changing the weight, clipping, stretching and blend in/out of animations and mimics. But on the bright side: all of the camera definitions can be used mostly as defined in the storyboard (although it's only possible to setup moving/interpolating cams as static cams for start and end as two separate shots in the storyboard and manually link them in the resulting scene description).
However every settings change requires the repackaging of the dlc scenemod and restart of the game. There will be a batch file included which makes this package + restart process simple and "fast" - but adjusting and finetuning animations/mimics/lookats/timings will still be a time consuming process. Even if you are familiar with the settings and have a good grasp what the result will probably be.
So in summary: the number of mods is the smallest problem for creating scenes. It really depends what you want to create: I think these tools are good enough to easily create even complex dialogues with *some* nice animations and camera work (but emphasis must be on the *good* dialogue part) but totally inadequate for "cutscenes" where the visuals are the main focus.
Having said that, it's still mostly fun if you already have the "final" scene visualized in your head...
P.s. Sorry for the late answer I had some problems logging into the forums...
