[VIDEO] Tutorial to make your custom crowd screenshots/videos EASILY

Episode 2 is up: place crowds facing different locations, place specific characters doing emotes, and make the camera movement smoother. Watch it here.

I put together a video to show people how to use my scripts to quickly assemble a crowd with the characters from your supergroup, global friends, or whatever. I explain things quickly, so feel free to pause and go over things at your pace.

I didn't edit the video at all because I've had no time (life decided to get busy all of the sudden), so you can hear me stutter and backtrack a couple of times. Sorry about that.

Thanks goes to Stephanie, who tried to use my scripts for the last 2 days and found them horribly user-unfriendly, so this is my attempt to make sure EVERYBODY can use these scripts to make nice screenshots or videos.

This video only covers the basics (extracting characters and placing them along a path); if there's interest, I'll post other videos explaining more complicated things that the script can do.

Without further ado, here's the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNIlFDngZto

ActivePerl: http://activestate.com/activeperl/downloads
Paint.NET: http://www.getpaint.net/
Script: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/37952257/crowdscript.zip

Brilliant.

FPAAW.*




*First Post After A Wizard

By the way, if you want hilariously inaccurate subtitles, try the automated transcription YouTube made. It's so wrong, it's funny.

Let me just tell you this man has the patience of a saint and more knowledge shoved into his pinky finger then I do in my whole body. Thank you so much again for all the help!

Honestly he took me from two days of this to .

You. Are. The.

MAN.

I... well, damn, I'm just elated to see this and that you are gonna let me USE it.

I gotta go get all my Mains in a screenie...

Ooh... No, I'll ask somewhere else. This is completely WIN!

Mike

/Saw the other thread, but this is... astonishingly simple to do. You, sir, are indeed a Wizard 50+3.

I only watched the video to hear Leandro's sexy voice.

I don't do demo editing, but I'll listen to this for the voice.

*grins*

Let me be the first to tell you - until you have heard him drunkenly warbling Spanish love songs and poetry, you have NO idea.

(And my Freedom incarnation of Johanna Sinclair is married to Doctor Leo. He could tell her "Ready for teleport" and she'd swoon.)

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite

Well, I was idly humming and singing "My Way" while explaining the script to Angelus Animi, so she can most likely tell you that you are all crazy. There is something in the Enriche that alters your ears, I think.

This is awesome! Thanks a ton for taking the time to put this together, Leandro. If you get the time and inclination I'd love to see more videos with you expanding on the things we can do with this.

A wizard indeed!

Nice tutorial Leandro!

Yeah. I already "broke" it somehow.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

Leo, you could read a statistics textbook and I would remain entertained.

Also your tutorial is good. >.>

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dispari I don't know why Dink thinks she's not as sexy as Jay was. In 5 posts she's already upstaged his entire career.

Oh man and here I thought it was something complicated lol. You rock Leandro, ty so much for this tutorial!

PS,
He puts up with me a lot lately too heh

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dispari I don't know why Dink thinks she's not as sexy as Jay was. In 5 posts she's already upstaged his entire career.

Okay! Have a video put together, rendering and uploading to YouTube now!

My camera work sucks. I'm not really sure how to get nice smooth camera moves with my shaky hands (maybe lay off the caffiene...NEVAH! MUAHAHAHAHAHA!), but I did my best for a short vid.

Note that the script is placing avatars randomly in the painted space. So if you don't like how a certain shot came out (like your Huge guy is standing dead in front of another toon that's min-height and blotting it from the shot), rerun fillmap.pl and try running the demo again.

Here's my vid. Should be done post-processing soon.

http://youtu.be/u1f0iU-NjLg

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

About the camera movement: rotations are a pain in the neck to do by hand, pans are a lot easier (especially if you use hover, with flight enhancements to get the perfect speed). There's a trick, though: use the keyboard or a gamepad. The game will rotate the camera at a constant speed if you use a button for it, instead of using the mouse.

You control the speed of the turns in Settings -> Controls -> Control Sensitivity -> Turning; and the actual keeys used with Settings -> Keymapping -> View -> Look Up/Down. It's not perfect, but it's certainly better than trying to control it with the mouse.

Leandro, did you use key commands for your original collage video? That camera seemed to be moving much slower than the standard fly-by-wire speed that I've been experiencing during demo playback.

It seems to me that by pulling the camera back a bit from your toon and then just using forward, back, strafe left, strafe right; that your 'walk' to create the line to populate your critters could also be the same 'walk' used to navigate the camera.

So... I should do this using a special made character... which I'm thinkin' of calling "houcam" or possibly 'camtex'... where he is only slotted with Hover. And use keyboards. Makes sense. Likin' it!.

Mike

/And I'll probably make him look sorta like me. Why not?
//Then again, I might break the camera/game doin' that... Frack it. Doin' it.
///Thanks for the pointers peoples!