Disco Inferno - 3DS MAX generated TF2 movie

A while ago I created the TF2 machinima movie Engination, the purpose of the movie at first was to create an Engineer frag/machinima movie, but it turned out to be only machinima. During the later stages of the project, I got into some 3D work and learnt that the Team Fortress 2 models could be imported to 3DS Max. However, I only ended up doing a minor part for the credits with 3DS Max, but saw the potential it had. Watch the movie here.



Since the release of the Engination movie, I started working on the sequal already. Even though not a lot of footage is captured for it yet, I do have the whole storyline done and written, so it just is a matter of putting words into footage. This time however, it'll be a lot more done with 3D programs, simply due to the possibilities that become available when using them.

Disco Inferno was really a side project, which I just started while testing out some motion capture data to TF2 models. Luckily, a lot of the work had already been done by superaldo in terms of getting the pyro model ready for animation. I did some minor adjustments to the model and especially the texturing, primarily providing it a latex suit kind-of-look (got wax?). As for the remaining player models seen in the movie, I imported them the same way as described in the tutorial (linked above).

This project became larger and larger, and at some point decided I'd make a separate movie out of it. The concept of it is very simple, and it isn't even long, but do not for one minute think that it didn't take long to create it. The movie footage consisted of 6698 frames rendered in 3ds Max, and with an average rendering time of roughly 90 seconds per frame, it took roughly 175 hours to simply get the rendered frames out of 3DS Max. With a couple of mistakes in a few scenes, I ended up re-rendering quite a lot of things, and there still remained a few small issues I wish wouldn't have been there, but simply don't have the time to start re-rendering all the portions again.

I did learn a lot of new techniques and things through the making of this, knowledge which I will definetly put in use while creating the sequal for the Engination movie. Got so many great things planned for it, just hope I'll be able to create them at as high level of detail I'd want them to be. Having said that, if there are people out there that are proficient with 3ds max and especially animation, please contact me if you'd be interested in creating the movie with me.