#hatboydaily

[hatboyproject]

In vanilla, Joker makes some mildly uncomfortable remarks, prompting EDI to decide to continue their discussion in the hallway. I reframed this conversation as happening right there, as I found EDI blithely ignorant about how talking about Joker in front of him is rude to be funny. Shepard's response as to whether or not they'll answer EDI's questions is an autoresponse dictated by Paragon or Renegade points in vanilla; I gave the choice back to the player. (Important, considering certain content depends on Shepard being friendly with EDI!)

This is an example of some additional stuff being added to conversations. It's mostly flourishes, but fun. I had no idea how to hook in Jeff's responses back then and didn't have an EDI synth yet, either so I enjoyed getting this working.

[hatboyproject]

MMM DELICIOUS JANK

For real though, this scene is mostly functional now, aside from a few weird camera problems and a couple animation glitches, which I'll iron out. The Paragon responses all work but their cameras are massively screwed up, but I'm pretty sure it's just because I forgot to tick a damn box somewhere and an animation went nutsoid, ruining the actor placement for the rest of it. The script always goes through some slight changes, depending on what specific verbiage the synths feel like playing ball with. For some reason, EDI really likes being in HMM_DP_HandsBehindBack, but really fucking hates using the DL_HandsBehindBackEnter transitional animation to get there, so she just kinda pops into it. On purpose. To piss me off. So, this "The Babe With the Bullets," thing is a reference to something I wrote into a draft of my old fanfiction, Tiger By My Side, a million zillion years ago. Essentially, Joker keeps playlists, and his one about Shepard is called, well... that. One of the earliest synth lines I did for EDI when I was messing around with it is a line about it I might make into an ambient.

[hatboyproject]

And now for your viewing pleasure, some tidied up animation and some new lines.

This right here is one of my favourite lines I’ve written for him. Jeff never asks  Shepard for anything but her patience, and yet he gives everything he can. He tries so hard to be what she needs, a little spot of levity in all the craziness. Just really gets to the heart of why I love the character so much, and why I’m doing this mod. Powercouple, or something. 💙 💛 💙  🖤 🤍 ❤️

[hatboyproject]

Today’s updates include:

Slight changes to the conversation

Boosted audio gain for Shepard’s line, “I bet you say that to all your commanding officers.” Sounds fine now

A camera angle change that I stumbled across by accident that I actually think looks really nice except it was actually meant as an attempt to cover up Shepard’s weird popping in, and despite changing animation offsets and starting position offsets and praying to the offset gods she still fucking pops in after he talks about shattering pelvises

A failed subtitle change this has since been rectified, turns out numerodyslexia really sucks when trying to type in sequences of very specific numbers

Still to do:

Fuck around with phonemes, literally nothing has been done to alter lipflaps yet

One of Joker’s lines is still set to being too long in the InterpData, need to shorten that

[hatboyproject]

The first visual updates for the post-Thessia conversation! The Romancing Joker version of this conversation is the longest one between them in the game now, at least on the Bridge, anyway. I’ve only done lip-sync animations for the custom lines up until where the video ends. There’s like... 30 more lines of dialogue in the tree past this point, and this is the first pass of these lip animations which were all done today! I saw the animations actually play for the first time when I recorded this. Not bad for a first pass I think, but wow I need to address Joker’s angry face because it does very ugly things to his mouth. (This aside from the fact that the game’s vanilla textures give my poor boy black rotted-ass looking teeth. If they don’t fix that in the Legendary Edition I will be furious.) I think Joker’s synth lines are working pretty well, here. I managed to get him to be pretty emotional sounding for the most part. I just have to do something about those expressions. L O R D T  boy please do not snarl at me like that

[hatboyproject]

Hatboy Project Daily: I'll Phoneme YOU in a Minute Edition

No running commentary today, too annoyed. Some lines STILL SKIP even with InterpData, WwiseEvent MillisecondDuration and new temporary animation keys set to ...

I have a YouTube now, in case subscribing there is something you want to do or for ease of linking etc. Right so I am having problems right now. Each line of dialogue is contained in something called a node. It looks like this in Dialogue Editor:

Each node has a lot of different information inside it, including several values that determine the length of time before the game progresses to the next node, or ‘shot,’ as it were. InterpLength essentially controls how long the camera stays on the characters in general. A WwiseEvent is something that tells the game to play a line of dialogue, and its duration (in milliseconds) tells the game how long it has in which to play the audio file. Lastly, the FaceFX is as you might think, facial animation information and it also plays a part in controlling how long the audio plays for. I have been careful to set all of these nodes’ information to accommodate new lines, and have added new (very temporary) facial animation keys to try and keep them talking until the end of what they’re trying to say, but boy, it is not working and I do not know why. Both Shepard and Joker are having troubles here getting to the end of their custom dialogue and it’s driving me actually bloody bonkers, because every time I do try and change this, I have to dig around deep inside ME3′s brains to tweak some numbers and make damn sure I don’t tweak the wrong thing.  Also, poor Jeff gets stuck in the middle of an OW phoneme here and it looks very, very silly, poor boy. Shepard’s last long line here that finishes with “I’ll look forward to our next talk” is a concatenation of about four different lines together, and I’ve had no choice but to begin the process of custom animating the phonemes for it. I have at this point only done the jaw, but it syncs up relatively well. (If you ignore that her face is otherwise more or less paralysed because I haven’t done those elements yet, it’s just the jaw.) When I get that line looking a little better, I will make a tutorial showing how I did it, because it’s very different doing it the way you have to in the FaceFX Editor than it is via traditional and intuitive animation techniques.