Team Trouble [ L4D ]

December 8, 2014 in category: Gallery left 4 dead, left 4 dead 2, poster, source filmmaker

Second poster with rough testing of custom skins for models. The basic idea behind image was turning whole Survivors team against the most fragile member – young Zoey, which still fights to the last moment.

Creating custom skins themsleves was pretty easy – low saturation on the standard survivors textures, copying foggy iris material from Infected models materials and placing blood decals by simply adding layer in PS with painted splatters on all three male surivovrs, blended in with multiply mode. Blood splatters were brushed using amazing and awesome templates created by dead-brushes at deviant art – i used them in 2 ghosts I video too.

Making them work in SFM was another story – i couldn’t force them to show up at all. And i still can’t figure out, why files with most recent dates and included in folder written in last line of game_info.txt mount segment weren’t working. SFM was loading old, original ones instead. If anyone knows, how VTF and VMT loading works in SFM, when You have duplicates of the files (which go first, which go last) – i will be extremely grateful for info on that matter :). Custom skins are downloadable by clicking here.

L4D L4D2 – Team Trouble detailing – Of Secrets

On the left – original setup without custom textures, additional detail models and color correction.

Other than that, map used is of course c1m2_streets – safehouse beginning of L4D2 survivors. The whole composition needed a lot of more detail – check out the comparison above between initial setup and final render. The original doesn’t look good at all, right? Unnoticable at first sight details can bring a lot of atmosphere to the image – and turn, like in this example, almost empty room to the last stand battlefield. By simply adding small models in the background the scene becomes much more interesting.

I placed additional lighting behind Zoey to highlight the ground, which brought nice contrast to body model. Outside the room there’s also orange light, just behind the Survivors, to simulate aura emitting from the fire in the background. Also notice Zoey’s cheeks – while dark on export, after crunching levels in PS the color of their illumination looks much more pronounced.

L4D L4D2 – Team Trouble – Gore – Of Secrets

Yup, the fire axe slash gib just hangs in air in front of Louis. Also notice the information board in background sinking into the floor. The important thing was to make them look good only through camera.

The exposed flesh parts of infected survivors are just standard L4D2 gibs, rotated, scaled and placed in mid air – so they would look in place through camera view. Bill’s cigarette was removed in PS – when i made it’s texture transparent using alphatest in VMT file i noticed i can’t render him with ambient occlusion anymore (and i definetly didn’t want to decompile and compile his model). There’s also additional dirt and noise added to the floor, since it looked too flat from this angle and additional decals on Zoey’s clothing. Also i blended in additonal hair layer overlapping her head to make it more detailed.

I like how this image turned out, lot of things going on but without overload of details. To busy for a wallpaper – but i hope it’s pretty to look at!

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Map used:	c1m2_streets.bsp (included in Left 4 Dead 2 Compatibility Pack)
Additional Detail:	Dirty Walls IV & Urban Details from Open Footage
Render Settings:	1920×1080 \| DoF : 24 samples \| Motion Blur: 24 samples
Accompanying music:	Mike Morasky – Chocolate Helicopter (obviously ;))