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Definitely not, your posters are wonderfully posed. Lighting is also pretty great, however for some reason your spy's legs have 256 colors?

Honestly, my best guess is that they're just pulling your leg. Or, they just don't like them because they have different opinions, but I like them quite a bit.

And if you don't want to use imgur, use pomf.se, since it doesn't add any unnecessary whitespace, it just links the image/file you drop there. And you can sync it to ShareX which is, IMO, the best file/image-uploading software I've used to date, better than Gyazo and Puush combined, as you can even choose where to upload (imgur, pomf, dropbox...).

Additionally, consider how much experience you have with audio, cinematography, and photography principles, as these all apply when creating a video. For an educational video, you really just need to know basic camera lens and placement rules, and three point lighting to create what you need in an appealing way, but you still need to know them.

Edit: For resources, I prefer to use this gallery, and this article seems to accurately identify what camera lenses you want to emulate in SFM (it has options for lense presets in the camera animation set), and I suggest you stick to 50mm or 35mm (perhaps something higher than 50mm for closeups?), again, as /u/Dr-Dinosaur said, it's important to determine the complexity of this video, but I believe that a video is a lot easier to watch (and thus easier to get information from) when you can properly view the subject.

Good luck with your video, and if you ever need any one-on-one assistance, hit me up on steam (same username), I'll try to help you, as I've taught a lot of people some SFM basics and a lot of those principles. Also, I like to pretend I'm just a nice guy to talk to. If you do try to contact me, note I'll be a little busy for a few days, but definitely not for as long as a week.

Here's the a download link for a recreation of the group photo room. Might come in handy. Also, in case you didn't know, switching maps will not affect the posing of the characters. You'll just have to fine them on the new map and move them as a group to the right spot.

Looks really good. Maybe add a touch of backlight / rim lighting to make him stand out a bit more from the background ( http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Backlighting_(lighting_design) ). Apart from that, it's damn good for your second poster!

I don't know how the rules work there, but the Newgrounds Audio community has plenty to work with as far as easy to obtain music goes. I don't know if the Saxxy's count as commercial use, but a lot of the artists are fine with people using the songs for whatever. I mean I just looked up sad violin in the Audio Portal and got this pretty effective song.

Another, he seems active so you could always try sending him a PM to ask for use.

I mean it isn't a perfect solution but if you can work with it why not try? Your video is fun, I think it should at least get some more views.

alrigth i went to render the poster but since i've updatee the drivers of my graphic card the quality really improved a lot so without changing any lights nor camera settings the poster was just darker: https://www.dropbox.com/s/9osrs2ipksejmxo/demoman%202.png

this is the brighter version: https://www.dropbox.com/s/cb3xgv71b3644po/demoman%202%20light.png

P.S.: where do i get the prize? :D

Likely due to time zones. If you take the epoch at 1st Jan 1970, and then take 5 hours off because you're on the east coast of the US, you end up as 31st Dec 1969

Why it was chosen as 1970? Well Unix came out around that time (http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Unix), so I imagine it's just a round numbered year around then. There have also been other representations (like 60ths of a second since... some point in 1971 as well). The "number of seconds since 1970" was what people tended to based on how wide a date range you could fit in a 32 bit int.

It's also why we have the Year 2038 problem: http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Year_2038_problem

To be fair there was nothing WRONG with the CPU specs you posted, it's just that in order to really understand how well your computer performs we need specs on RAM as well as GPU. You should check out this free program called CPUZ, it's my go-to program for finding out what kind of hardware your computer has. It's also the easiest to use, easier than windows haha. Just double click the program and it shows you all your computers hardware in great detail: https://www.cpuid.com/softwares/cpu-z.html

I would recommend you render as many angles as possible until you are sure you have covered everything. Don't have anything too close to the camera either like I did in this video with the piano or the software will get confused. I used http://www.kolor.com/autopano-video/ to string all the clips together and ran a separate script against the video to make it 360 degrees. Relevant link: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6178631?hl=en-GB

Hope that helps!

I guess the only tip I can give from my recent SFM experience is to have some sort of anticipation before the character does an action. It's little stuff like that which makes the animation better. I also recommend getting this book

Hope this helps.

the great bible about animation: The Animator's Survival Kit http://www.amazon.com/Animators-Survival-Kit-Principles-Classical/dp/086547897X

buy it, read it, praise it༼ つ ◕_◕༽つ

edit: or borrow it from the library

You're rendering as AVI. It's buggy and certainly not recommended under any circumstance. The ideal render file should be MP4. By default, SFM does not have an MP4 option. Follow these steps:

1. Download Quicktime here
2. Restart your PC (Important. Don't skip this step)
3. Open SFM, go to Export -> Movie and change AVI to MP4.

extract the .rar file by using the program winzip. http://download.cnet.com/WinZip/3000-2250_4-10003164.html (don't worry, you don't ever have to upgrade to the paid version). in the folder it extracts should be the .bsp and .vmf files you're looking for.

here ya go! https://www.dropbox.com/s/mlthkn7nsquc0va/effects.zip it's all the materials\effects folder in it as i didnt have time to really select the one u need

just paste it in the materials folder.. and overwrite the one u have was nice to help u! well kinda of... :P

As said, you gotta work on the lighting. But one this not many say is the material fix for the hats that are black as well as unpaintable.

http://www.4shared.com/rar/uHObsoOvce/Sfmmaterialsfixespack.html? This should fix it, it has instructions along with it.

I made it myself using Photoshop, it's not hard

Here's the VTF and the VMT, place them under sfm/game/usermod/materials/maxofs2d/

One thing that helps an image look better is to do the following with the camera:

• Back the fuck out

• Zoom the fuck in

Here's a few demonstrations of the effect it gives.

>That's a wonderful system monitor you have there. Is it the Windows 8 one or would you be able to point me at a link for it?

It's not from Windows 8 but the Windows 8 task manager is heavily based on it. It's called Process Explorer and is basically Microsoft's pumped-up version of task manager.

If anyone cares I also have a gallery of all my finished posters, both good and bad http://puush.me/worticus/Gallery. most of them are of my loadouts where i tested how to pose, light, and do other details.

Fantastic work!

I was curious about how long this took, so I went back to look at the WIP video.

22 days ago, the 7-second-long WIP was submitted to Youtube (and got a mention on Valve's SFM Blog the following day. Kudos!) Assuming that the WIP was all that had been done on the video at that time (which is a fairly heavy assumption), this animation was expanded into a full 80-seconds-long sequence, using only the graph editor, over the next 3-4 weeks.

Out of curiosity, how many hours did you log in SFM while making this? I feel like this could be a standard-setting video in terms of the effort that went into it.

Save the sound file with a different name. It didn't re-read the file before, so that was my problem.

Otherwise, maybe try using GoldWave or any other program to try change the bitrate.

You shouldn't loose data from one load to the next, never seen that before. The only thing I've seen is loosing data from not saving at all before a crash, which doesn't seem like what's happened to you. The only thing I recommend is getting a file searching program like everything: https://www.voidtools.com/

Search your computer for any .dmx files you can find. If you still cant find it, you might be able to use a file recovery program, like ntfs undelete, or recuva. Just make sure not to save anything on your hard driver if you can avoid it as it might over right the old data.

Here try this: https://gofile.io/?c=N257Kc It's a map I've been using for years, I can't even remember how I got it, I might of even made it... Maybe this is what's on the workshop, but apparently it's the largest map you can make in source, pure black, unlit background. I also include a green version, so if you want to do VFX in post.

K, here's the Expirebox link:

https://expirebox.com/download/069c88b1ec108ee639d05f3b0e9b15d1.html

I've also deleted and re-installed that version instead of the other one. Btw, you'll probably get the missing textures problem with this - the console will say where they need to go in the error messages

Hmm ... if you actually do have a newer version I might have just created a file conflict for you. Sorry about that. To clean this up, you'd have to go into the folder and delete everything manually (take the two model archives as reference for what you need to delete) and then only push one of the models in ...

Speaking of which, may I take a look at the newer version you're using? Which'd mean you'd have to upload it again to a site like Empirebox, as I'm pretty sure this model will not go live on the Steam workshop ... (I assume that's where you've uploaded it, right?)

You're welcome :) If you have a phone with the google playstore, I'd also highly suggest downloading a note taking app like Private Notepad, so you can take notes that you can always use later when animating.

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https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ru.alexandermalikov.protectednotes&hl=en&gl=US

It's an actual Android game.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ENWTGames.PootisSpenzerBird&hl=en_US&gl=US

I wonder if Valve even gives two shits...

Buy this book: http://www.amazon.com/Framed-Ink-Drawing-Composition-Storytellers/dp/1933492953

I can see you have the potential to have some really cool angles on your characters, but you really need to learn the rules of lighting and composition. I also suggest watching a lot of films and really paying attention to the visuals (i.e. how and why they shoot individual scenes to tell the story fluidly). Trust me, it'll make your work all the better.

Valve's pose to pose tutorial is great even though it's not done yet. Also I recommend The Animator's Survival Kit. Which teaches you the fundamentals of animation.