The pad above activates the
color user interface and the color correction tools.
How about a black and white effect? Pretty stark
eh?
Black and White |
Day as Night |
Day as night pad providing
some interesting contrasts. Let’s slide over
to the High Contrast pad next.
High Contrast |
Sepia Tone |
Film Grain |
Film Grain Colour |
Split screen Film Grain
|
This pad above shows no film
grain effect on the left side while you have film
grain appearance on the right side.
In his closing remarks,
Marc Scaparro commented on the trailer and explained
his reasons why they used the effects they did and
where. For instance he said they used black and
white effects at the beginning of the faux WWII
news reel DOD trailer, and then transitioned to
deeper color in order to draw focus to the balcony
window. He said that color correction was made easier
with the Photoshop like controls. On the interior
shots, color correction was used because these particular
scenes were considered too dark to see what was
going on. The focus shifts to the sky, then the
window at a later point in the trailer, before it
pops away from the window and down to the falling
helmet.
Gabe Newell commented that
this trailer would be “useful in marketing”
and also stated that Valve wanted to “Put
something out there to tell people what the experience
of playing DOD is like.” Valve would like
to see people making specific benchmarks from the
SDK’s, created for specific needs.
I asked Gabe the following
question – Are you going to use this technology
besides marketing to produce shorts, i.e. comedy
shorts or episodic content? Gabe answered “We’ll
see how people react to the DOD shorts. We have
upcoming concepts to work into the release, and
if people like the DOD trailer then we will probably
do more, with upcoming content releases.”
Forbes 2006 Investment Guide,
published December 12th, 2005, proved a very good
guy. On page 64 you will find a feature article
in their technology section featuring Valve and
Gabe Newell. The article goes on to state that Gabe
began Valve in 1996 and has poured over $15 million
dollars of his own money into the company. After
asking Gabe Newell my own question about Valve developing
episodic shorts, it was interesting to read the
answer he gave Forbes magazine, when he stated “No
one has created the Yahoo for games. That’s
our opportunity” says Newell, who plans to
start selling music and minimovies on Steam next
year. So folks, it looks like Forbes wangled a bit
more out of Gabe than I was able to. The picture
below was scanned from page 65 of the Forbes Magazine
article, which is definitely worth a read for investors
and gaming aficionados alike.
Gabe Newell
|
In conclusion, Valve stated
over and over again during this presentation how
realism can be increased by implying complexity.
The use of their filmic effects over existing game
assets is a coup to the company and to the multitude
of gaming enthusiasts and modders out there. The
non real-time effects were Motion Blur and Depth
of Field. The real time effects were Color Correction,
and the use of Film Grain and Dust. It was once
again my pleasure to visit the Valve enclave and
see indeed what tricks were up the proverbial sleeve
of Valve, a constant innovator in their field. I’d
like to thank Gabe Newell, Doug Lombardi and Kathy
Gehrig, for making the arrangements for DriverHeaven
to attend.
