Star Wars RPG, What Next?

Since Wizards decided not to renew the Star Wars license for their RPG (and minis game) I have been waiting for an announcement from some other company to say they will be releasing a Star Wars game instead. So far none has been forthcoming.

I have recently been wondering about the possibility of trying to drum up support for a community written/supported RPG. I'm sure the fan base is there, we just need a few individuals to get the ball rolling and to start working on a system and rules. The eventual aim would be to become officially licensed in some way.

I had been thinking along the community driven development for my own system (which may see the light of day sometime), but with the name Star Wars there should be more people interested in getting it started.

Lightsaber Effects

Being a Star Wars fan, one of the first thing I looked at doing when I started editing video was to create some lightsaber effects.

I trawled the internet for some examples and tutorials and found this excellent one from videocopilot.net. I tried it out on a simple animation I was working on at the time and was very impressed. Having got it out of my system, I left well alone and got on with other, more serious, bits of work.

While putting together the DVD for the latest show by my drama group, the Appleton Players, I took the opportunity to recycle some footage of a rehearsal of a sword fight and add the lightsaber effects for the amusement of all.

The clip I used was only just over 30 seconds long, but there was no way I was going to manually track both ends of two swords for the 900+ frames, so I decided to make things a little easier with motion tracking and expressions in after effects.

I followed the tutorial to set up the lightsabers and get the look that I liked, then I set about creating 4 trackers, one to track the tip and base of each sword. This was the time consuming bit. While the motion tracking tool in After Effects is OK, when you have fast moving items or light coloured items against a light coloured background, it has some difficulty. These swords were both fast moving and light against light (sigh). So, after many hours of correcting the motion tracking, I had my points plotted. By using expressions similar to the following I set the start and end position of each of the lightsabers to use these tracked points.

comp("mycomp").layer("clip.m2t").motionTracker("Tracker 1")("Track Point 1").attachPoint


With these expressions plugged in, my effects followed the action in the clip as expected. Unfortunately, I had to manually mask out items as they passed in front of the lightsabers, as shown in the tutorial, however I am hopeful that the new Roto Brush in CS5 will automate this too.


So I have my video, but a lightsaber just isn't right without that sound. So I went trawling again. I found a number of samples of lightsabers (and I already have some myself), but I was after a "clean" sound so that I can modify it as required. Eventually I found this site describing how to create you own sounds in a similar way to the way Ben Burtt did for the original film. While this is a bit too technical and long winded for what I was after, there was a download of a premixed lightsaber hum, so I grabbed that instead.


As I was using two lightsabers, I pitched one up slightly (the green one) and both slowed and pitched down the other (red), so that each had a unique sound.


The final part was to adjust the volume of the lightsaber as the sword was moved on screen so that the faster the blade is moved, the louder the buzz.


After some experimentation and research I created the following expression for the audio level of the lightsaber.


// Use the combined speed of both the tip and base of the lightsaber
totalSpeed = thisComp.layer("Green Saber").effect("Saber_Controls")("Start Position").speed + thisComp.layer("Green Saber").effect("Saber_Controls")("End Position").speed;
// Convert the speed to a volume, maximum volume of 2.5dB
vol = Math.min(totalSpeed * 0.05 - 12, 2.5);
// return the volume for left and right channels
[vol,vol]


My short clip, "Darth Mo", was finally complete.

Creating a Bothan in Poser

As I have mentioned in a previous post, the latest RPG I am running is a Star Wars campaign with multimedia support, known as Fade to Black. I have now run the first session and will be posting some of the details of the preparation.
In the first of these posts I'll discuss the creation of a 3D character for a Bothan, a species in the Star Wars universe that one of my players is using.
The picture to the right shows what a Bothan should look like and what I am aiming for. As all except the head is basically the same as a human, I started with the basic Michael 4 figure from DAZ in poser.

The first step is to create a snout-like shape for the mouth and nose of the figure, I do this by creating a magnet with it's base located toward the front of the jaw as shown below. If you look closely, you can see the size and position of the magnet's area of effect in the image below, but you will want to configure this to your own taste.

Pull the magnet away from the head to stretch the lower face into a shape that you think is the right size for your Bothan. Once you have a shape you are happy with, you can spawn a new morph target and delete the magnet. Setting the new morph target to "1" should morph the head to show the snout.

While the basic shape is there, it doesn't look like the mouth and nose of a Bothan, but I'll come back to that later. The next thing to do is the simple task of changing the ears to the long and pointy style the Bothan has. Fortunately, the Michael 4 figure, and a number of others, comes with morphs for Elf ears, experiment with these until you find something that works for you.

OK, back to the face and here is where I cheat slightly. I bought a copy of the cat world bundle and applied the face morph to my Bothan, giving feline features to the nose and mouth.

Now that the facial features are more "Bothan-y", I need to make a few adjustments to the shape of the lower face. I created another magnet on the face and pulled the mouth down and slightly forward, one more magnet allowed me to flatten the mouth and nose as they had become pointed during the stretching.

At the penultimate step, I added some long hair. There are loads of hair props out there you can use, just find one that fits the model and suits your Bothan.

Finally, I replaced the skin texture with one of the textures from the cat world bundle and changed the colour of the texture to a more neutral tan shade. To complete the effect I also changed the colour of the eyes to a yellow-green to better suit the character.

Say hello to Teruft Tarvish, a Bothan scout and a member of Unit : Black.

Star Wars: Fade to Black

I have been working for some time now on a new Star Wars RPG campaign named "Fade to Black".

This time around I am hoping to make it a multimedia experience and have been working away on character images, video, software and a number of other items to make the most of today's technology to enhance the role-play. Much of it is still being kept secret from the players, but once the first session is completed on Saturday, I will be looking to provide details on what I did and how well it worked (or not).

Multi-Media Role-Playing

I'm currently in the process of putting together a new Star Wars RPG campaign and this time I'm going to try going all technological.

A friend of mine (shout out to Martin) has taken to running combat on a computer screen to avoid the need for models and a clear space to use them. When I started the planning for my campaign I asked a few questions of my potential players, one was how to handle combat; When the results came in, the use of a computer screen was favourite. With this in mind, I was thinking I'd move a few feet from running the game in my dining room to the living room where I have a big TV to put my laptop into.

I then started thinking what a waste it would be to have the screen blank during the session whenever combat isn't happening, so I decided to try a multimedia approach.

Being Star Wars, I will have an opening crawl at the start of each adventure to introduce the story. I also hope to get some CG models of each of the characters so I can use them in short animations or graphics for display. I even hope to use the odd bit of programming to display computer consoles or keypads where passwords or similar are required.