A perfectly normal day in CS:GO... except a tsunami strikes and floods the map.

The following text comes from a comment I wrote under a Reddit post on r/GlobalOffensive that I posted around the same time as this:

Before anyone asks, no, this is not a mod or anything like that. It's CGI. Well, the gameplay itself isn't CGI but the water is. Something like this wouldn't be possible in really any game at the moment, unless the simulation is pre-baked. We just aren't at the level where high quality, real-time liquid simulations are doable yet. Not sure how many years it'll take until the technology has developed that far. Sorry if this is really obvious to everyone! It's just I've gotten questions like that and people thinking it's mods before on other similar videos I've done in the past, so I wanted to be clear.

The video was made with Blender 3.1 and Houdini (3D programs) along with some tools that this would be impossible without. One of them being HLAE for exporting the original gameplay footage from the recorded demo to several image sequences. One for just the world, one for just the viewmodel and one for just the effects (sparks, dust and smoke particles etc, like what you saw when I knifed the wall) so I can bring them into my editing software as separate layers. Another one being io_import_vmf for importing the whole Inferno map (including lights) into Blender so I can use that as collison for the fluid and also lighting/reflections for the water. Last one being afx-blender-scripts for exporting the terrorist player as well as the POV camera to import into Blender and have them move exactly as they did in-game, matching perfectly to the recorded footage.

From here I imported the portion of the map I needed into Houdini and set it up for fluid simulation. I split the project into 4 parts, one for each major wave. Otherwise I would have to make the simulation container huge, covering the whole area of all waves instead of just a small area per wave. This is way more convenient and takes less time to simulate. From here it was a matter of tweaking all the settings to what I think would be good, and simulating at a pretty low resolution (fewer particles, less detail on the fluid) to get a quick idea of what it's looking like. Then, obviously everything is completely wrong because it's the first try, so I tweak some more settings and hit simulate again. Basically, do this many times until it look somewhat good. Trial and error. Now it's time to raise the resolution a lot, which adds more particles and more detail, and obviously takes much longer. So I leave it on overnight, only to wake up the next day to find out something went wrong. Either I ran out of memory halfway through, or Houdini crashed, or the simulation actually finished but it looks terrible because upping the resolution changes the behavior quite a lot sometimes, etc.

The process was basically just that for the better part of 2 weeks. Since it took a whole night to simulate each section, then a whole night to render each section out of Blender once finished, plus the work time during the days, you can probably understand why it took so long. I know that any 3D artist who has worked with fluid simulations can agree they are a huge pain. They are also very huge in file size... this project took up almost half a terabyte total on my hard drive. Could've optimized it a bit better so it wouldn't be as large but it's whatever now.

After this it was just a matter of bringing all the rendered layers into my editing software of choice (After Effects) and compositing them all together, do the sound design and add some finishing touches. Done. Obviously this was an oversimplified description, a ton of steps weren't mentioned.

Anyway, thanks for watching! Hoping at least a couple of people will see/enjoy the video so it was worth making :)

P.S. How did the watermark on the wall at the start look to you? It's something new I'm trying out to avoid people stealing my videos without giving credit, which has happened quite a few times now. Previously I had a sort of intrusive text of my channel name in the corner of the screen, which obviously gets cut out anyway because of the aspect ratio when those bastards post it to TikTok or Instagram for example. I thought of putting it in the middle but that looks ugly and even more intrusive. Now it's still there but it kind of blends in with the footage. People will still steal it but at least it'll be obvious who made it.

TOOLS:

HLAE by advancedfx: [ Ссылка ]
afx-blender-scripts by advancedfx: [ Ссылка ]
io_import_vmf by lasa01: [ Ссылка ]

CREDITS:

Sound Effects from ZapSplat: [ Ссылка ]

#cs2 #counterstrike #animation #csgo

[Z/Mount Myriad]

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