Hello there guys and girls, welcome to another tutorial on my channel. This time we’re gonna talk about Scene Director by elsewhat, a mod that was created specifically for the purpose of making machinima with Grand Theft Auto V. Now I know that in parts this has been done before by other people, especially elsewhat himself, and I know that this mod has been out for years now, but I think there are many viewers out there who like the comprehensive way I explain fluffy unicorns and also I wanna put this into my tutorial playlist so that creators who just start out find all the necessary info in one place.
Some of the stuff from this video has already been covered in my Machinima Masterclass, but in this workshop we’re gonna have more time to look into the features of this mod in detail, because at times it isn’t really self explanatory. I’m gonna try to keep it beginner friendly. I structured this video into a bunch of chapters which you can see on the right side. All the links you’ll need as well as timecodes to skip to another chapter are in the video description. Now without further ado, let’s get started.
01 Installation
Go to the mod page on gta5-mods.com and download the package. Like with any mod in GTA V you will additionally need ScriptHook V by Alexander Blade, which you will also find to download on gta5-mods. After extracting the Scene Director archive you will find a couple of files in there. All you have to do is to copy and paste these particular files into your main GTA game directory. The ASI and INI files are basically the heart of the script while the TXT file right here is a list of all available animations from the game, the same goes for the so called synchronized animations. I’ll get to that later on. If you wanna use these stage lights, which highly I recommend, you gotta do a few extra steps to install them. Here’s how: First, go to your main game directory again and create the following folder path modsupdatex64dlcpacks if you haven’t already. Go back to your download of Scene Director and copy this folder over to the directory you just created. For step two you need to tell the game that the directory you’ve just created even exists, so you put it in the file “dlclist.xml”. To do that you navigate to the directory called “update” in GTA V, where you’ll find the file “update.rpf” and copy it to the equivalent location in your mods folder which you created before. Now you boot up the tool OpenIV – if you don’t know what this is yet please watch my tutorial about it – and go to modsupdate. As you can see this is the same directory you created in Windows Explorer. And now you double click the RPF file and go to “commondata”. And there it is, the file “dlclist.xml”. Extract it to your desktop and open the file with Notepad++ or any other editor. At the very end add the following line:
02 The Basics
To boot up the menu, you just hit the hotkey and there it is. The controls are on your numpad on the keyboard, so 8 is up, 2 is down, 4 is left and 6 is right. NUM 5 is used to confirm actions or selections. The hotkey F10 also closes the interface again. You should always pay attention to the controls bar at the very bottom of the screen which will give you hints about how to activate certain features. If you’re wondering what this button icon means: it’s your left ALT key on the keyboard. Also there will be a variety of helpful texts popping up above your minimap. Keep an eye out for those as well. The foundation for understanding Scene Director are the two different modes, called “Setup” and “Active”. In setup mode you can prepare an entire scene by recording what the actors do one by one. If all this is done you can switch to “Active” and all the things you prepared will happen at the same time as if you were the master of all these little puppets. Since this is a movie making tool you’re gonna need actors. The first step you’re always gonna make is to add the actor to slot 1, otherwise you won’t have many options at all. If you spot a character on the street which you think suits your machinima, just get close to it and hit “possess near / aimed”. If the character is further away, you have to aim at him or her with a gun first. This feature can also be useful if you have a lot of peds on a scene and want to slide into a specific…sleeve so to speak. One thing I wanna advise you to make a habit of is to give your actors names so you can identify them quickly. Navigate to the name entry, hit NUM 5 on your keyboard and type something suitable. If you don’t name your actors and switch to the wrong one it can cause you a lot of extra work, like re-applying animations, waypoints or whatever. Another cool feature is to clone an actor. If you clone your actor while shooting interior scenes the clone will often be ported to the roof of the building so you might have to teleport back into the filming location. It will create an exact copy of the model you’re using right now, which by the way also works if you sit in any vehicle. In this case the car or boat or whatever is copied as well when you click “clone actor and car”. If you switch your actor’s model in between, for instance after cloning, there will be a popup message above your minimap to update the actor so Scene Director knows the model name. Just select the actor you’ve just changed and hit the delete key. Now you can add the actor again and the model is updated. In the actors menu you will find the walk styles. You can apply these with other trainers, too, but it’s nice to have them in here as well. And I recommend you to use these if appropriate because the regular multiplayer ped walk style looks really boring after a while because everyone is used to it from playing the game online. The same goes for the walk speed, which you can switch between walking and running, but personally I’ve never needed this particular feature. The same goes for the actor’s health. It can be helpful to change this if, let’s say you wanna create a shootout between regular soldiers and a juggernaut, the latter of which should have more health than the others. But in that scenario I’d advise you to make the juggernaut invincible with Menyoo PC or any other trainer.
03 Recording Mode
This is a very interesting feature if you wanna create scenes with multiple actors that all do a different thing at the same time. It lets you record a variety of actions for the current actor, such as movement on foot or in vehicles, entering and exiting vehicles, playing synchronized animations or animation sequences, scenario actions from other mods like Menyoo, gun fire, going into cover as well as jumping and climbing. However, and I wanna say this right at the start, the results of the recorded actions may vary depending on what you’re trying to do, which in theory makes this a great tool, but in practice it can be tricky and faulty. I’ll show you why in a few minutes. You’ll notice there are two different modes of recording, which are equivalent to the two states I explained in the beginning. I’ll take my usual example again, two guys walking down the street. For the first actor you use the recording in setup mode by hitting NUM 5 and walking from here to over there. When you’re done with the desired activities you hit ALT+R on your keyboard to stop the recording. Then you hit the button “back to start” which will bring all the actors back to their original positions and into their resting state. You’ll notice that actors sitting in cars will do a little honk while being positioned by Scene Director. Depending on how many pawns you have in this game it will take a couple of seconds so be patient before you give the game any other input. By the way if your actors are inside helicopters the starting point will also be remembered on the Z axis, or the vertical axis which means that they will hover in the air after you switch to another actor. But often times wind will influence the position of the helicopter, so the position might shift over time. It can make for some cool shots, though. Now let’s skip back to our original train of thought again: I’ve just now shown you how the first recording mode works. Well, and the second mode is basically the same only that the scene gets set to active so you can see your other actors performing their actions to be able to time it better. The rest of the features is exactly the same. Watch out, though: It is very important that you realize what “back to start” means because the starting point can accidentally be changed if you don’t pay attention. The starting point is set at the very moment you put your scene from “setup” into “active” mode. So if these two guys stand like this and you set it to active, we can start walking together. Then you deactivate the scene and go back to start. But when for instance we walk for a bit and you hit “active” again, you’ll see that once you go back to start the actors will have a different position than you had originally planned, as marked by this less than subtle arrow. Of course you can and should use this method to willingly change the starting positions of actors, but I want you to be aware of not changing it on accident because it can cost you a lot of time. You can always test a recording for each individual actor with this button right here. This way you won’t have to start the entire scene for all actors. If the timing of your recording is off with the actions of other actors, you can set a delay for the recording. It isn’t really explained anywhere around here but to delay the recording for one second, you type 1000 in here. 2000 for two seconds, 5000 for five seconds and so on. There is also a feature that lets you copy a recording to all other actors, which could be useful for some scenes but personally I’ve never needed it in any of my videos. The problem I have with the recording mode it that it’s not replicating all your actions accurately at all. For example if you wanna have a police officer closing in with covering fire, you’d just aim and fire, right? But if you go and use the “test recording” feature, it looks very different and basically unusable for machinima in my opinion. Nobody shoots like that, the movement is jittery. My guess is that Scene Director can’t record all these parallel inputs from walking, aiming and shooting but I lack the technical knowledge to confirm this. Also, even if you use the recording while the scene is active, the timing seems off afterwards. I tested it by having one guy walk around and another circling him at the same time. Here’s the comparison between what I recorded and what is being replayed. It’s a very different result. It totally fails at doing complex patterns, though, as demonstrated in this obstacle path I created for testing purposes. But still, generally, for running, walking and driving in straight lines or very simple paths the recording mode is a good tool. One thing that is very practical is the button for mouth movement. This used to be an individual mod by the infamous jedijosh, but it’s now integrated in Scene Director. Just press “J” on your keyboard to make the mouth move for as long as you need. You can try to read your text from the script while recording this to get a better timing. Admittedly the mouth movements do look a little bit random, kinda like chewing really. Also when you let go of the button, the mouth will often close very rapidly which looks unnatural for a human being. Those are just my two cents on the matter, which is why I prefer triggering mouth movement with the voice options in simple trainer. Let’s move on to the animations section, because with these the recording mode can play out it’s real advantage over other trainers.
04 Animations
Using custom animations is almost obligatory if you wanna create truly unique machinima, so Scene Director has a feature that suits well here. This is still in beta, but up to now it didn’t make any trouble on my setup. In the animations menu you can change the type of animation, unfortunately I don’t think these options are of great use compared to the animation flags in Menyoo or AnimViewer which I’ve shown partly in my Machinima Masterclass. The biggest problem I see here is that Scene Director can’t loop animations in here which is kinda sad because often you’re gonna need sitting animations or standing animations that loop perfectly and you can’t do that manually. Don’t even try it, boi. But as Jupit pointed out, go subscribe to his channel if you haven’t yet, finding animations can be much quicker in Scene Director. Here’s how: Go to single animation preview and it will play all of the ingame animations in order automatically. If you wanna go through this list at your own pace I recommend you to press L in order to loop the animations. Then you can press B and N to move back and forth between animation previews. The animation names at the top of the screen will give you more info on what mission or situation the anims are from. Of course now you don’t wanna watch over 99000 animations in order, which is why you filter this list by pressing F on your keyboard. You will see a message pop up that reads “Enter text to filter animations. Operators AND OR NOT can be used”. This means that you can for example search for “rifle” which brings up 2086 animations. If you type “rifle AND sniper” you will get 331 animations, which is a much more manageable amount of anims to go through. When you have found a suitable animation, write down the number you see at the start. Then you stop the preview by pressing C. To add the animation to your shortcut list, you have to enter the number now. If it succeeded, you should be able to trigger the animation by pressing ALT+NUM1. You can always remove an animation by selecting the entry and pressing the delete key. Even if you don’t wanna use the animation within Scene Director because it can’t be looped you can still use the animation name you’ve found and quickly search for that in another trainer if you like. It’s really a matter of personal taste, I’ve talked to different creators from the community and some prefer working animations in Scene Director, others like myself or Duggy prefer Menyoo PC. But in a couple of minutes I will show you a cool way to actually utilize the animations with the help of Scene Director. Probably the coolest feature in this sub menu are the synchronized animations. These will be applied to multiple actors at the same time. You can choose between a variety of animations from assorted categories like advanced melee, friendly interaction or celebration. The number in parentheses shows you how many there are. Since it’s GTA there is a lot of aggressive interactions. Naturally. On the right you’ll see how many actors are needed to perform the action. Sometimes you can play a 3 actor anim with only two actors as well. For now I’m gonna show you “beatup dockworker intro”. There is one guy being threatened but as of now the setup is wrong, because the guy I want to be the victim here has the wrong role. The way these synced anims work is that the order of the actors matters. So to change that you’ll have to remove the actor 1, switch to actor 2 and remove that one, too. When you re-add the actor now he will become the new number 1. Then you possess the other guy near you again and he becomes actor 2. If you preview the synced animation again, the characters are in the right order. You can now press A to add this to a shortcut, just like you did with the single animations before. While this animation is played you can’t use the “J” hotkey for mouth movement in recording mode. But you can play the animation with the shortcut and use Simple Trainer to trigger voice events. Now you can see that the synced animation isn’t placed properly because this guys’ hand is obviously leaning against a wall. You can now try to position it correctly by walking your actor 1 to another location. But this technique isn’t very precise and hard to predict, especially in narrow rooms you won’t even have the freedom to walk wherever you want. This is why you will need the edit scene mode, which I will show you in the next chapter.
05 Edit Scene
Another helpful feature is the edit scene mode. This is also in beta and admittedly it does crash the game quite often for me. I won’t be able to explain every detail about this feature because of this. Nonetheless, let me try and give you an impression of how it works. Admittedly I am super thankful that I can invert the camera control here by pressing “I” on my keyboard. I am used to an inverted Y axis since my N64 childhood, I guess. But if you go into this mode just like that you won’t see much. In order to actually use this you’ll need to have some sort of recording first. So for demonstration purposes I’m gonna make Franklin run around on this open field while recording mode is active. Once you go back into “edit scene” you’ll see that there are all these yellow markers which show you the exact moments Scene Director recorded one of your actions. If you get closer to one of the markers it’ll turn blue, which means it’s selected. You can also select a recording marker by moving to the top of this list and pressing NUM5 to switch. As you can see the name of the actor is in parentheses because when you record the actions of multiple actors it can get chaotic. By pressing spacebar once you can now quickly edit the position. While the marker is red you can move it left, right, back and forth with the camera to change the path. These markers are basically just like keyframes in any video editing or video effects software. To lock the new position, press spacebar again. You can repeat that step for any marker, so if you wanna have Franklin move to the left instead of right, move all the markers there like in this timelapse. You’ll notice that the last marker isn’t called “walking” anymore, but “cover”. Somehow there is another marker here because I moved Franklin while in cover. You can deactivate unwanted markers like this by setting the status to “disabled”. In order to
IN EN-US GTA V: How To Utilize the Scene Director Mod For Cinematic Purposes [TUTORIAL | Rockstar Editor]
Introduction
Grand Theft Auto V (GTA V) is not just a game; it’s a platform where players can unleash their creativity and immerse themselves in the virtual world of Los Santos. One of the best tools available for creating stunning cinematics within the game is the Scene Director Mod. In this tutorial, we will guide you through the process of using the Scene Director Mod in combination with the Rockstar Editor to craft cinematic masterpieces.
Setting Up the Scene Director Mod
To start using the Scene Director Mod in GTA V, you will first need to download and install the mod from a reputable source. Make sure to follow the installation instructions carefully to avoid any issues. Once the mod is properly installed, launch the game and enter Director Mode to access the Scene Director tool. This tool allows you to place actors, vehicles, objects, and props in the game world to create your cinematic scenes.
Creating Cinematics with the Scene Director Mod
Now that you have the Scene Director Mod installed and ready to use, it’s time to start creating your cinematic masterpiece. Start by selecting the location where you want to shoot your scene and place the necessary elements, such as actors and vehicles, using the Scene Director tool. You can adjust the camera angles, lighting, and other settings to capture the perfect shot.
Enhancing Your Cinematics with the Rockstar Editor
After you have captured your cinematic scenes using the Scene Director Mod, you can further enhance them using the Rockstar Editor. The Rockstar Editor allows you to edit your footage, add visual effects, music, and create seamless transitions between different shots. Experiment with different editing techniques to make your cinematics stand out.
Sharing Your Cinematics with the World
Once you have completed your cinematic masterpiece using the Scene Director Mod and Rockstar Editor, it’s time to share it with the world. You can export your footage from the Rockstar Editor and upload it to platforms like YouTube, where you can showcase your creativity and talent to a broader audience. Don’t forget to add tags and descriptions to optimize your video for search engines.
Conclusion
Using the Scene Director Mod in combination with the Rockstar Editor opens up a world of possibilities for creating stunning cinematics in GTA V. Experiment with different scenes, camera angles, and editing techniques to unleash your creativity and produce cinematic masterpieces that will leave viewers in awe. Follow this tutorial and start creating your epic cinematic adventures in the world of GTA V.
Introduction to Scene Director Mod
Scene Director Mod is a powerful tool that allows players to create cinematic clips in GTA V using the Rockstar Editor. By using this mod, players can manipulate the camera, actors, and vehicles in the game to create stunning cinematic sequences. Whether you want to create a simple driving scene or an action-packed shootout, Scene Director Mod gives you the tools to bring your vision to life.
How to Use Scene Director Mod
Using Scene Director Mod is relatively straightforward, but it does require some basic knowledge of the Rockstar Editor. To start, players need to download and install the mod from a reputable source. Once installed, players can access the mod in-game by pressing a designated hotkey. From there, players can manipulate the camera angle, spawn actors and vehicles, and even adjust the weather and time of day to create the perfect cinematic atmosphere.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Scene Director Mod is a fantastic tool for players looking to create cinematic clips in GTA V. By following this tutorial and familiarizing yourself with the Rockstar Editor, you can unleash your creativity and create stunning cinematic sequences that rival those seen in Hollywood blockbusters. So grab your camera, set the scene, and let the magic of Scene Director Mod transport you into the world of cinematic storytelling in GTA V.
Source: Youtube Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hryP_kmpjPg of Channel whanowa.