Hello there guys and girls, today I want to share 13 more secrets about machinima production with you. Some of them apply to consoles as well, so stick around. You can skip to any tip by selecting a chapter in the timeline or the video description. Down there you will also find the links to all the tools I’m using to create my content. If you want to support my work, please consider checking out my Patreon page for some neat benefits.
So here we go: 13 more machinima secrets nobody tells you about because they are just selfish.
01. Invisible Objects as Cover
For starters, here’s one for all you action lovers out there. If you want your characters to run to cover at a certain spot, you can often just press Q on your keyboard and they will react accordingly. However, in some spots on the map this just won’t work for whatever reason. Sometimes it works when you play the actor yourself, but not within a task sequence, like you can see here.
Or you would like to make your character crouch behind cover instead of standing up. In such situations you can use invisible objects that your character can take cover behind. I have identified a couple of useful objects for that. The sandblock is a nice and compact type of cover, then you got the wall fragment for longer distances and a regular door for taking cover while standing. Let’s start with the first example.
Your character wants to take cover behind a tree, but crouching instead of standing. So you just place the sandblock inside the tree like this and can test taking cover there. If it doesn’t work, try deactivating the collision on the tree. Et voilá. Now just make the sandblock invisible.
The next example is taking cover behind cars. Normally you can do this cover transition which looks nice. But if you just want your characters to keep walking, you can pick the wall here and place it like this. Let’s test it. Very cool! The best part is that you can just place the invisible wall anywhere to give your actor a cool tactical crouched walk without looking for animations. By angling the walls you can make an actual path the actor will follow.
02. Soloing Footsteps Track
One of the things that annoy me the most in post production is placing sound effects for footsteps correctly. So if you’re like me and delete all the audio from GTA V to create your own soundscapes, I’ve got a simple trick for you that makes this much easier: Create two or three dedicated audio tracks only for footsteps and then solo these tracks. This will mute all other SFX and music and let you focus on syncing up the audio with the video, instead of listening through all other sounds.
Usually I keep this very tedious task for the end of the sound design phase, but you can also do it after placing the music and dialogue audio, because those two are so important to the timing of your edit. But the footsteps are also like an invisible rhythm to your shots.
So while editing you need to watch out for the feet of your characters. If you cut away while they are moving their right leg forward you should let them finish that step in the next shot, right in time with the walking pace of the character.
03. Use Weather Indoors
The next trick is probably not the most intuitive thing to do. You all know that Menyoo and Simple Trainer allow you to change the weather which massively affects the lighting conditions for your scenes that are filmed outside. But did you know that this can also affect how the lighting looks indoors? Yes, just experiment a little and see how it affects different locations. Of course it won’t rain inside, but…oh well, and don’t forget to combine the different weather settings with different vision hax. Plus: In Rockstar Editor you can easily just increase the brightness of your clips which has yielded great results for me in the past.
04. Decorate Existing Interiors
I am not sure if I’ve talked about this in another video before, as I’ve made an insane amount of tutorial content so far. But one thing I really recommend to you is to fill the existing maps in GTA V with a little more life. When you spawn into, say, an apartment interior from the online mode, it feels like a blank canvas. An apartment of somebody who only goes there to sleep. Of course, if your character is like Patrick Bateman, the clean and lifeless apartment is perfectly fine as is.
Luckily, GTA V offers a wide variety of decorative items to fill these places with life. Just be creative with keywords when searching for objects. Decorating existing places is much faster than building a map from scratch, like I also sometimes do with my virtual office here. Still it will make your movies more convincing. Because all of that tells a story about your character. Are they a little messy or chaotic? Do they like to cook a lot? Did they have a party last night? What hobbies do they have? Do they need to poop all the time? Did someone get laid? Think about who you want to portray here.
05. Remove Unwanted Objects with OpenIV
Oftentimes certain objects in GTA V are spawned by default in the map. Sometimes you don’t want that shyte in your video. So you just whip out the ole spooner crosshairs and delete all that junk, right? But in Rockstar Editor you will notice that they have all returned. But don’t worry, you don’t even have to re-shoot the clips you have already recorded!
To fix this issue, you first need to write down or screenshot the name of the object that you want gone. Then you close the game and start OpenIV, our trusty modding suite. You can then search for that particular object in the game folder – keep your eyes open for the YDR file of the object and double click that entry.
Nextly, uh, activate edit mode and copy the RPF archive to your mods folder to not destroy the original game files. Then you can just rename the YDR from the RPF archive. I suggest using a keyword you can easily filter by like “DEACTIVATED”. When you boot up the game and go straight to the rockstar editor you will see that even though it is the same clip, the unwanted object is gone. All instances of it, mind you. So this also means you cannot spawn that object anymore.
To get the object back you can just rename the object back or delete the RPF archive that you copied to your mods folder. That way GTA V will not use that one, but the original RPF archive in the main game directory.
06. Rotating Lights (emergency red)
In the task sequence tutorial I’ve shown you how to make objects rotate with the task “snap to rotation”. There are rotating lights in Scene Director, too, but from my experience they sometimes glitch out or become invisible from certain camera angles – which are usually your favourite angles that become unusable then.
Also you cannot save the stage lights as a part of your Menyoo map or easily change the lights position after creating it. Luckily, Menyoo PC also has a solution for that. If you spawn this particular light you will also get a nice and dangerous red glow. By using the task “snap to rotation” once again you can make the light spin around itself, you can determine the speed and direction with these values here. If you want you can even make the object itself invisible by setting the opacity to 1. This will keep the light intact but make the lamp that emits it transparent.
The next step is to position the light correctly. If you need more than one of those alarm lamps, just copy the object and then move it around and see where the light bounces nicely off the walls. You can also make lights blink with a task sequence. This alternative air light has a change opacity task which sets it to level 1, then half a second of nothing, then the opacity goes to level zero, then half a second of nothing. This loops indefinitely if you start the sequence. By changing the values of the nothing task you can determine how fast the light flickers. Then you move it around to the position you like.
07. Stylish Drifting
I think we can all agree that awesome driving scenes make action machinima a lot better. But sometimes driving the cars like a true stuntman can be hard. That’s why I want to show you a few cool tricks you can do on the fly without having to change the handling data of each individual car or installing additional drifting mods.
First of all there are some vehicle modifiers in Menyoo you can use. Increasing acceleration and braking to 10ish and 15 ish makes driving a lot more fun in my opinion. Then I would argue that drifting around small 90 degree corners is not that hard to do. But going sideways on a longer curve is often impossible with the car physics in GTA V because the vehicles stabilize so quickly. And here’s where the feature “slidy tires” comes in handy. I believe it is just meant to be fun, but it can actually be useful for machinima.
With some practice it will allow you to drift for extended periods of time or slide more even at lower vehicle speeds, which can also be useful because it is easier to film the cars in Rockstar Editor when they are not going super fast.
In the background footage of this you can see me activate and deactivate the slidy tires over and over again, kinda like an additional parking brake. As soon as I turn it off, the car has enough grip again and the drifting ends. This is how you can control even longer drifts easily.
What makes this feature easier to understand is that once you activate it, your car will proceed to travel in a straight line and barely be able to steer. This is why before activating the slidy tires you have to turn just a little bit and hit the handbrake to turn the car sideways into the curve. I promise, once you get the hang of it, that’s a ton of fun. Like your mom.
08. Burst Tires with Simple Trainer
Here’s a neat little trick with one of my favorite tools that I have been using since my first machinima in GTA IV. Simple Trainer has some features that Menyoo PC is lacking, but which can be useful for machinima – even if the UI of this tool is not very user friendly. If you go to the vehicle options and then into the tyre menu, you can easily burst any of your tires while driving. This is practical for scenes where a character shoots at the wheels and the rubber just pops, just like that one night when my parents … uh nevermind. The nice thing about this is that you can time it perfectly with other events in the scene instead of relying on coincidence.
The not so nice thing is that this feature might not work with non-standard vehicles in the game. Sadly. I would have loved to see one of these big wheels pop.
09. Locking and Unlocking Doors
When you want to use a certain location in GTA V’s map you may find some doors that can’t be opened by your character. Luckily, there is a very easy solution for this, which I found out about when working on “Red Roses”, in which this location was featured. Just start Menyoo’s spooner mode, right click the door in question and set it from frozen to dynamic. Now you should be able to open it normally.
As you can see, most doors in the game close automatically after some time – which is an effect you might not want in a movie. In that case just push the door open and then quickly freeze the door again with the spooner mode. That way it will remain open as long as you want.
10. Dynamic Doors
A related issue occurs when you are using doors in your own Menyoo maps. I first encountered this back in 2017 when working on this little shack for the video “A Rich Man’s Pleasure”, with this particular door. While building the map you can set a door to dynamic, however, upon reloading the map later, it might just fall through the ground.
That’s super annoying because it means you have to save the doors as frozen in place and make them dynamic individually every time you reload the map. But I’ve found a way to work around this: Set the door to be frozen in place first. Then go to task sequences and add the task “freeze in place” with the setting “unfreeze”. Then you add a task called “end sequence”, which does what it says it does.
Now you can go back to the saved map and overwrite it. If this option is activated, the door will start its task sequence directly after loading the map. To demonstrate, I’ll delete the map again and load it anew. Moment of truth: Now I can just walk through the door normally.
Pro tip: If you wanna use multiple doors in your map, just do the task sequence for one door and then copy it, the task sequence will also be transferred and you don’t have to do it again.
11. Keep the Helmet in a Car
Let’s say you want to film a racing scene. But an actual race where the drivers are protected by helmets. With story characters like Mike, Frank and Trevor it shouldn’t be a problem, but GTA V will usually just make the helmet disappear once you enter a car with a multiplayer model. But there are simple ways to retrieve the helmet or equip another one. Just get in the car first and then open Menyoo’s “Player Options | Wardrobe | Accessories | Hats”.
Now you can pick and choose any headgear you like. But beware, when you get out and back in the helmet will vanish again. For a permanent solution you would have to punch the helmet off your actor’s face and attach it to his or her head with Menyoo. It is easier if you reset the rotation of the object before attaching it, but still tedious to do. If your character has a big hairdo, you might have to change that to “bald” to avoid glitching. Also don’t forget to deactivate the collision on the helmet when you’re done placing it, otherwise there will be horrible glitches once you get into the vehicle.
With this method any helmet or hat will remain no matter what – this could be useful if you do not want to make a cut between getting into the car with the helmet on and then actually sitting in the car. Be aware that this solution is not super permanent when you save it to your Menyoo map, because any headgear will just be saved as “physics hat2” or something. Thereby the first workaround I’ve shown you is much faster.
12. Spooner File Management
Here’s another boring secret for every artist who likes things in orderly fashion. Once again it revolves around the maps you’ve built in Menyoo. I tend to build tons of different maps for each video and at some point I lost track of which is which, because Menyoo sorts them alphabetically here.
To make this easier, you should just think of a short abbreviation to put at the start of each file name, to associate the map with the project you are working on. For “SCP: The Corridor” I used the abbreviation H21 for “Halloween 2021” because that was the working title from the start. Then underscore and whatever name you want to give that map. To structure it further I then wrote “corridor” or “garagelab” and then another indicator for the version or the function of the particular fork of the map. Like “garagelab_alldead”.
This saves you a lot of searching around for the right map, because loading them takes a while each time.
13. Take Notes
One more thing before I go…this is something I should have found out about a lot earlier. In Menyoo’s object spooner you can write down notes for each of your saved maps. Why is that helpful, you ask? Well. Most of the time you will record scenes in multiple sessions, meaning you have to reset some variables like time of day, weather and vision hax to get the same visual style you had when working on the scene the day before. This can be hard to remember, especially when certain effects require a special combination of these variables.
Of course you could also write it down in a notebook, but this is much easier. Let’s take an example from my video “The Corridor” here. As an example, you could write down: Time of day 20:30 o’clock which is 9;30 PM. Vision Hax: nervousRON_fog at 3.00 intensity weather: clear And then you could write down some instructions for what the map is for, especially when working with many variations of the same base map. For instance: This map has small candles on top of the walls with task sequences that move the walls around. Also you must teleport to the morgue before loading the map so that the props in that one room load correctly.
Let me demonstrate how that looks when you reload the placements. As you can see all your notes appear in the lower left corner now, which means you got it all in one place and don’t have to go searching for the right page in your notebook.
So, yeah. That’s about it for this tutorial. I hope you’ve enjoyed it, if you want more helpful stuff and direct contact with me on Discord, join my Patreon family at patreon.com/whanowa. I am grateful for any support because YouTube doesn’t pay well and even demonetizes videos by claiming I stole music which I did not. Thank you for watching and stay tuned, whanowa over.
How to Drift Better in GTA V: 13 Machinima Secrets Revealed
In the world of GTA V, mastering the art of drifting is essential for pulling off epic stunts and achieving the highest scores. Whether you’re a seasoned player or a novice looking to improve your skills, this tutorial will provide you with 13 secrets to help you drift like a pro.
1. Choose the Right Car
When it comes to drifting in GTA V, the type of vehicle you choose can make all the difference. Opt for a car with good handling and acceleration, such as the Elegy RH8 or Banshee 900R, to maximize your drifting potential.
2. Practice Makes Perfect
Like any skill, drifting requires practice. Spend time honing your drifting skills in the game to improve your technique and timing. The more you practice, the better you’ll become at executing flawless drifts.
3. Master the Handbrake
One of the keys to successful drifting in GTA V is mastering the handbrake. Use the handbrake in combination with steering to initiate and maintain drifts around corners. Practice using the handbrake in different situations to become more comfortable with its mechanics.
4. Utilize the E-Brake
In addition to the handbrake, the E-brake can be a valuable tool for drifting in GTA V. Experiment with using the E-brake in conjunction with the handbrake to perform more advanced drifting maneuvers and achieve tighter drifts.
5. Find the Perfect Drift Angle
Achieving the perfect drift angle is crucial for maintaining control and speed while drifting. Experiment with different angles and steering techniques to find the sweet spot that allows you to glide seamlessly around corners with precision.
6. Control Your Speed
To drift effectively, it’s important to control your speed throughout the maneuver. Maintain a balance between speed and control to avoid spinning out or losing traction during drifts. Practice modulating your throttle to achieve the desired speed for each drift.
7. Upgrade Your Suspension
Upgrading your car’s suspension can significantly improve its drifting capabilities. Invest in suspension upgrades to enhance your vehicle’s handling and stability, making it easier to execute smooth and controlled drifts.
8. Customize Your Controls
Customizing your control settings in GTA V can help you optimize your drifting performance. Experiment with different control configurations to find the setup that works best for you and allows you to execute drifts with ease.
9. Study Machinima Techniques
Machinima techniques can be a valuable resource for improving your drifting skills in GTA V. Watch tutorials and videos to learn new tricks and strategies for mastering complex drift maneuvers and achieving higher scores in the game.
10. Join Drifting Communities
Joining drifting communities and forums can provide you with invaluable tips and advice from experienced players. Engage with other drifters to share strategies, collaborate on projects, and learn from one another to enhance your drifting abilities.
11. Experiment with Different Drift Styles
There are various drift styles you can experiment with in GTA V, such as power slides, feint drifts, and clutch kicks. Try out different techniques to discover which style suits your gameplay style and preferences, and practice executing them to perfection.
12. Create Epic Machinima Moments
Utilize the tools and features available in GTA V to create epic machinima moments that showcase your drifting skills in action. Experiment with camera angles, editing techniques, and special effects to capture and enhance your most impressive drifts for sharing with the gaming community.
13. Never Stop Learning
Continuous learning and improvement are essential for mastering the art of drifting in GTA V. Stay curious, seek out new resources, and never stop honing your skills to become a drifting legend in the world of Grand Theft Auto.
With these 13 secrets revealed, you now have the knowledge and tools to drift better in GTA V like never before. Practice, experiment, and push your limits to become a true drifting master in the game. Happy drifting!
Mastering the Art of Drifting in GTA V
Drifting in GTA V can be a challenging but rewarding experience for players looking to add some style to their driving skills. To better drift in the game, it’s important to choose the right vehicle with good handling and control. Practice makes perfect, so spend some time honing your drifting skills in different locations around Los Santos. Additionally, modifying your vehicle with upgrades such as suspension and tires can significantly improve drifting performance. Remember to also adjust your driving technique by feathering the throttle and using the handbrake to initiate and maintain drifts.
Unlocking the Secrets of Machinima in GTA V
Creating stunning machinima in GTA V requires a combination of creativity and technical know-how. To improve your machinima skills, experiment with different camera angles, lighting effects, and editing techniques. Using mods and custom scripts can also enhance the visual quality of your machinima projects. Utilize in-game assets and settings to create unique and engaging storytelling elements in your videos. Don’t be afraid to push the boundaries of traditional machinima filmmaking by incorporating your own creative flair and style into your projects.
Conclusion: Elevate Your GTA V Experience with Better Drifting and Machinima Secrets
In conclusion, mastering the art of drifting in GTA V and unlocking the secrets of machinima can greatly enhance your gameplay and creative endeavors in the game. By following the tips and techniques outlined in this article, players can take their driving skills and filmmaking projects to the next level. Whether you’re looking to showcase your drifting prowess on the streets of Los Santos or create cinematic masterpieces through machinima, there are endless possibilities to explore in GTA V.
Source: Youtube Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wR-SXS3vpWE of Channel whanowa.