8-12 : Preparing for the raid

These scenes use the same compositing techniques as scenes 4-5, with a different sepia tint and other paramaters adjusted to take into account the lighting.

Scene 8

In the original opening, many soldiers are standing in a yard. It did not make sense in Tarkov in which there are only small squads of soldiers (5 players max.). I simply took some footage of the reserve map with the freecam and that was it. It’s lazy, but it fits well !

Scene 9

In the original scene, the soldiers are taking their iconic salute pose. This would not work in Tarkov, so I replaced it by a scene of a character loading his weapon.

I used Feldmütze’s AK reload tutorial as a reference for the under-handed reload technique. In game, this technique is only used for mastery level 3 (refer to Not Sure’s video to see a showcase).

The characters are lit from behind by a sun light source. In front of them, an emissive mesh allows to brighten the shadows.

I didn’t disable the weapon parenting and it did weird stuff with the secondary characters’ arms. Hopefully, this was off-screen, so I didn’t have to fix it !

Scene 1O

This scene uses the same setup with additional characters, and follows directly the previous one : after loading his weapon, the character lowers his Altyn face shield.

To animate this, I added a Child of bone constraint to the left hand. This way, the hand moves with the face shield being lowered, and then it can move on its own.

Scene 11

In this scene, the characters are raising their weapons. To make the scene more visually interesting, I added a Sun rays effect in compositing, combined with a specific lighting setup : I parented an area light source to each of the characters’ weapons. For each character, the intensity of this light starts at 0 and increases as they raise their gun, which makes the sun rays appear as the scene plays.

Scene 12

The characters are ready and finally start walking towards their enemy. Except animating a character walking a is pain, five at a time even more so ! The scene is short, so even if I’m not too satisfied with the result, it still looks convincing in the final video. Don’t look at it for too long, though.

To animate this, I parented each weapon to their respective character’s chest bone, so that they would move at the same time. Here is the process I used to animate the walk :

• Create the starting keyframe.
• At the end keyframe, move the torso bone (big cube) forward : this makes the entire character move, except his feet. Since the hands are parented to the weapon, which is parented the the chest, they move too. Move one foot forward, create a keyframe for the other so that it does not move.
• Place the cursor at the middle point between the two keyframes, to add detail to the animation.
• Raise the moving foot and rotate it so that it faces the ground.
• Raise the torso so that the static leg is stretched. Rotate it so that the moving leg is a bit higher and in front of the other.

I think this imperfect method was good enough for this scene. The other possible method would be a walk cycle, but I have not learnt to do that yet…

The USEC on the left uses a pistol instead of his sniper rifle, as originally I wanted this scene to take place in the Factory. I ended up changing for the Reserve because it was easier to light, and the ground was clean and flat.

The scene setup is similar to the previous scenes, except the background is a video and the camera was placed through motion tracking, just like in scene 3. An additional area light was placed just behind the characters so that the sun rays would be more visible.