Uploaded October 2019 | Updated September 2026, 2 hours ago
This video has been ripped from either the "Character Design & Integration with HL2" DVD or the "3D Content Creation" DVD, both by Neosis Interactive.
They were originally released around 2006 and the Neosis Ineractive no longer seems to be active.
There are other Neosis Interactive videos are online, so I decided to upload these.
I don't know how relevant they will still be, but somebody might find them useful.
Rob Martins ripped the files and organised them. I can't thank him enough for his hard work. His adapted notes are at the bottom.
Feel free to post comments and questions, but know that I am NOT able or qualified to answer them. Hopefully, another viewer will be able to.
NEOSIS PLAYLISTS
There are 4 playlists related to 2 DVDs, 2 in English and 2 in Spanish.
You can watch them in any order, but if you are new to this aspect of modding, it would probably be best to watch them in the correct order.
In the "Character Design & Integration with HL2" DVD there is some reference to the 3D Content Creation DVD. I do not know whether this means you must have completed that course first.
Character Design & Integration with HL2 - English:
youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqbW6AL5XR4piivv2RRDG-Z89R8_C9hdq
3D Content Creation - English:
youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqbW6AL5XR4rGeKiwTCWgNmwM17b1Sfmm
Character Design & Integration with HL2 - Spanish:
youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqbW6AL5XR4poU_q_mUPl892MI-9xrvRL
3D Content Creation - Spanish:
youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqbW6AL5XR4r-vcK1R_OzmuJoFbBXZpr8
NAMING
-I've named the files after their respective menu entries, preserving
spelling, capitalization, and punctuation to the best of my ability.
-First off, there are duplicate names in some cases (a video called
Getting Started is on both discs, and the HL2 disc's Rigging video has
the same name in both English and Spanish).
TECHNICAL INFO
-I opted to do a simple window capture by way of OBS for this project.
The Quicktime .movs are simply stored on the discs, and are visible if
you enable display of hidden files in your OS, but the video tracks
inside them are encrypted. A sufficiently knowledgeable and motivated
individual could conceivably reverse engineer the decryption key, but
that's beyond my skill level. In addition, the helpful text overlays
seen periodically throughout the presentations aren't baked into the
video, but instead overlaid by the player software on the fly. Even if
one could directly access the video tracks, you'd lose the onscreen
instructions, so screen recording seemed like my best bet.
-The Macromedia Projector player, or the Director software that
produced these presentations, is not very good. From
researching the issue, I've seen suggested on ancient message board
threads that it's the combination of Quicktime and onscreen images
that causes the unpredictable, inconsistently reproducible gray
flashes and decoding errors that I had to try to fix. I
even tried running this software in a Windows XP virtual machine,
using Quicktime 6.1 like they ask for (i.e. a system representative of
what people would have been using in 2006 when these discs were
published), and still had the problem. I was able to work around the
issues for these recordings, so there shouldn't be any visible
glitches.
-The video resolution and aspect ratio vary. The
videos are all 4:3, but the screen captures were sometimes 4:3,
sometimes 5:4 pillarboxed to fit 4:3, in one case I even saw a 16:9
client area (that is, the part of a Windows window inside the
application, excluding the title bar) stretched to fit 4:3. I thought
about this a bit and decided to leave well enough alone. Since all the
different clips are in the same video they'd need to be stretched,
squashed, or padded with borders depending on the clip. Stretch or
squash would distort the content, which suggests padding would be the
best, but they already did that, so I left it alone. You may notice
the vertical black bars on either side of many videos, but on Youtube
the player background is black, so it should blend right in and be
unobjectionable.
-The audio isn't ideal. The quality varies between the two languages,
between discs, and between videos. The volume is inconsistent too;
I've increased the levels as much as I felt reasonable, but it can
still be quiet in some cases. I also noticed some sync issues here and
there, especially with the Spanish version of 3DCC.
HASHTAGS:
#SourceSDK
#NeosisInteractive
#3DContentCreation
This video has been ripped from either the "Character Design & Integration with HL2" DVD or the "3D Content Creation" DVD, both by Neosis Interactive.
They were originally released around 2006 and the Neosis Ineractive no longer seems to be active.
There are other Neosis Interactive videos are online, so I decided to upload these.
I don't know how relevant they will still be, but somebody might find them useful.
Rob Martins ripped the files and organised them. I can't thank him enough for his hard work. His adapted notes are at the bottom.
Feel free to post comments and questions, but know that I am NOT able or qualified to answer them. Hopefully, another viewer will be able to.
NEOSIS PLAYLISTS
There are 4 playlists related to 2 DVDs, 2 in English and 2 in Spanish.
You can watch them in any order, but if you are new to this aspect of modding, it would probably be best to watch them in the correct order.
In the "Character Design & Integration with HL2" DVD there is some reference to the 3D Content Creation DVD. I do not know whether this means you must have completed that course first.
Character Design & Integration with HL2 - English:
youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqbW6AL5XR4piivv2RRDG-Z89R8_C9hdq
3D Content Creation - English:
youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqbW6AL5XR4rGeKiwTCWgNmwM17b1Sfmm
Character Design & Integration with HL2 - Spanish:
youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqbW6AL5XR4poU_q_mUPl892MI-9xrvRL
3D Content Creation - Spanish:
youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqbW6AL5XR4r-vcK1R_OzmuJoFbBXZpr8
NAMING
-I've named the files after their respective menu entries, preserving
spelling, capitalization, and punctuation to the best of my ability.
-First off, there are duplicate names in some cases (a video called
Getting Started is on both discs, and the HL2 disc's Rigging video has
the same name in both English and Spanish).
TECHNICAL INFO
-I opted to do a simple window capture by way of OBS for this project.
The Quicktime .movs are simply stored on the discs, and are visible if
you enable display of hidden files in your OS, but the video tracks
inside them are encrypted. A sufficiently knowledgeable and motivated
individual could conceivably reverse engineer the decryption key, but
that's beyond my skill level. In addition, the helpful text overlays
seen periodically throughout the presentations aren't baked into the
video, but instead overlaid by the player software on the fly. Even if
one could directly access the video tracks, you'd lose the onscreen
instructions, so screen recording seemed like my best bet.
-The Macromedia Projector player, or the Director software that
produced these presentations, is not very good. From
researching the issue, I've seen suggested on ancient message board
threads that it's the combination of Quicktime and onscreen images
that causes the unpredictable, inconsistently reproducible gray
flashes and decoding errors that I had to try to fix. I
even tried running this software in a Windows XP virtual machine,
using Quicktime 6.1 like they ask for (i.e. a system representative of
what people would have been using in 2006 when these discs were
published), and still had the problem. I was able to work around the
issues for these recordings, so there shouldn't be any visible
glitches.
-The video resolution and aspect ratio vary. The
videos are all 4:3, but the screen captures were sometimes 4:3,
sometimes 5:4 pillarboxed to fit 4:3, in one case I even saw a 16:9
client area (that is, the part of a Windows window inside the
application, excluding the title bar) stretched to fit 4:3. I thought
about this a bit and decided to leave well enough alone. Since all the
different clips are in the same video they'd need to be stretched,
squashed, or padded with borders depending on the clip. Stretch or
squash would distort the content, which suggests padding would be the
best, but they already did that, so I left it alone. You may notice
the vertical black bars on either side of many videos, but on Youtube
the player background is black, so it should blend right in and be
unobjectionable.
-The audio isn't ideal. The quality varies between the two languages,
between discs, and between videos. The volume is inconsistent too;
I've increased the levels as much as I felt reasonable, but it can
still be quiet in some cases. I also noticed some sync issues here and
there, especially with the Spanish version of 3DCC.
HASHTAGS:
#SourceSDK
#NeosisInteractive
#3DContentCreation
