Gaming references

I remember back when the original Red Dead Redemption released, I had plans. Here was a big open world game set in the Old West, with all sorts of settings and characters, and more than that a possible answer to a problem we were already experiencing: I’d want a certain angle for some panel and Dawn would request references to base a drawing from, and what I thought would be a simple image search would become a nightmare. For crissake was there no photo in creation of someone shooting a rifle that way? But now I could set my own angles, take a screenshot, and blammo! References!

Now mind you I quite enjoyed the game as well, which was probably a good thing since those other plans ended up shelved due to things like transferring a screenshot from my Xbox to my PC being more complicated than I anticipated, up to and including running into some godawful version of copyright scrambling. I’m sure professional or even enthusiastic amateur gamers had their ways to do it even back in those ancient days of 2010, but between that and not really having good free camera options I could figure out, I gave up. Dawn eventually got some posing software on the (relative) cheap and we accumulated a collection of realistic enough toy and Airsoft firearms to supplement that with live pictures when we could.

But fast forward to recently when I once again found myself stymied. I wanted two Huachucas firing their rifles, shooting up at Suzie, and had a clear image in my head of how I hoped it would look. But that top down angle… Dawn needed some help. She could try mocking it up in her 3-D program but we’re getting close to SDCC and time is getting crunchy. And of course, Google imaging failed at the time, even though now it’s mocking me just now by returning at least one image that would have been close enough on what I swear is the exact same search terms.

Sigh.

Anyhow, frustrated, I fired up Fallout 4 on my PC to clear my head with some mutant shooting, and had to use a console command for something, and it suddenly hit me that Fallout 4 has a free camera feature and AI pausing features and setting-time-of-day features, etc. etc., and taking a screenshot through Steam is as simple as hitting F12. Oh and I could modify the look of my character on the fly to approximate the image(s) in my head.

It still wasn’t entirely simple since I had to take two separate screenshots at as similar an angle as possible (something that at least the vanilla Fallout engine doesn’t make easy as far as I know) and composite together a reference in Photoshop, but at the end, an hour or so’s work got me something usable. Not something I’d want to be doing on a regular basis, but 2010 Clint is no doubt decidedly jealous.