SovietWomble - Valheim Bullshittery - Update #8 - Behind the scenes

Good evening everyone. I hope you're all doing well. And a special welcome to the new Patron/Twitch subscribers after the last video drop. Thank you sincerely for doing that. It's extremely kind of you.

At the end of last week I was finally able to upload Valheim bullshittery to Youtube. A week ish prior there was a Patreon/Twitch subscriber only pre-release version. Many of you spotted lots of errors.  Thank you for doing so. Your eyes were much fresher than mine. Quality assurance is a team effort :)

Before I move onto the next thing (and after a short break) please allow me to do a project retrospective/behind the scenes post. Explain some of the editing decisions made and generally show-off like a big fat show-off-person.

The whole project ended up being 36 minutes and 13 seconds long. This was divided up into about 75-80 "sequences" in Adobe Premiere. Represented by these green, pink and blue boxes:

But the real story is buried within those sequences.

As each one is made up of multiple Adobe After Effects compositions. And due to Adobe rendering bug, I've gotten into the habit of pre-rendering those compositions as lossless, extremely large .mp4 files and storing them in one folder.

This also lets me verify them before committing to a max quality render.

The final project has 362 of these lossless files, each one between 5 to 20 seconds long. So 362 scenes to process. Bit of a whopper.

This is what they look like in the folder - 1.23 terabyte of video data.

Soon these will all be deleted to make space for the next project. Once I'm confident that the existing video is staying up.

Then Valheim bullshittery master will be carefully saved, for its eventual retrieval for part 2 "The village of Knobgard". To be continued:

On this video retrospective.

Structurally, I made the decision to cluster the individual highlights by the biome. My goal was to avoid confusing the viewer by having the characters clothing and environment change drastically scene to scene.

That of course presented it's own problems. As some biomes were over represented and some severely under represented.

The Meadows, for example, takes up most of the first 8 minutes. And I believe that's only the opening 2 streams out of 30+.

The Mountains biome however only has about 2-3 highlights of any worth.

The Mistlands had a vast amount of footage. Since we were working around people being offline due to IRL commitments. But had very few funny highlights of value.

Alas, I had to make do with what I had.

One of the things I had to negotiate was the ludicrously low frame rate for any of the scenes that took place in the middle of the village. Unfortunately as time went on, the contrast between the village and the rest of the game looked stark.

Therefore in some small opportunities, I took a moment to insert a few cheeky little "reshoots".

Since I had the original save file, run locally on my PC, it was a fairly simple affair to use the "devcommand true" function whilst standing in, or near, the original village:

Then a "spawn" function to quickly give my character anything from the original stream.

And then mimic the actions of that original scene, with a much better frame rate.

My rational here was the amount of jitter in the text would likely be highly distracting for new viewers.  And it made a small number of scenes stand out from the nominal 60 frames per second render. So provided I could do it without anybody noticing, and provided the scene in question only featured me, I figured I'd give it a shot.

I think there were about five in total.

1.) In this sequence, the run to the new workbench was replaced with an insert where I ran around the corner instead of jumping down the lag stairs.

2.) In this shot, the run to the portal for the Mistlands was slowed down. With no awkward jumping.

(Annoyingly doing this comparison I can spot a mistake - the Lulu camera layer gets disabled at the midpoint. Dammit!!)

3.) In the very first shot of mounted Fred and Craig, I simply shuffled slower and didn't open the UI or pan the camera up. Meaning Duckslayer's text was easier to read.

4.) And in this scene, I took a moment to simply sit still on a stool, rather than have my mouse swing left, then right, then up and down, multiple times.

5.)  And in this one, god the original footage was a nightmare. Uneven terrain, darkness, many trees for multiple hours of masking work. So I moved the character about 200m to the left to find a clearing and ran in a straight line.

And of course, there were numerous situations where I simply had no choice but to keep the original low-frame rate footage. Where my messing with it would have been too obvious.

Meaning I often simply had no good options. There could be no text. Because the text was too jittery at 5-6 frames per second.

Another thing that caused a problem during production was how "dumb" the tracking often was. Or rather, After Effects will track whatever you tell it to track. But that's rarely the "ideal" thing. And it's difficult to explain to a computer what that is, without potentially juggling between 4-5 anchor points.

This sort of thing becomes obvious in quality assurance.

The text is somewhere on the screen, but your human brain - or at least my human brain - is looking somewhere else. Towards movement. Or obvious faces. Or the thing that's clearly the actual joke.

Take this scene for example. The red square is my rework. The text would nominally be tracked on the "Troll" title and health bar. But that's not at all where the animation is going.

And here, the text was originally above my head. But the Lox on the screen is obviously the point of focus. So the text was redone in QA to follow the Lox. Which goes off screen and becomes heavily obscured.

I encountered some other problems with eyeline.

In the below scene I was showing many of the boss designs from Valheim. Giving each one 2-3 seconds of screen time.

But some of the Forsaken designs are exceptionally "busy". And it's hard to even parse what you're looking at on a glance.

Therefore decided to simplify Eikthyr's antlers so it was less of a crazy mess all over the text. To at least give the viewer a chance to comprehend that there's writing there amongst that morass of antlers.

Occasionally during the editing, just like the troll head thing, I had to step in and revise the tracking point until it "seemed right" to my mind. Rather than gun for the thing that was easiest to track, I would just trust my gut.

Here for example, the text isn't tracking one thing in particular. I've just tried to make it float in the empty space roughly between everybody. Just by hand and by eye.

The scenes with lots of text simultaneously were often fairly simple and quick however, usually because I was tracking the health bars.

Automated tracking could handle that in mere minutes. With an easily duplicated text layer split between everybody.

Note the red squares here. And in all of the "toast" scenes. These were all handled by After Effects pretty effortlessly.

The same with the bonemass cleave. Everyone who was hit simply had their name plate tracked.

In this scene, I used a Shape tool to draw a bendy line. And stretched it up the side of the serpents body. The text can be made to follow the shape. And I presume it's how lots of companies do those fancy animated logos.

The character spacing can also be keyframed.

And that's how I achieved the serpent text thing. I just squashed the shape down and adjusted the vertical spacing. Easy peasy.

The SABER effect makes a return. An often used staple now. It can make text seem like it's on fire, or wreathed in lightning, etc. You set the effect up as you please and wrap it around some text as the "core".

I had a bit of sneaky fun with this next scene.

I recognised during the playthrough that the men "dancing for the onions" would be funnier if there was a contrasting shot of what Messy and Craft were often talking about in the background - making preparatory buff foods.

But of course, silly me, I never actually filmed that. The playthrough ended before I remembered.

And whilst I could probably have invited Messy and Craft onto a small local server, I discovered that Valheim has a free flying spectator camera. Oh goody!

Therefore all I needed to do was don a cloak. One that would hide my features.

Film from a distance with a fixed angle.

Then film another bit of footage in which I walk up to the stove, also wearing precisely what messy was wearing at the time. Though I did put my hair into a ponytail.

Film that from a similar angle.

Then...WITNESS MY CHEAP CHICANERY!!!

Welcome to this circle of hell. Where the men are Soviet.

But also the women are Soviet. Just in drag.

The Beech tree clip at the start was a short clip. But my-oh-my was it pain!!

Initially I'd put the text on Duck's head. But on reflection what was the point? The viewer focus is on the rolling tree anyway. And it was an opportunity to do something fancy in the opening few seconds to get attention to the video.

Have the text roll with the tree.

Automated tracking was completely out the window.

What I did instead was a series of different text layers. The first following the tree sideways as it fell. With a null on the trunk. Then it would rotate away and hide behind a mask on the floor.

Then each subsequent roll would be following its own separate Null object. An invisible square positioned roughly in the middle of the trunk and rolling on one axis.

The text then having its distance from the square adjusted to make it look like it was on the bark. The speed in which it's moving going a long way towards hiding the faults.

It did take quite a few attempts to get the overall motion right. But I think I got there in the end.

A major part of what I do consists of "masking", as you probably well know. The cutting out of shapes in the foreground to make it look like the text isn't simply on the screen, but is part of the scene.

Sometimes that's very simple. Such as the UI elements. Which often just needs to be masked one time and then copied from scene to scene.

Or on Yagluth, I decided to mask the orbs in the foreground. With their circular shape and highly feathered edge, this was all super simple and quick.

Other times however, the masking was a real headache. For a lot of Valheim's foreground elements are very bushy. Things get geometrically complicated pretty quickly

It was also in this project that I started to properly experiment with Rotobrush - one of the After Effects tools. It's a sort of automatic masking that lets you define foreground elements and mask them in an algorithmic fashion. And they've made humdrum about their recent 2026 version being AI powered.

The results were very...mixed.

Sometimes it worked perfectly on the first try.

But more often than not it it would get it utterly wrong. And the best result was a sort of combined approach. Where the automation could handle the simple things. But I'd need to add my own manual masking for anything complicated.

Once again, I do think Adobe software struggles with video game footage.

I also found myself a little disappointed with my work of the longboat rigging. For when it worked, it looked pretty neat.

But it was also often time consuming, being utterly out of the realms of automated anything, as After Effects became confused by the tiny 1-2px wide ropes. And when it was used, it often looked more like a graphical mistake in the text.

Meaning I often just fell back to doing the mast and the sails. Leading to a level of inconsistency that I'm not entirely happy with.

Modor's scenes were weird. I was repeatedly struggling to find some final configuration in the mountain scene. It went through about 4-5 different iterations. But I just couldn't get it looking right.

I attempted going with:

The text only on me.

The text on me and the guys.

A little monk "wololo" animation on Jinx.

Everyone having the annotation "cold" in blue. Like the "toast" scenes.

Eventually I put the text back on me. Doing a very simple shape layer with a bit of embossing effects to make it washed out/slightly reflective. And a few shape layers behind it, with a bit of warping, to look like little icicles.

For the Modor fight itself, I dialed that up heavily. "Freezing" the text in place as though hit by the ice attack.

A shape layer animated beneath the text to look like ice. An amplification of the emboss effect with a bit of warping.

The "stroke" (black outline) was a head scratcher. I ended up making a layer underneath as a stencil on a black background. Then as the ice hits, I fade it out to an identical white outline.

Then I used a mask over the ice breath to make it look like it's being engulfed by the cone of ice. All part of my gimmick.

On the ending of the video, I was rather hoping to do a little epilogue rather than simply fade to black. That was planned for a while, but required several little steps.

ZF Bavon recorded a series of little musical pieces. Which would let me time the transitions and also not have the video stung by Youtube's content ID system. I was initially planning to use a piece of the Song of Gabriel from Little Big Adventure. But didn't really want the sound of children laughing.

After that I went into Valheim and recorded little snippets of beauty shots with the free cam.

I had to take the following steps:

Smash all of the torches and sconces to make it look as though the village had been unoccupied for a few days.

In their place I often put little wisp lights for the ambience.

I had to go and clean up all of the random drops and sparkling elements with the admin "removedrops" command.

Play with the time of day settings to get the moon in the right position.

Replace some of the armour racks.

But mechanically speaking the epilogue was pretty straightforward. Premiere has plenty of little crossfade/cross dissolve effects. No need for After Effects. And there we go. A nice little fade out to some music/scenery. A glass raised to a journey completed.

So right now, particularly for the new Patrons/Twitch subscribers who are not familiar with my process, I plan to take a bit of time off.

There's a whole bunch of house repairs I need to look into also. But after such a behemoth of a project, I plan to unwind for a bit.

I usually find that the best way is to alternate between Patreon/Twitch subscriber polls for a video, then my personal choice. So the next video shall be my personal choice :)

Thank you all for being here folks. Your patronage is extremely appreciated. You've all been very kind to me.