The GLaDOS Design You Don't Remember - Portal

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Hey everyone, the name's Ossy Flawol. GLaDOS. You know her, she's the primary antagonistic force of the Portal series and is one of the most compelling characters that Valve has ever made. She is sarcastic, has an iconic design, toys with the player, and has definitely awoken something within many people who have played the Portal games. It's truly no wonder why she's landed a place in the hearts of many Portal fans. Amongst those fans, you may hear a lot of debate about which design of GLaDOS is the better one, as she sports entirely unique designs between both Portal games. Some may prefer the classic original Portal 1 look of GLaDOS, while others will throw their support behind Portal 2 GLaDOS, with a lot of fans preferring her Portal 2 design for its expressiveness. However, the Portal 2 GLaDOS design is also incredibly controversial among fan circles. See, take a look at GLaDOS between the two games. She looks incredibly, radically different between these incarnations of her, and it's led to a lot of debate over how exactly she ended up this way. How exactly did GLaDOS, after being destroyed in Portal 1, go from her initial design to her new one? It's not like she got somehow repaired between both games. Well, there is an answer, funnily enough, and so many people have entirely forgotten that it even exists. In fact, this answer is presented to the player when they see GLaDOS for the first time in Portal 2. (Wheatley) Hello! (GLaDOS) Oh... it's you. This is an entirely unique GLaDOS design that dedicated fans have given the name "Wakeup GLaDOS", and it is my absolute favourite GLaDOS design. Now, from down below as the cutscene plays out, GLaDOS in this sequence looks a lot more like the Portal 2 design everyone knows she has, but that's the trick — she only looks different to the Portal 1 design from this perspective. When you enter the wrecked remains of her chamber, you can actually just... stick around and look at her destroyed remains spread across the room. If you ignore Wheatley being in your face, that is. Let's just get rid of him. (Wheatley yells) Anyways, if you inspect her design from here, she actually has a lot of design choices ripped directly from the first game's look. For example, these central pistons found on her Portal 1 design are actually translated into the Wakeup look. This wire arm on her left matches with the general look for her original design, however obviously destroyed. They even have this little dangly bit on the back of her Portal 1 model. You can actually see this specific part during her wakeup sequence, looking really loose, which is, honestly, super cool. Up top on her chassis, there's also this hoop-shaped component. This actually is a hole for her wiring to pass through on her Portal 1 model, however, Wakeup GLaDOS has lost all her wiring. I presume getting blown up with a few rockets would've probably incinerated those. I can already hear people riling up about aspects of the design. Yes, there are still some inconsistencies with this design. For example, her general white plating on the outside is different, she's got an entirely unique head, and is missing the faceplate on her eye. You get the gist. But, really, there's a very easy explanation for these. It's just that Portal 2 and Portal 1 happen to be in completely different art styles, and art styles can change a lot about how things look in a game. If you need an explanation, here's a simple one: Portal 1's artstyle is more grounded in Half-Life 2's look, while Portal 2 is kinda just... Team Fortress 2 with a bunch of grime slapped on top. Portal 2 is just inherently a slightly cartoonier look, and a lot of features of designs got redesigned to adapt for that. Practically all of her design changes with the wakeup design? They were done to make her a much more expressive character in the wakeup scene. In fact, making GLaDOS more expressive was a goal from the very beginning; just look at the Carcass GLaDOS animation tests. I don't think it's surprising to learn that this wakeup model was actually created first before the "Fixed GLaDOS" design you see later in the game. How do we know that for a fact? It's due to this model. This right here is a model called glados_wheatley.mdl, and look, it's the wakeup design! This was presumably a temporary model they made once they came up with the idea of Wheatley turning into the antagonist for the second half. This model has a fascinating little detail in that GLaDOS' head is still on the design, but rotated into the chassis itself, which is... kind of disturbing when you think about it. She's even missing her eye. The fact that they used the Wakeup design shows that the design everyone associated with Portal 2 GLaDOS came much later on in development, and on the topic of models, the Wakeup GLaDOS model actually holds a dark secret I haven't told you. See, have you ever wondered why you haven't seen SFM animators ever use this model? Well, I'll tell you right now, but I'll have to explain something to you about models. Character models in practically any engine have what is known as a reference pose. This is an incredibly basic pose for a model, and typically you can find these in A-pose or T-pose variants. This is done to help make animating the model much easier to do. The reference pose for Wakeup GLaDOS looks like this. looks like this. (glass shattering SFX) Also, I've been lying to you, she's just straight up not one model. she's just straight up not one model. (explosion SFX) Wakeup GLaDOS is actually composed of several models all being stitched together and animated together at the same time during that whole sequence, and I genuinely have zero explanation for... why did they do this? The developer commentary talks about how the model was animated with a mix of physics simulation and manual hand-made animation, with the simulation used for the dangly bits and the stuff she wrecks as she wakes up, while the handmade animations are for her actual movements. The model's animations were kind of rushed together for a press demo. They mention E3, but the model was seen in an earlier press demo, indicating it may have been used for that rather than simply just E3. It may be possible they refined the animations a little further for E3 instead. Wakeup GLaDOS in general shows many signs of being rushed together with a deadline. When they had to extend the wakeup sequence after E3 to add GLaDOS dropping the player into the incinerator, the rig for Wakeup GLaDOS was a huge mess and painful to work with. In fact, all the models that make up Wakeup GLaDOS are suffixed with "_temp", implying they planned to make a new model at some point, but sunk-cost fallacy meant they had to iterate on the temporary separated models. It's honestly a huge shame. This is one of the coolest GLaDOS designs out of the main three that exist in the Portal games, yet it's completely unusable because the model is in a horrible state. I would love to see if someone could tackle the Herculean task of taking the parts of Wakeup GLaDOS and making her actually usable. And, of course, it wouldn't be a Source engine video without talkin' 'bout some BETA. A portfolio by a Valve environment artist shows their work on Portal 2, which are actually earlier versions of the areas in the final game, and, wouldn't you know it? They worked on the near-final iteration of GLaDOS' room, and these screenshots feature the wakeup model in a much earlier state. This model seems so early, in fact, it's just pure flat colours. This lovely closeup shot of the early textures really emphasises it doesn't even have any baked ambient occlusion on it. You can actually see this peculiar red spot in the background of her model, and more interestingly, the same red colour is present where her eye would be. I don't think this is indicative of any possible design choices to make her eye red, though there are a few pre-release depictions of GLaDOS with a red eye, and honestly she doesn't look half bad with a red eye in this state — but the little red circle panel in the background is actually still red in the final model. Circling back around to the commentary node, they also mention an idea of GLaDOS originally being depicted as being curled up into a ring to disguise herself as the many discs she had on her generator. Interestingly, the Wakeup GLaDOS design actually seems to allow for this, as she would reasonably be able to fold up and have room to spare. There's even a few Carcass GLaDOS animation tests of her dropping from the ceiling to support the disguise idea. What I think, personally, is that this "Disc Disguise" form of GLaDOS wasn't ever actually animated with the wakeup design, but the model had been made with it in mind. It's likely, then, the concept for her reintroduction in Portal 2 changed before the model was finished, and they just continued using it for the press demo it had to be rushed together for, because it's still an awesome design. So, why exactly do I love this design so much? Well, Wakeup GLaDOS is a design with a lot of depth to it. It's the canonical transitionary point from her Portal 1 design to her rebuilt one, it has elements of how the Portal 1 design would be reinterpreted in the Portal 2 style, and it has a fascinating history with being one the first GLaDOS retail designs to be made. In fact, her appearance later in the game with her new rebuilt body had design lineage you can trace directly to the wakeup design. I genuinely love the idea that GLaDOS upgraded herself by filling in her own ideal replacements for her missing components, not just recreating her original body. Speaking of, it would be super fascinating to see how Wakeup GLaDOS may have turned out if her "rebuilt" design was more in line with her Portal 1 look. You'd have a really cool Portal 2-styled Portal 1 GLaDOS, with an authentic basis to it. We've seen this design be rebuilt; I'd love to see it undestroyed, too. And that... is as much as I can really say for Wakeup GLaDOS. She's a design that everyone overlooks due to people likely forgetting it even just exists in the game due to the more popular Fixed GLaDOS design that appears in the iconic Core Transfer sequence and the ending of the game. The reality is that there is not just one design for GLaDOS in Portal 2. There's a second one, and it's the one you see right at the start of the game, and for everything that the design has done, with it serving as the basis for the redesign, and calling back to the original Portal 1 look, and just generally kinda making GLaDOS look a little bit more spooky, it really deserves some more love. I know there's a lot of skilled people out there in the Source community. Seeing someone pull together a fixed version of the Wakeup GLaDOS design with a proper rig and making it one full model would genuinely really make my day, and I'm sure it'd make some animators really happy to see, too. Oh, and I forgot to mention: The head model doesn't have an eye. Like, at all(!) It's pure void in there. The wakeup sequence attaches a little glowing sprite to her head where her eye would be to make up for it instead. It's kinda amusing, but it also helps make her a little creepier. That's all I have for now, y'all. Hope you enjoyed this silly little ramble about a design for GLaDOS I care way too much about — and, yes, I know there's technically a more obscure design for her in the form of the Robot Repair GLaDOS, but that one isn't as drastically different as it's just a remaster. Anyways, thank you for watching this video. Stay safe out there. Peace. Closed captioning by Reese Rivers tech.lgbt/@reeserivers

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Channel: Ossy Flawol

Views: 389,744

Rating: undefined out of 5

Keywords: portal, portal 2, glados, portal lore, aperture science, portal timeline, the lab robot repair

Id: zmEc_YviMs4

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Length: 11min 50sec (710 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 19 2023