Racing Machinima - how hard ... can it be?
Jul
Here at Machinimafordummies Towers, we recently received an email from a guy looking to put together a racing scene. Now, I’ve seen a few pieces of racing Machinima in my time, but it’s always been a minority interest, with nothing like the pull of the flight-sim scene, say.
But a bit of Googling around did come up with a very impressive-looking, highly-modded engine that he could use.
It’s called rFactor, and apparently it’s independent (which means it’d be easier to negotiate some kind of license for commercial work), it’s highly moddable (the official site has dozens of varied addons), fairly pretty (not at the level of the latest racing games, but good enough to play onscreen), and has full camera and replay tools.
Here’s a quick demo of its potential:
Interesting tool!
The first “machinima” I ever made was using Microsoft’s Monster Truck Racing way back in, oooh, about 1995. It had a basic set of camera and replay tools, and you could edit together different views of a race to make a “movie”. You could only watch it in-game, but hey, it was a movie, and I had a lot of fun with it.
This looks great, though, easily good enough to create a racing scene for a movie that needs it.
I’d probably tackle a racing scene the same way the WoW teams would: With enough compositing to give Speed Racer a blowout! You could do a lot with some basic car stills and a track background or two…