EDIT - Oh, knackers. Looks like this isn’t actually true, just someone’s fantasy (see comments). Cheapest option for Mocap remains Ipisoft. Dammit.
Ooh! Looks like a major player’s getting into the cheap mocap game - Adobe have just announced a suite named “Gollum” which will perform mocap using the Project Natal cameras.
Cost? $400. Time? No idea.
The Internets are buzzing with the announcement of Project Natal, a camera for the Xbox 360 which will supposedly offer full-body motion capture for use in games.
It’s very, very early days yet (the video floating around the Internet bears the small note “Product Vision - actual features and functionality may vary”), but they seem pretty confident about their tech.
Full-body motion capture at a games console price? We’ll have to wait and see.
Vimeo seem to be the new darlings of the video hosting scene, but they’re looking less and less good to me.
Just after the fascinating article on video site terms of service in which they didn’t come out too well, we hear that they’ve deleted the incredibly popular “Craft of War: Blind” (one of our Machinima of the Year 2008 list) from their servers, apparently because “videos depicting people playing the game like walkthroughs, strategies, raids, pvp,etc aren’t allowed”, according to author Percula, second comment down.
It’s blatantly obvious from a thirty-second glance at the video (possibly-broken YouTube version here) that this isn’t a gameplay video, but high-quality animation that happens to be set in a gameworld. And this isn’t the first time Vimeo have deleted quality Machinima, either - Baron Soosden has had some of his videos taken down in the past.
Vimeo really need to get their act together. In the meantime, anyone got any recommendations for alternate hosting sites? I’ve really been impressed with Blip.tv, who host BloodSpell, although I know a few other people weren’t so keen - comments? And of course the Internet Archive is still awesome for Creative Commons-licensed content.
There’s one question that keeps being asked about the new PS3 Home Machinima tool, and that is - how will users actually capture the video?
I’ve heard from a few people now, and it appears that, barring some miraculous tool popping up on release, in order to create any video using this tool, you’ll need to use an exterior capture device to capture the video from the PS3.
HDMI capture cards like the Blackmagic Intensity cost about $200 minimum, so that puts a pretty hefty pricetag on using the software at all.
I’m guessing we won’t see too much use of the Home Machinima setup unless something changes- pity.
OK, this is very much “just in”, but it appears that Blizzard, makers of World of Warcraft, have just taken the ground-breaking (in a bad way) step of threatening legal action against a fan comic.
WoWInsider’s Mike Schramm has posted the news, and he’s following up with Blizzard, so hopefully we’ll have more details soon:
First the legal crackdown on fan-made iPhone apps, and now this: German-based webcomic Shakes and Fidget, a longtime sight in our Sunday Morning Funnies column, has apparently been smacked with a cease-and-desist by Blizzard. Our German isn’t that great (and we’ve reached out to the comic’s creators for further comment), but a translation of this forum page tells us that Activision-Blizzard’s legal department suggested to them that there was enough similarity between the official game and the unofficial comic to cause a problem, and while they believe that they’re covered under parody laws, they decided to take the “offending” comics offline anyway, and are apparently currently working on editing them so that they can be put back up without any issues.
(From WoWInsider, Blizzard legal censures Shakes and Fidget)
I’m keeping up to date on this story, and I’ll put up more news as soon as we have it.
Currently, I’d say there’s no immediate threat to Machinima creators, but Blizzard’s actions are tending in a very, very bad direction, and I’d certainly suggest that you might want to consider another engine if you were thinking about making something in WoW. I’m in an internal Strange Company discussion right now where we’re debating just that.
More details on the Home Machinima tool, plus a (very interesting) video can be found over here - http://blog.us.playstation.com/2009/05/06/enormous-update-coming-to-playstation-home/
I’m querying a couple of details - notably how video capture works on the system - and I’ll have more details soon.
This could be extremely interesting - I’ve just heard that Sony are about to launch a Machinima tool within the PS3’s “Home” 3D world.
Here’s what I know so far, from Rich Bisso at Loot:
“The reason I’m writing is that I thought you guys might be interested in what we’ve been working on. It’s essentially a machinima tool for Playstation Home. Our goal was to try and create something for PSHome users that combined the two aspects of Home we thought were the most interesting: Social Activity and Interactive Experience.
Instead of making a traditional game, or even an ARG (which is the way a lot of Home development was going), we wanted to make something that would really encourage the player to get together with their friends and have some fun. Being spawned from a movie company, it is pretty easy to see how we were inspired to make a movie stage/set. It’s really cool to walk through the lot every day and peek inside the huge stages, so we figured that other people would be psyched to have their own stage and even make some movies, too. After that, we went crazy putting all sorts of lighting and camera controls, green screens, backdrops, etc in the limited amount of time we had.
It was fun and a bit of a challenge, since we were pushing the development tools in some pretty unconventional directions.”
Very interesting. Apparently the entire thing will go live in about two weeks. Obviously, details are a little thin at the moment, but we’ll let you know more as soon as we hear it.
A brief announcement, in the interests of journalistic disclosure: I’m now employed as Product Manager for Short Fuze Ltd in the UK (I was previously employed by the same company as Technical Author). Short Fuze are the guys who make Moviestorm, which we’ve mentioned more than once on this blog and in the book.
My job now is to be a ‘champion of the product’, which is a rather pretentious and buzzword-laden way of saying that I have to ensure that Moviestorm remains great, and co-ordinate the input of the whole team to decide what exciting features we’re going to work on next.
As I wrote when Short Fuze first hired me, this blog is not and nor will it ever be a thinly-veiled publicity tool for Short Fuze. That doesn’t mean that we won’t be talking about Moviestorm, though. We will. And IClone. And Antics3D, and ZenCub3d, and Second Life and World of Warcraft and anything else that seems relevant.
It’s a sad day for fans of WoW parodies of rap music. It appears that Nhym, creator of numerous WoW hip-hop parodies including MfD favourite Hard Like Heroic, has had to quit playing WoW for reasons unknown, and has posted his last video as an encore.
No big story here, just a pity to see a fun Machinima creator go.
ZenCub3d’s Billy Chang has just posted an announcement in which he states that
We will be putting the ZenCub3d project on-hold indefinitely.
After the recent loss of Antics3D from the Machinima scene, your reaction to this is likely to have been the same as mine – panic.
There’s no need for screaming and wailing just yet though. Billy’s post makes it clear that this is not the end for ZenCub3d. Quite the opposite in fact – they’re going into ‘stealth mode’ to work on the successor to the application.
I think this is actually great news for the future of ZenCub3d (and, judging by the comments so far on Billy’s post, most people seem to agree with me). The ZenCub3d forums will still be active, and there’s no indication that current copies of ZenCub3d will suddenly stop working or anything horrible like that.
If you don’t have a copy of ZenCub3d yet, it’ll be available to download in its current form for another two weeks. After that, you’ll have wait patiently for the grand unveiling of the sequel (ZenCub3d2? Seems a little unwieldy!)
