Machinima for Dummies

Antics 3D has been around for quite a while now, but up until very recently has had a moderately hefty price tag. Not any more! Along with a shiny new website design, the Antics team have released version 3 of their product for free! Can I get a “woo”, and also a “hoo!”?

The free version is the Version 3 Base Pack – you’ll still need to reach for the credit card if you want the Pro pack (it’ll cost you $595/£295 in fact). Having access to a powerful package like this for free is great news for machinimators everywhere, though.

In much the same way as Moviestorm has been doing, the Antics guys are planning to launch some premium content packs soon. The first 500 downloaders of the free base pack will get the first content pack for free when it eventually launches! You can’t say fairer than that.

The Characters Police pack, of course, is already available and still free.

And some less-good news. According to the Second Life Open Source page,

What source code won’t you be releasing?

We don’t (yet) plan to release the code that runs our simulators or other server code (“the Grid”).

I’m not sure whether this is seriously out of date, or if it represents a change of plan chez Linden. I hope it’s the former. As we’ve blogged before, not to mention also talked about in the book, an open-source SL server would be a fantastic development for Machinima in general, removing or limiting a lot of the existing problems with creating Second Life Machinima. If it’s not going to happen, that’s a real pity.

I’m going to try and get hold of the Lindens to see if I can get a confirm/deny on this issue. Anyone who knows what’s up, please do comment below!

Otherwise, I guess we’re all hoping that Open Simulator (the Open-source SL-compatible server that’s under development right now) comes along well.

It’s CHRIIIIISTMAS! (or it will be soon)

And there are new and exciting engines crawling out of the woodwork left, right and center.

First up, Ricky Grove has written a piece on persuading the Unreal Engine 3 editor to work, both with Gears of War (fail) and Unreal Tournament 3 (pass). It’s an interesting read, and includes links to some great resources too. I’ve had a look at the U3 editor myself, and there’s some real power in there.

Secondly, Cinemassively points us to this Machinima trailer for Pirates of the Burning Sea. Very impressive stuff - nice swashbuckling swordfighting animation, some truly awesome ship combat, and what looks a lot like a lipsynched character. I forsee a lot of pirate Machinima coming out, probably starting with the PotBS open beta, which will open on December 7th.

So that’s four engines at least we need to cover: Halo 3, Source, Unreal 3 and PotBS, plus the updated Moviestorm tutorial. We’ll be getting into those in the new year.

Of course, time is always an issue. Just out of interest - would any of our noble readers be interested in a subscription-based service, where we promise to deliver MfD-the-book-quality content every month or so, in exchange for a small number of your pennies? It’s no more than an idea at this point, but it would potentially allow us to spend more time developing quality Machinima tutorials.

A few days ago I wrote about the release of Moviestorm version 1.0. Among the many boasts I made was that the new release included the Modder’s Workshop that certain prominent machinimators have been jonesing for.

Alas, it was too good to be true. The decision was made to hold back the Mod Shop from this release at the very last second. Overman’s screams of frustration could be heard around the globe.

This time, it’s for real. The Modder’s Workshop has officially returned, with an all-new publishers licence key system. You’ll need to request a key if you want to use it, and we’re limiting the release of them, so if you’re a Moviestorm pioneer, head over to the forums and register your interest right now, that’s my advice.

( Disclosure: I’m employed by Short Fuze as Moviestorm’s Technical Author )

I’m sure I’m late to the party here, and a lot of you will already know about and regularly use the freeware video encoder Super, but just in case there are people who, like me until very recently, have no knowledge of its existence, I’m blogging about it here.

Super is basically a GUI wrapper around the free and open-source ffmpeg codec and encoding library. Although there’s theoretically nothing that Super can do that clever command-line use of ffmpeg couldn’t also achieve, Super makes it oh-so-very-much easier. As regular readers will know, I’m a dyed-in-the-wool Linux fanboy, used to working on reasonably complicated tasks using the shell or command line. Unadulterated ffmpeg still makes my head spin.

The reason that I’m bringing Super to your attention specifically is that the latest version of ffmpeg can encode magnificently to Quicktime. We strongly recommend purchasing Quicktime Pro in the book, and I’ll stick by that recommendation as an excellent encoding solution, but ffmpeg wrapped in Super is definately worth considering before you get your credit card out – it’s freeware!

(Windows-only, I’m afraid, * nix fans, although ffmpeg itself is cross-platform.)

Second Life has just had a major graphics upgrade, in the form of the new “Windlight” client. Whilst this doesn’t solve all the problems that we discuss in the book connected to Second Life, it certainly does massively increase its usability for some projects - if you’re doing a primarily landscape-based piece (like Robbie Dingo’s awesome “Watch the Worlds”), you should definitely check this out.

Even if you’re not, the technology is worth a look for compositing purposes - you could, for example, use this to generate an landscape to composite in outside a MovieStorm set.

Here’s a short film highlighting some of the visuals now available in SL, made by the inimitable Fleef of Fling Films.

Moviestorm, which features pretty heavily in the book, officially left Beta status a few hours ago. Moviestorm 1.0 is a brand new release, featuring new base assets, a new interactive tutorial, and – best of all – the long-awaited return of the Modders Workshop! And about darned time too, as Moviestorm Beta users will attest.

Moviestorm 1.0 and the new Base pack are completely free to download and use, and any machinima you create is yours to exploit, so take a look if you haven’t already.

Moviestorm has moved on so much since we wrote Machinima For Dummies that I really wouldn’t recommend trying to follow on with the book using this new version of the software. Not to worry, though – you can safely install and run this new version and the version we supplied on our cover DVD simultaneously. Just resist the urge to click “Yes” when you’re asked if you want to do an automatic update.

If you’re already a Moviestorm user, note that Moviestorm’s automatic update process won’t update to this new release. There’s a fat goody bag of new content, so you’ll have to visit your Downloads page on the Moviestorm site to grab the new gear.

We’ll try to get an updated version of the Moviestorm sections from the book up on the blog soon – both Hugh and I are up to our necks in busy-ness at the moment!

(Disclosure: I’m employed by Short Fuze as Moviestorm’s Technical Author)

Ricky Grove has written an extensive and thoughtful review of MfD over at the CG super-site Renderosity - a good read!

We recommend focus-grouping your work a bunch of times in Machinima for Dummies - where by “focus-grouping”, we mean “getting people who aren’t you to watch your film before it’s released”.

It’s one of the most valuable processes you can go through. Ideally, it’s most valuable when you can cross-question your audience, but any eyeballs that aren’t yours or your team’s on your work will help pick up the problems that you’re too close to what you’re doing to be aware of.

The problem, of course, is finding people to focus-group on - particularly people you don’t know! By definition, you can’t just call them. Or at least, you couldn’t.

Amazon.com’s new ”Mechanical Turk” technology looks to be perfect for doing low-cost “mall tests” of your film. Essentially, it allows you to hire as many people as you want for a very small task - like, say, watching a short movie and commenting on it. In terms of costs, it’s very cheap indeed - this Slashdot poster paid $1.45 for people to come up with rebuttals to an argument he was making online, for example.

So it would be trivial to set aside a budget of $30 or so - well within reach if you’ve spent a month or two on a film - and use Mechanical Turk to find out what Real People think of your film before release, allowing you to correct any mistakes, make clearer anything that isn’t, polish the bits that clunk, and generally get you closer to that 4,500,000 hit YouTube smash!

Ok, so I’m going to be in Vancouver between the 13th and the 17th of November. I’m mostly on holiday, but wouldn’t object to meeting Machinima people whilst I’m there!

(I’m also going to be in Montreal and Edmonton on that trip, but I’ll put a seperate post up about that.)

So - any Machinima enthusiasts out there in the cold north, and if so, care to show a tired author your friendly local beer establishments?