Machinima Festival and News

Hugh Hancock writes: "Machinima (real-time 3D film-making in game engines, what used to be called 'Quake Movies') has a bit of a grab-bag day today -- the New York Times (registration, blah) is running an article on it, prompted by the announcement of the first Machinima-only film festival, sponsored by NVidia!"

Comments

Re:basically that means....

[GigsVT]

That you make movies out of somebody elses hard work and then claim the pie

Yeah, that's almost as bad as those lazy directors and producers that buy pre-built cameras and ready to use film! They are just using other's work and presenting it as their own!

Great for Sub-professional Animators

[bjb]

I remember when Hardy Workin' first came out, I was trying to explain to a co-worker why this was so cool. It wasn't that the graphics were rendered completely in graphics hardware, it wasn't that the file size for a 16 minute movie was only a handful of megabytes (most being reusable textures and audio samples) compared to a comparable MPEG that could be played CLEAN at 1280x1024, it was that someone is doing a Pixar on their home computer.

Think about it. You spend the time creating the backgrounds and characters (basically "cells" for animation, in a sense), and then you direct their movements and so-forth. Sure, there have been home animators for years making their own cartoons, but aren't most cartoons done on computers these days? I just think it is great that someone is making the computer one more way to express themselves. Last wave was the home musicians, now movie makers. What next?

UT 2003

[Quintin Stone]

Unreal Tournament 2003 will be a great boon to machinema artists, from what I've seen. During their UT2003 Mod Summit, they previewed a lot their tools for movie and cut-scene production. Matinee is the UT2k3 component that movie makers will be able to use in order to execute tailored bot scripts and set up special time- or animation-related notifications to trigger specific events. I'm not really into that kind of stuff myself, but what I saw did look very useful and very powerful. Now if we can all get easy access to the kind of motion-capture systems the industry has....

Interactive Story...

[Junta]

When I had AI, my professor was working on a project using the unreal tournament engine. The idea was to have scripted events triggers, and an evolving storyline affected by the viewer who is allowed the most freedom the engine allows. The demo shown in class was an aquarium where the 'plaques' were generated on the fly using some basic facts, in whatever language the user requested. The plaques never looked the same
twice and always offered different facts. The english sentences generated were pretty good and convincing enough to think things were scripted, but weren't. Character actions and dialog are not scripted, but instead they have a knowledge base and goals and rules of how goals can be acheived that influence their speech and action. Truly a gargantuan project but really neat to see it in action. Agents showed visible pauses at decision points in the demo. I have a friend who still works on the project with the college. Now this sort of stuff could make for some really interesting experiences when brought to its ultimate incarnation. Currently it requires three high-end systems to run, and even then the pauses are rather annoying, but given time this could be really exciting. Imagine an RPG with this technology where NPCs have goals and knowledge bases instead of scripts... .("Sigh... Times are tough..."). That would kick serious ass.

Re:Speaking of 'Quake Movies'

[unicron]

They mixed and matched parts of lesser dorks to make you, didn't they? You're some type of Frankenstein-like, uber-dork.

Dork(robotic voice): I am a StormTrooper.

Triumph the Wonder Dog(robotic voice): You are a huge nerd.

QdQ

[dogas]

I highly recommend watching Quake Done Quicker. These guys beat Quake 1 in 12 minutes.. and there are plenty of trick moves to keep the audience entertained... definitely not boring.