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Best Tools for Machinima?
wrinkledshirt asks: "As a former Creative Writing major with a huge interest in film, I've been thinking about trying to get into Machinima (com, org, and wiki sites -- basically, using game engines to make movies). Probably the most famous use of it for the Slashdot crowd right now is Red vs Blue, which makes use of Halo, but up until recently, most of the other options have involved FPS game engines, which would require a huge investment in time so as to create non-FPS-genre content for non-FPS-genre movies. Now that Sims 2 is here with its video-recording feature (and the promise of more contemporary realism in the expansion packs) and with Pete Molnyeux's The Movies coming out in 2005, is it possible that an amateur writer could make the Machinimatic movies of his or her dreams? Plus, what would the best tools be? What machine would you need? Would any single game engine help you create your own Citizen Kane?"
Not from personal experience ; but afaik, UnrealEd (the editor for Unreal) supports setting up scenes as you would in 3d-modeling software (eg. Lightwave) ; and assigns controllers to objects/models etc in scenes, thus making it a bit easier to create a movie-like scene (without or with human 'actors').
As the Parent said ; Doom 3 is really -lacking- those features ; and I think that id is hoping for the community to come up with some decent modtools to make Machinima movies on it.
A shot missed by id, imho : Since of all the mayor engines out now, Doom 3 surely comes most close to real life.
Sidenote ; The latest shown Unreal techbnology also seems wicked and the D3 engine will defenitely need soom future tweaks to keep up with that. . http://www.unrealtechnology.com/
The unreal engine has wonderful abilities to create machinima pieces (I'm sure other engines do as well). I created some cinematics for a video game using the engine and I can tell you that the hard part is not having the animations and sounds that you need. Setting up the scenes is not difficult (relatively) once you know the tools and if you have all this stuff handy, or have the time or a person to do quick animations: "Hey Jon, I need an animation of Captain Zer0 scratching his butt...".
:P
Think about it; for a long "movie" you would need an incredible amount of motions, sounds and voices, even when you modularize them as much as possible (walking, looking left/right, radio chatter, ambient nature noises, blahblah). The beauty is in the subtleties, a quick glance, a raised eyebrow, a certain cock to the shoulders when someone starts to talk about a subject that changes the characters mood, etc. Plus, since voice acting is just as important as how cool the models look, you pretty much need a cast, even though it's "ghosts in the machine"
Of course the reality is that there are practically no films at all that make a profit. Certainly every big budget film is guaranteed to make a loss. At least, according to the movie studio accountants.
And in the end that's actually a reasonably large part of where all the real profit comes from. Take a read of this and just look at all the amazing money shuffling methods they have to sweep any semblance of profit under the carpet. Just look at how the account for video and DVD sales for gods sake! Dodgy, dodgy, dodgy.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
As far as Machinima goes, treat games as you would any tool in any other field. If it accomplishes the end you have in mind, then you should use that tool. Never treat the games as ends in and of themselves.
This means that if Battlechess 3000 does what you want, then use it! It's just that FPS engines are usually designed with flexibility in mind and so are often the easiest games to manipulate into what one wants.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
Try this program called Machinimation: http://www.fountainheadent.com/n.x/fe/Home/Product ions/Machinimation
It's not free, but I've heard its good.
3D Movie Maker is an old (1995) game MS made, it's aimed at kids, but you can do some very nice simple movie making with it.
.3mm file, which contains only the sound files and the animation details, so they are TINY. You can get an hour long movie with dialog and music in 20mb)
.AVI/.MPG (You can use other tools to do this though)
I have YET to find anything simpler. You have actors, props, and text-boxes, and you place them, pick animations and costumes, then animate them manually (where you select animation frames) or automaticly (where they play out their pre-made animations at a preset speed).
You can record dialog right into the movie, and it's saved into the final movie file. (a
It comes with 45 built in actors, 21 props, and 11 pre-built backgrounds. (Each of them with multiple camera angles)
They only drawbacks are:
1. No easy way to group objects or move more than one at a time.
2. Can't save to
3. No way to import your own backgrounds,actors, props, or textures. (This is changing though. We've just recently figured out the model format, and I've written a program that lets you import quake 2 models. It's still pretty early-beta quality software however.)
4. Annoying barney-like host. You can skip his intro movies and shut him up after that, you you never see him. He's still annoying though.
Another nice thing is there are PLENTY of movies made with it. I've got a 3DMM movie archive site, and I currently have 1344 movies, all in about 2 gigs of space. (That's the largest 3dmm site, but still far from all movies released).
So I suggest you check it out, if you're looking for something to make fun movies in, quickly.
You can often grab a copy on Ebay for under 10$.
A quick search shows only one copy on right now: 5 days to go (I'm not connected to the seller, BTW. I just did a search.)
You can download it on a few sites (google for "3dmm"), since MS seems to no longer care about it. (They don't even mention it on their site anymore). It's about a 200mb download.
Have fun!
I respond to your sigs
I don't get it
Let me help you out. You are WAY WAY WAY off-base with your assumptions.
The "movies" are created using a game engine. The "movies" are distributed in a video format such as MPEG or WMV.
I don't think anyone's ever created a Machinima "movie" that actually requires a viewer to own the game or platform.
Hope this helps!
If you're looking to get out cheap and easy I can only help with cheap.
Use Blender (blender.org). It's free.
Easy is another matter. You will need to create your enviornments and characters by hand, otherwise risk having your machinima look like it's from the sims or some other game. It works for red vs. blue because of the nature of the jokes. If you were making something else, like "It's a wonderful life" or "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" then then stock game models from some game engine might not be appropriate.
Thats a tradeoff you risk in any filmmaking venture though. Are you willing to risk a generic look for a lower budget, or are you willing to find or create the perfect set, character, etc, at the expense of a higher budget and longer production time.
http://www.realityfactory.ca
Reality Factory is the ONLY freely available open-source engine that is capable of producing quality machinima.
Anything you see in Deus Ex or Max Payne is possible in RF, plus you get the entire source code.
Come join the community & contribute to an engine that benefits us ALL not a single proprietary corporation.
Gekido's Lair
Developed originally by Disney VR Studio for Toontown Online, we use the Panda3D game engine at the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University for our Building Virtual Worlds class. A lot of the projects result in machinima-like content.
There's an exporter for Maya and 3ds Max models and animation, which makes it quite easy to do a world in Maya, then dump it straight into a realtime engine and add basic or complex interactivity. Scripting is done in python so it's easy do create and expand.
It's pretty versatile too - we've used it for motion-tracked virtual reality, dome projection, 3D polarized projection, desktop pets, and integrated things like MIDI, all sorts of physical interfaces, show control, etc...