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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?"
The sims? Realism? You're kidding right?
We're talking here about simulated "people" who will quite happily beat the crap out of someone one second and talk about the weather to them the next. "people" who will moan and whinge when the bathroom is in use when there are three other free ones in the house. "people" who will happily stuff their faces whilst their kid is crying it's eyes out after shattin itself. "people" who, when they see a fire, go as close to it as they can manage and burn themselves to death instead of calling the fire brigade as any sensible person would do. "people" who play *exactly* the same game of chess every time (technical limitations, I know)
The actual actions they do are vaguely convincing but overall the sims is *not* realistic!
You were right though, it does have a video recording dooby which the strangerhood has used and with some fiddly work you could create a story.
To create any movie you'd need to know what the engine(s) can do inside and out, and if you're using existing characters, you'd need to know their capabilities inside and out too. So to answer, I think anyone could create something half decent but you're looking at a lot of studying and some very careful planning to get it just right.
Oh, just as a complete sidenote and to make this post as worthwhile (debatably) as possible, for anyone who's interested fraps lets you record pretty much anything happening on your screen such as games etc. so you're not limited to in-game recording to capture footage.
Get paid to search..It's geniune and
Theres plenty of game engines out there doing the visuals but what about the voices? sound effects? is there even anything out there that can do voice simulation?
just curious.
moo
I invested a relatively massive amount of time trying to figure a way to do this kind of thing myself, tho not so much for the purpose of a no-budget movie... I was aiming to be able to rapidly create episodes of a show to blend into an ARG. The problem is there's no good way to do this kind of thing now without a massive investment in a gaming engine (with strings attached, of course). You have to go the old-fashioned route, one way or another...
The best way I could see to do it (though it was far too much work for the returns) was to hire someone to write a huge number of Python add-ons for Blender, but even that was a bit wishy-washy from a practical standpoint.
If anyone out there who DOES do Blender scripting/hacking wants to give it a shot, drop me a line (mcm at my website above) and maybe we can do something neat.
But really, Machinima isn't really a viable medium for "new" filmmaking until someone puts those peices together for us.
The world's only surviving livewriter.
Me and a few friends once created a Quake1 mod that was specifically designed to help with making movies. To my knowledge it was only used one or two times, but we had a lot of fun making it. It used to reside here: http://www.inside3d.com/qmovie/ but the page has since been taken down. You can still see it in the various internet archives though, I'd imagine. I still have the source and all if anyone's interested in it... As an aside, one of the other programmers on the project went on to create a fell remake of the Quake engine with a feature-length movie and TC to go with it. He also created ScummVM which some of us use to play old LucasArts games on various platforms...
A little rudeness and disrespect can elevate a meaningless interaction to a battle of wills
Look at the reviews for Alexander. Ebert said the film was crap. That's a film they spent $150mil to create!
With games like Halo 2 grosing $100 mil on the first day, for a much smaller budget compared to Alexander, the bottom line is clear. The age of movies is waning.
I agree with you general comment, although I need to be picky -- the age of the overblown Bruckheimer-esque piece of crap Hollywood epic, is waning. There are lots of films, usually 'indie', that have very modest budgets but do quite well. Of the top of my head, "Dancer in the Dark" was done with a few digital video cameras that were under $10k. Hollywood needs to decide what is a better use of its money... $150 million on a movie that might break $160 gross? Or a series of 10-20 $5 million movies that make $10 million?
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
Machima isn't all about a game type. You can do it without it. UT2004 offers great tools, using it's "Matinee" system you can create complete movies and together with oc3 entertainment's "imposter" tool you can create great things.2 229/
Some examples:
http://www.machinima.com/films.php?id=793/
http://www.unrealtournament.com/news/view.php?id=
instead of actually creating a movie this might end up being a damn good way to storyboard (and pre-production is the most important part of successful movie making).
00010111 always try everything twice
I'm an animator and I've made my share of films. Like most filmmakers, I'm interested in getting people to see my work. That usually involves distributing it in the more ubiquitous formats.
I know most people have computers, but game engines can be fussy and platform-specific. This method seems to be more of an idle curiosity than anything. I don't get why people use a format that limits the audience.
Why not go for the most common and stable formats out there - video, streaming video or flash? Make it easy for everyone to see your creation.
Besides, if you don't have animation or art skills, creating your film in a game engine won't make it look all that great. Dragging and dropping motions into game levels just won't cut it. Your characters need to act and emote, which ain't going to happen unless you have acting and animation skills, along with a good set of tools to truly control all aspects of your 3D characters down to the keyframe. Good looking 3D is expensive for a reason.
Just my 2 cents... sorry for the rant.
I recently saw a review for Stephen Greenblat's "Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare". While I was in school, it was a cliche that S. would have worked in television if he lived in the 20th century. But I wonder what would he would be doing in the 21st. Maybe it would be this?
Making a scene or a movie using videogame tools isn't meant to be a replacement for real actors, or Pixar quality animation. It is just another tool, a different palette to get your ideas across with. One of the appealing things about using a game engine as a movie making tool is, it is DIRT CHEAP. Try the Doom3 engine, if it isn't doing what you want, you blew $55. Move on.
I'm a professional level designer, and I can tell you right now, you do NOT need to be a programmer to get the most out of the tools. Certainly the scale of your project may require a team of talented people, but you can squeeze a lot out of just yourself and your own ingenuity.
So you CAN be "MacGyver", and write your own stuff, build your own "sets", animate your own "actors", and control your own cameras.
First thing, you pick a game that already has a look similar to what you want to make, that way at least at the start you have access to assets (textures, props, models, environments) that have the look (realistic, historical, sci fi, etc) that you're planning on. If you eventually want your finished film to make you some $coin$, then you'll have to remake all of the models and props and textures borrowed from the game, to keep the copyright nazis off your back.
Then also you'll want to pick a game that's "mod friendly", that either uses an engine that's easily modified or even better, includes the tools WITH the game. Most games using the Quake3, Unreal, or Half Life engines do that. Also now you have newer tech like Far Cry, Doom3, and Half Life 2 to consider (and Unreal 3 right around the corner), and that's all just with FPS games.
Personally, and I've used the Quake3, Unreal, and Far Cry engines extensively, I'd say I'm most interested in the Half Life 2 engine as a tool for making movies with. I know next to nothing about the tools right now, but I'm going to learn. The facial animations are the most lifelike and deep yet seen in a game, with many elements automatic (like the lip syncing with sound files). Also the lighting and materials offer some very realistic, real world settings.
But that's my bent. Lots of options out there now, just pick one, dig into the community, see what the tutorials say, and start making stuff.
With games like Halo 2 grosing $100 mil on the first day, for a much smaller budget compared to Alexander, the bottom line is clear. The age of movies is waning.
Couldn't disagree more. The big difference is the sales drop-off. Sure, Halo 2 took in that. In three months time, sales will be through the floor and getting lower and lower. Halo 2 shot it's load, and that's it. Alexander has the following in it's future after it supposedly tanks (and bear in mind the bums on seats around the world will be many multitudes higher than the number of copies Halo 2 shipped):
DVD Rental: Still a very lucrative market
DVD Sell through: Where a lot of movies that tank make a fortune.
Pay Per View: Still a lucrative market.
Cable TV: Probably similar to PPV
Network Broadcast: This will make another few million, THREE YEARS after the release.
Tell me Halo 2 will make a few million in 2007 and see if I laugh.
Ah, QuakeMovie. Those were the good ol' days, huh Tux? :)
:)
:)
That full-length machinima is Nehahra, and is renderered in real-time using the engine. Apart from being the first (well-known, at least) full length machinima, its all displayed by the Quake engine in real-time.
This is unlike the majority of the genre, which is typically distributed only in pre-edited video formats. Of course, THAT has the advantage that the movie will look the same on all video cards *g*
Of course, all these newer engines are far prettier than Quake, but still, check it out: http://www.planetquake.com/nehahra/
- Ender. One of the "other" programmers
Is there not a repository of 3d models somewhere on the net? Surely animators/modelers share their work , isnt there a standard model format and tonnes just 'out there'?
...as well as a plug for my old Quake clan.
...which was actually pretty entertaining, and in that day in age, pretty revolutionary. They even went ahead and created some QuakeC mods to help them through the "filming" process (which was all done over the Internet, I think with a number of latency-challenged modem users).
http://machinima.com/qml/quake/rgb.htm
As far as I know, this was the earliest example of this mode of entertainment. Of course, it was really weak compared to its sequel:
http://machinima.com/qml/quake/rgb2.htm
The Rangers were one of the most well-recognized clans following the release of the original Quake, mostly for their contributions of fiction pieces and, eventually, these two movies. A cool bunch of guys. I joined up with them a little after their heyday, just in time to spend a little time working on the filming of Ranger Gone Bad 3. In spite of being a really neat effort with a lot of custom Quake content, it was so ambitious for its time that it just never got completed.
While I'm at it, I'll give a little footnote to how great the original Quake was. People sometimes deride it as being nothing drastically innovative from a gameplay standpoint, which was a little bit true in the single player game. However, the multiplayer component forged pretty much all of online multiplayer gaming as we know it. It was the moment of critical mass for the formation of long distance social gaming, and the multiplayer model was good enough that virtually every first person shooter since then is based on it (although these days they tend to incorporate a built-in server browsing utility, which was an independent addition called QuakeSpy back then).
In closing, a little write-up that I happened to enjoy reading: http://www.muppetclan.com/history/
The Unreal engine does look like it has some pretty amazing stuff up its sleave, but you may wish to keep in mind that the basic Doom 3 rendering engine has been finalized for a good three or four years now, with the exception of what constituted minor tweaking along the way.
Certainly Carmack has been devoting a lot of his time to rocketry, and it's probably also fair to say that he's sometimes been narrow-minded in his approach to everything that isn't bread-and-butter first person shooter stuff (fast graphics rendering, core networking capabilities, etc., but not physics, deformable geometry, etc.). But you can bet he hasn't been resting on his laurels with regard to next-gen game engine technology.
I know a lot of folks that want to do their own animes, but they simply can't, because it takes too much time, effort and talent. So instead they write fan fiction.
It would be amazing if we could 'direct' a movie with the help of the computer. We should be able to tell the computer 'place this object here', 'place this character here', etc, at a level above 3d object design.
It could be the next killer app.