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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?"
Would any single game engine help you create your own Citizen Kane?
Not right now, but I'm sure this is a direction the video games creators are contemplating because it's an area of expected growth. It would certainly make the creation of cinematics much easier for dev teams if machinima was considered part of the engine.
The problem is that in games like Doom 3 for example, the creation of cinematics is scripted heavily and designed into the levels. Models take weeks to build correctly and integrate, and you have to have strong modelling skills to achieve that. There is no separation of set and action or actors, for the most part. I understand that Half Life 2 has changed this kind of static nature, but it's still very early.
The games would have to have quick modelling system built in, or methods for generating random characters and skins, and voices.
I'm sure that in the next twenty years, this is the direction of video games. It would be a smart approach, IMHO.
You also have to consider the comparison between video game sales and box office/rental sales. Video games are beating the movie industry to a pulp, so film as a medium of expression is likely on the way out, unless the business makes some changes and continues to grow and support new vision. Indy film will always be of a higher quality than blockbusters, IMHO.
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.
Quality of film has declined heavily as far as dramatic content, with the exception of films like LotR. I'm seeing the film expression as being played out for the most part.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
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
Now that Sims 2 is here with its video-recording feature (and the promise of more contemporary realism in the expansion packs)
As if the millions of "cartoonists" taking screen shots of video games and adding moronic thought bubbles wasn't enough of a waste of bandwidth... Now we get to have millions of retards creating movies. *sigh*
Atleast out of the 1,030,205 dopes, we'll probably get a few, clever gems.
Would any single game engine help you create your own Citizen Kane?
1. Find game engine
2.Become Orson Welles
3.Profit!
KFG
...but everyone who saw my movie said "Hey! You forgot to remove the lens cap!"
Although using a game engine to do most of the work, you need to consider quite a bit:
- Will the game engine show the expressions necessary in your 'actors'?
- Will you be able to adequately time the sound effects and voice-overs? (I do NOT recommend using a synth, unless you are making a comedy)
- Do you have a strong understanding of programming? Because that's what you will need to do to correctly move characters/wireframes/objects/timing/etc
Although the engine will most definitely cut out quite a bit of production time, the best advice is to 'play'... learning how the physics work, and how the engine reacts to commands, etc are key to making something worth watching.
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
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"
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=
I just watched an episode of Red vs Blue, quote:
-Oh you f'cking camping bitch
-It's a legitimate strategy!
I lauged a bit, but somehow I don't see the consept of making a movie out of a PC-game ever becoming a big hit for the average people...
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"
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
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'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?
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.
I really want to see the movie about the intrepid '@' and his adventures in a world of dangerous 'D's, obnoxious 'o's and ravening 'r's. The scene where he's backed into a dead-end '#' by a swarm of killer 'b's, with nothing but a ')' to defend himself, and then his faithful 'f' saves the day, should have audiences laughing and cheering.
:)
Heck, there's no way it could possibly be worse than Dungeons & Dragons: the Movie!
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.
you had me at #!
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
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...
I think it's a totally different thing to attempt to add Gollum to Jackson's LOTR then to make a gollum which would fit into a totally cgi environment. Also I think Jackson milked Gollum for all he was worth. If you couldn't do him quite as well, you'ld just have to keep the camera moving more and generally further back, not 6 inches from his face, everything still for a few seconds! I think machinima will be an artform with limited success, and the people who do have success will probably go on to become very highly regarded in a more mainstream field (directors, script writers, animators, game designers). If you can create a good script to fit what you can do though I can't see any reason why machinima can't potentialy be every bit as good as cartoon.
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
...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/
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.