Machinima for Dummies: Category News

Notes of note (or not, notionally)

Johnnie Ingram — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 14:25:00 +0000

Rather than the traditional Guess what? I’m not dead! type of blog post, I’m going to break our recent hiatus by giving you a short list of exciting machinima-related happenings of recent times. If you subscribe to the indispensable Machinifeed, a lot of this will be old news, but I’m aware that not everyone does¹.

The Machinima Expo, in its moved-to-Second-Life-at-the-last-minute state, was a huge success. I get the impression that it was even more successful than the organisational team dared to hope. The legendary workaholic gestalt that is Phil “Overman” Rice did a monumental job of constructing a multi-exhibit, feature-packed virtual theme park in Second Life, including a very fitting – and rather moving – tribute to the late Peter Rasmussen. Congratulations (and thanks) to Phil, Ricky, Ingrid, Damien and the Expo elves. If you weren’t able to make it to the live event, take a look at some of the footage captured by living machinima database Ben Grussi.

Antics3D is dead. Long live Antics3D. Actually, rumours of Antics’ death are somewhat exaggerated, but the company has announced that the Antics3D software will no longer be offered for purchase or download, and that subscriptions will not be able to be renewed after 28th November 2008. The move came, seemingly, out of nowhere, and has caused some serious ripples in the machinima pond. If you’re an Antics user, there’s no need to panic. Your current copy of Antics is not going to stop working, but there’ll be no more updates for the program, and official support will cease around June 2009. Perhaps now would be a good time to take a look at one of the alternative machinima-capable engines instead.

Linux Insider’s series on intellectual property law finished with a very interesting post on copyright law as it pertains to virtual worlds. SLifers, you’ll want to read this one.

Not breaking news, but a gentle reminder: the monthly machinima-themed audio conference Talk The Machinima Talk is back again this month. If you’ve never been, this is the perfect time to pop in to Second Life and meet some like-minded people. The audio conference is not a cliquey thing at all. Whatever your experience, you’ll be made welcome.

The 2009 AMAS Machinima Film Festival is on! In New York, at Eyebeam again! Fo’ shizzle! Wait – no it’s not. Yes it is. Erm … it might be.

Have you backed up your data recently? Are you sure? Go check. Go back up right now – losing data hurts as Zachariah Scott knows all too well².

Sorry for the quiet time at the moment. Hugh and I are both as busy as bees who’ve discovered that the entire hive is off sick and they have to do two-hundredweight of pollen by the end of the day and the pollen-sorting machine is on the blink again so they have to do the whole thing by hand and it’s their wedding anniversary and they forgot to buy flowers for Mrs Bee and she’s a bee so she really likes flowers and oh my god is that the time? In other words, we’ve both very little free time at the moment, and that’s got nothing to do with the recent release of the World of Warcraft Wrath Of The Lich King expansion³.

¹ You’d better have a darned good excuse.

² Big love to Zach – we feel your pain, man.

³ Okay, maybe a little. How great are the Howling Fjord questlines?

Mgestyk - 3D gesture recognition - one to watch

Hugh "Nomad" Hancock — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 14:56:56 +0000

Looks like the 3D camera-based technologies are starting to hit. Mgestyk are showing off their new 3D gesture recognition system, which apparently recognises hand movements and gestures and translates them into computer control.

That’s nice, of course, but what’s really interesting is that this technology could presumably also be used to recognise gestures as… gestures. Cheap home mocap, here we come.

One to watch. Apparently the system will be “the price of a high-end webcam”.

Hiatus

Hugh "Nomad" Hancock — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 12:04:30 +0100

Expect a drop in posting frequency around here for the next few months, I’m afraid.

I’m launching a new non-machinima series (a cooking show, as a matter of fact) right now, so I’m going to be focussing pretty hard on that. Johnnie will still be holding down the fort here, but Moviestorm’s also stepping up, so he’s likely to be pretty busy too.

Don’t worry, though - we will be back.

Machinima Expo "badly hurt but not destroyed"

Johnnie Ingram — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 17:33:00 +0100

We’ve just heard the bad news that the Machinima Expo – organised as part of Festival Arcadia by Phil Rice, Ricky Grove, Ingrid Moon and Damien Valentine – has been cancelled, at least in its originally proposed form.

You can read the full sad story at the Expo blog. After the time, effort and expense that the four organisers have poured into it, this is a real shame. The Expo was shaping up to be a superb event for machinimators.

All is far from lost, though. The Expo will still go on, but is now being moved to a virtual event within Second Life. In many ways, this is even better. If you weren’t going to be able to attend in person, now you have no excuse!

Stay tuned to the Expo blog or the twitter feed for updates, and we’ll see you in-world.

Siggraph 2008 - Papers of interest for Machinima creators

Hugh "Nomad" Hancock — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 18:33:00 +0100

Whilst there have been a couple of reports on Siggraph 2008, the premiere graphics conference held in LA last month, no-one’s really talked about the academic papers that were presented there. Since these tend to represent the cutting edge of graphics technology that we can expect to be using in between two and five years, I thought it was worth having a quick look over what came out there.

I wasn’t at Siggraph, so I’m going from the list of papers maintained here. In addition, whilst I can code a bit, I’m not at the level of these guys, so I could have completely the wrong end of the stick on something. If you’re interested, check out the papers linked for more.

There aren’t a hell of a lot of papers directly applicable to Machinima and real-time techniques this year. By far the most obvious trend was work on markerless performance capture - in other words, motion capture without ping-pong balls. Perhaps the most impressive demonstration of this field was Performance Capture from Sparse Multi-view Video - it’s worth watching the attached video, as it shows an 8-camera setup being able to completely recreate an actor and his movements as an animated mesh, without markers, lasers, or anything else, clothing and all. Articulated Mesh Animation from Multi-view Silhouettes appears to do much the same thing, but this time working from a base reference mesh. Markerless Garment Capture is doing the same thing again, but this time just with clothes.

All of this, of course, is very exciting. Motion capture from normal cameras - and the first paper listed notes that it uses normal 25 fps cameras - would massively reduce the cost of this technique and open it up to a huge range of applications. Imagine just being able to capture any motion you needed for your movie right in your living room.

There were a couple of papers on crowd techniques - Clone Attack! Perception of Crowd Variety, which dealt with the problem of avoiding obvious cloning in your crowd scenes, and Group Motion Editing, which talked about editing pre-created group paths - changing where the crowd walks in your film.

The former, in particular, is well worth a look for Machinima practitioners. It’s not a programming paper so much as it is a practical psychology paper, testing the various approaches to “de-cloning” your crowds, and many of its techniques are useful straight away. The latter paper is not so much use, but we’ll probably see its research in RTS games before too long.

The remaining individual papers are all interesting. Real-time, All-frequency Shadows in Dynamic Scenes, one of the few specifically real-time targetted papers, presents some really impressive real-time lighting techniques, which give me a lot of hope for next-generation lighting engines. Worth a look if you want to see the future, or you’re currently programming a renderer (you know whom you are!). Real-time Motion Retargeting to Highly Varied User-Created Morphologies is mostly notable for being written by some of the team behind Spore, but presents some fascinating if tricky to understand techniques for animating characters of unknown anatomy. Again, one for the programmers (although the author also links to a much less technical article on Gamasutra giving an overview of the process).

Hair Photobooth: Geometric and Photometric Acquisition of Real Hairstyles does pretty much what it says on the tin, although my reading is that this stuff won’t be real-time for a long while yet. And Statistical Reconstruction and Animation of Specific Speakers’ Gesturing Styles looks fascinating, but I haven’t been able to get it to load yet!

So, not the most fascinating SIGGRAPH ever from the point of view of the Machinima creator, but there’s still some good stuff in there. In particular, the developments in performance capture are really exciting.

MfD at the Cambridge Film Festival

Hugh "Nomad" Hancock — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 12:29:24 +0100

It has just occurred to us that we’ve not mentioned this.

Johnnie and I will be running two workshops at the Cambridge Film Festival in just under two weeks, on the Monday and the Tuesday (22nd and 23rd), entitled “Make a Film In Your Lunch Hour”. We’ll be teaching anyone attending not just how to use the tools, but how to make a, hopefully pretty decent, mini-film, all in an hour!

Also, Johnnie and I are appearing on various panels over the Festival. Check the schedule for more details.

Final list for the Cambridge Film Festival announced

Hugh "Nomad" Hancock — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 11:13:00 +0100

The final list of films to be shown in the Cambridge Film Festival’s Machinima lineup has been posted, and it’s a great selection, including both absolute classics (Red vs Blue, Snow Witch, Male Restroom Etiquette) and stuff even I’ve not heard of!

This is looking like a really good event. Stay tuned for a rundown of the event itself later in the week.

Reminder - the Machinima program is on the 22nd and 23rd of September, in Cambridge, UK.

Warning - "gotcha" in the Machinima Film Festival submissions process. If you're submitting a series, read this.

Hugh "Nomad" Hancock — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 14:50:00 +0100

The submissions process for this year’s Machinima Film Festival has a small “gotcha” of which everyone submitting should take account.

The MFF2008 organisers have decided that films will not be accepted for entry if any part of that film has been entered for competition at the Festival previously. This effectively bans work like feature-length adaptions of series pieces. The ban applies regardless of how much new material is also in the piece.

The last part is the crucial bit. Even if less than 25% of the material which makes up the film has been in the Festival before, the full film will be (and has been) turned down for entry. So far this year, the BloodSpell feature adaption and the Borg War feature adaption have been affected by this decision.

This has serious implications for Machinima filmakers. If you have any work that you’re contemplating reworking at a later date, you should strongly consider not submitting it to the Machinima Film Festival this year. That applies whether it be a series that you’re intending to turn into a feature film, a short film that will form the basis of a longer work, or merely an unfinished cut that you’re planning to rush in for the deadline.

Otherwise, any later film you complete based on your early work will be inelegible for future Machinima Film Festivals, and you’ll never have the chance for your best work to be recognised.

Oddly, festival organiser Friedrich Kirschner says that “Remixes [of existing work] are fine.”. However, adaptions definitely aren’t. If in doubt, ask before submitting (email festival@machinima.org).

If you’ve already submitted, but want to remove your submission based on this information, we’re not entirely sure how to do that, but we suggest emailing festival@machinima.org .

(Full disclosure - until recently, I was on the board of AMAS, which runs the film festival, and I’m also the director of BloodSpell, one of the films affected by this deicison.)

Machinima Expo - opportunity for older films (and Canadians!)

Hugh "Nomad" Hancock — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 14:58:00 +0100

Phil Rice pointed out something rather cool about the upcoming Machinima Expo in Montreal - they’ve got a completely open submissions process, meaning that you don’t have to have finished your film in the last year in order to submit it.

So this is a great opportunity to showcase your older work! Get submitting - you can submit to the Expo here.

In addition, if you’re a Canadian Machinima creator, they’re really, really keen to hear from you - there’s a Special Jury Prize open to Canadian filmmakers only.

Facial Motion Capture for $99?

Hugh "Nomad" Hancock — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 11:12:40 +0100

Motion capture is getting much cheaper very, very fast.

Case in point: Zign Track, which purports to do motion capture of markers on a face for $99 plus a webcam. The demos are impressive, although I’m not sure what Machinima packages aside from MotionBuilder would support imported facial data at present (UT3, perhaps?)

Having said that, now the capability’s there, the rest of the software may well follow.

Thanks to The Overcast for putting us on to that.