'Machinima' gains acceptance from filmmakers

http://news.yahoo.com/s/latimests/20051011/ts_latimes/straightfromvideo

Give us NPC avatars and better animation control and SL would rock this.

Suddenly, huge parts of the content industry in SL could be about making machinima artifacts.

There would be value chains (building stuff which can easily be made into movie quality artifacts, etc) and everything.

I tell you .. LindenLabs is MAJORLY missing the boat here.

If you really want NPC make your own. It won't be easy, but I am sure it can be done. I am against LL giving us anything but the very basics of the platform. More players making items will increase the quality of the items as other compete for business.

Woo, Blaze rules!!!

Yeah. You definitely have a point about the NPCs, tiger.

Man, and if only those Japanese research labs would hurry up with the humanoid robotics they've been promising, we could finally get that fledgling movie industry into full swing.

Hey, way to lead the charge, champ!

You mean primitars? Check the history wiki on how that turned out.

I know how they turned out, I have been also working on them. I agree that a better scripting language would be helpful, but I bet if you try, you can make something better. People have done other things that other would have said were impossible to do. Why not NPC?

I had an interesting conversation with Paul Marino at State of Play. I asked him how Second Life might get more machinema directors interested in SL as a tool. He advised the best way would be to show clips of machinema made in SL in the website http://www.machinema.com/

I'm working on this already, if you want to work on it with me, let me know. Why do you need NPC's when you have plenty of people who would love to act in your films? Or at least I've never had trouble recruiting talent. I'm also curious as to what you mean by better avatar animation controls - do you mean things like face and hand animations? if so I agree, but otherwiase, it's pretty easy to control animations.

bbc

p.s. Check out www.alt-zoom.com
p.p.s If you want, start talking here

Yeah, better face/hand animation control would be nice.

NPCs versus actors? It's an interesting point..

I guess I just think it would be nice to remove the hassle of dealing with actors? Every directors dream come true!

Well, in SL, you can make sure your actors follow a "script"

True..

Still, you can't control them that much. And what if they get into an IM conversation or move their mouse?

I also like the idea of being able to re-run my script over as many times as I like.

Of course, you might say, why not just use movie making software to do this?

Well,

a) SL is cheap
b) You have access to a very extensive 3d library
c) You can collaborate with fellow directors, set designers, etc on projects more easily.

You can control them very well with script attachments. Give residents NPCs and they'll come up with a dozen other missing features that are ruining the possibility of Second Life becoming the perfect machinima platform. Pah!

Ok ok fair enough.

How about better automated control of avatars then? Seems like a waste of resources to have people logged in but hey, I'm not going to argue with people making these movies.

I'm in favor, given technical power, of controlling more than one av at a time in a splitscreen mode not visually unlike Spy vs. Spy on the Commodore 64. 2, 4, 8 yous—it could sure come in handy for positioning multiple "actors" for when you need that finetuning control without asking friends to stand around and get into places. In other words, when you want to do things yourself. Or a main you and several "dummies" for those action scenes. You could set them up to do dance loops and blast them away, as a prelim experiment. (The digitally metaphysical part of this is I really, personally want OoAEs—Out of Avatar Experiences.)

Perhaps i am a little biased but I feel that in time Second Life will be the ideal platform for machinima creation. Its already so close that i sometimes have difficulty sleeping from the sheer excitement. In my opinion the only factor holding back widespread adoption of SL as a machinimation tool is a lack of knowledge of its capabilities by filmmakers. This failure of recognizing its potential is due to a serious lack of films created in SL. So what could be the reason behind the limited number of SL films.

Is it the tools? Lets start with the camera. It can easily be positioned virtually anywhere instantly. Camera movements are limited only by mouse dexterity. So perhaps its not the camera. Is it a lack of props? The synthetic world i experience everyday is full of this stuff. Is is because we don't have enough actors? I believe there is around 2000 during any given moment. So where is the wall?

I believe it is just simply human willpower. Perhaps their just aren't enough people interested in its possibilities as of yet. I rank highest among the guilty. I've been excited about machinimation in SL since Neph showed me the world nearly two years ago. During that time I've produced basically nothing. Until a device is invented which will record the focus of my thoughts, film making will always require serious effort no matter what form it takes. Billions of NPC's and trillions of custom animations will not change the simple fact that making any movie requires work and dedication. The process can be made cheaper. The number of skilled people required can be reduced. However, personal passion, labor, and artistic vision are all features which even Corey Linden himself can not program into Second Life.

In time machinima will not produce the next Spielberg. Instead it give some unknown genius born without the benefits of wealth and circumstance the tools to create a vision on the same level if not greater as the before mention million dollar director . I hope they are reading this post . If you are, then i suggest you get to work.

A Druid could have cast the spell to make the rain go away. Wake of Karana lvl 56

I think machinima and SL is a great match with tremendous potential. if you could have five essential filmmaking tools built into the client, what would they be?

1. camera object
2. quick n' easy animation pallette
3. ?
4. ?
5. ?

Four possibilities (of many):




I'm also presuming that the "camera object" can move along automated paths like a SLeadycam (hehe).

There should be an easier way to mix "between" animations because triggering one and then another often looks jerky. I've long thought of how fighter games do it, or even using an analog joystick or pressure sensitivity on a graphics tablet to "fade" between emotions.

Other things like transition wipes would prolly remain in postprocession for now...

1) A way to do lip-synching
2) Better lighting
3) Being able to manipulate a skybox would be nice too
4) Fraps built into the client
5) More Graphicy Goodness

Lack of lighting and art, oh yeah, and high FPS.


Fact is, Halo / WoW / Half Life / whatever .. they make great machinima because they have pre-done textures which make great eye candy.

SL doesn't have that. We don't have the sun flaring through the atmosphere.. we don't have speedtree (yet) .. we don't have prebaked lighting. It's hard to get

You can go anywhere in halo, wow, etc and start filming and it will look gorgeous. Not so in SL - you really need to scout.

Plus, you need a high end machine to get good FPS.

I think

a) speedtree
b) pre baked lighting
c) high FPS
d) better artists in SL

How about avatars that can actually interact with each other without having to be precisely positioned and animated with perfect synchrony. Avatars that are based on ragdolls and animations that have physical meaning rather than just visual. Arms that dont go through your body. I want to play a punch animation and have the system automatically calculate where the other avatar was punched and how much his body should bend in response to that.
I want my av to fall down stairs without having to make a custom animation and align it precisely so the av won't go through the stairs.
Havok2 supports ragdolls so in a 4-8 month timeframe it would make sense to think about these

A close second would be deformable objects. Got any ideas on how I can make a bouncy ball? It's not possible to change the scale of a physical object or retrieve the point where an object collided, so if I wanted to make something as simple as a ball that bounces around and realistically squishes itself against the floor / walls... without some convoluted workaround.

Animated objects. I actually made a linked object animation system that can even be used to make humanoid NPCs. However, SL scripts hold so little memory it won't be very useful unless I glue it to an external database server, and then the latency will introduce jitter into the animation playback so on top of that permanent storage I would have to come up with some LSL cache layer or something.
Aside from that, there are no synchrony guarantees in SL, so even when I trigger a bunch of llSetPrimitiveParams in multiple prims through a single llMessageLinked, you get weird stuff like the arm prim moving first and leaving the hand prim behind.

Customizable movement interpolation. As in, get the damn damping out of the way. Let me use, say, linear interpolation, or even none at all. Your damping function makes repeated movement calls horribly jittery because it's non linear. So if I tell an object to move 1 meter forward and then move 1 meter forward again, it will accelerate, decelerate, accelerate, decelerate due to the builtin, uncustomizable, non-disableable 1/n motion damping.

I could go on forever

Machinema really isn't machinema if you have perfect control of the actors - so I will not include avatar control improvements on my list.

1. Better camera control by LSL -- llPutCameraXYZ(vector location)
2. object-object communication
3. tree-based linking
4. avatars sitting on linked prims being moved when that linked prim is moved.
5. lip-syncing to voice/text would be cool

(with 4, I could turn PoseCubes into an extremely robust animation system because I could slash 75% of the code dealing with the work-around of this issue)

I would argue that this is in favor of SL machinima - you don't have to rely on the game's contents to work with your movie. What if I want to use WOW to make a sci-fi film? It might be possible, but it isn't easy. Sure I can mod a Half-Life 2 level, and the graphic quality might be better, but the tools are not as easy to use.


you can fake it


I don't think you finished your thought, but we do have prebaked lighting - why do you think Bedazzelds stuff looks so nice - they put static (aka, prebaked) textures into thier builds.


I agree, and so I went and got one - I get over 100 fps sometimes.


I'm really not sure how well speedtree by itsself will make machinima better in SL, although I would like to see it too. Prebaked lighting is a hack, I'd much rather have good realtime lighting, because I can bake my own if I need to. High fps - already spoken on. And for better artists, well, I don't know how much linden lab can help on that one.

aa

I had a lot of NPCs who worked for me in my store but I fired all of them because they didn't do a lick of work.

Wouldn't something that let you hold video conferences, run each other's computers, send files to each other, etc. be better for collaboration?