The Uncomfortable Chair (MS only)
Waiting (MS and Sims)
There has been extensive posts about Moviestorm over at Machinimafordummies.
iClone and Moviestorm, two products dedicated to machinima. Interesting, but I'm still waiting for an open source platform. Blender's produced two movies so far: Elephant Dreams and Plumiferos (the first a short, the second feature length). Perhaps Second Life's gradual movement in that direction is an answer (via MfD).
Waiting (MS and Sims)
There has been extensive posts about Moviestorm over at Machinimafordummies.
iClone and Moviestorm, two products dedicated to machinima. Interesting, but I'm still waiting for an open source platform. Blender's produced two movies so far: Elephant Dreams and Plumiferos (the first a short, the second feature length). Perhaps Second Life's gradual movement in that direction is an answer (via MfD).
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12 comments:
Blender's importance really appears to be underrated in machinima. It now comes with a real-time engine, which is going to continue to develop, as Blender itself has done. The program is superbly documented, has a thriving community, and... well, you've seen Elephant's Dream, you know what it's capable of.
Dabbling with it tends to unnerve, because its interface is such a paradigm shift. But once you push past that point, it is so worthwhile. And with the fairly recent real-time additions... it's the sleeper to watch. Not taking anything at all away from iC or MS, both have wonderful strengths, as does a product the Antics people are developing. But most people don't bring up Blender in that conversation (thank you for doing so!), and I think it'll be impossible to ignore before very long.
Hmmm...I have it installed, but have never really played with it. Might have to give it a whirl.
That's after I suck all the free time you seem to have and give it to myself.
I haven't used any of these (Blender, iC, MS), but I'm giving serious thoughts towards getting away from the SourceSDK due to all the hoops I have to jump through. Any word of how it compares in terms of ease-of-use / production time?
I'm kind of stuck right now because visually I'm pretty happy with the Source engine and wouldn't want to downgrade too much, but I'm not so happy with the 2 month per episode average production time.
I wish I had enough experience. Maybe Overman has some?
I am seriously thinking of diving in now after spending time in Source if I get the freedom to use my own content however I wish, no matter what the learning curve might be.
I haven't tried MovieStorm yet, and I've only played around with Blender just a little bit.
From what little bit I've played around with Blender, it seems to have a steep learning curve. If you know what you're doing in Source, you'll be well on your way to giving it a try I think.
I've played around with iClone a bit, too. A lot less steep of a learning curve, and the Motion Editor is fantastic. Very dry and very time consuming for creating fluid custom animations, but the results can be terrific. They just released a beta for transferring 3ds files into usable iClone files which is very neat. I think that program ends soon (early May I believe) so now may be a good time to dive in.
I wish somebody would do a comparison article.
Or maybe a contest? The same scene in different engines or software packages.
Yeah a comparison would be very helpful. In addition to being able to create your own animations (something Source allows a dead minimum of), I'm also interested in what default animations are available for humanoid models. I'm hardly a purist with this stuff, I'd love to have a library of already-made animations of people sitting down, dancing, climbing, tons of gestures, etc.
Britannica Dreams has screenshots and word that people can sign up for an open beta:
http://britannicadreams.com/wordpress/2007/04/22/moviestorm-screenshots/
Oh, if you're looking for default animations, iClone has a ton of them. A lot of dancing ones (seeing as they could prove difficult to create from scratch). You can also export your Motion Editor files and upload them to the web. There are a few forums where people swap 'em so there is a good deal of fresh content coming out.
Excellent post, Bllius. I've been working a lot with IClone and can vouch for it's ease of use. Blender has the same kind of learning curve that 3dsm or XSI does. Takes a lot of time to get up to speed, but as Ov points out it's really developing well as a possible machinima tool. Moviestorm has a lot of potential, but we won't really know what it can do until the release version is out.
The advantage IClone has is that the people behind it are committed to making it a useful machinima tool. Major problems in version 1.0 have been fixed in 2.0 (just out) due in large part to imput from the machinima community. Iclone had a great presentation at the Mackies and John Martin (their front man) just loves machinima.
Overman and I are going to do a review of IClone 2.0 in the next month or so. Perhaps we can work in some initial comparisons with MS and Blender. Will certainly give it some thought.
gToon
It'll be a few months yet, but we have a full comparison of the currently available Machinima packages, pro and non pro, in Machinima for Dummies.
Looking forward to it.
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