Machinima, real-time filmmaking, virtual production and VR. Four veteran machinimators share news, new films & filmmakers, and discuss the past, present and future of machinima.
Phil Rice 00:40
You. Hello and welcome to And now for something completely machinima, the podcast about machinima, virtual production and related technologies. I'm your host, Phil rice, and with me is Tracy Harwood, hello and Damian Valentine, hello, Ricky is away. No particular reason. He's just had enough of our nonsense, so he'll be back in a future episode. So this episode, we cover the news, and there's quite a bit of happenings to discuss. So Tracy, why don't you take the lead? Yeah, sure,
Tracy Harwood 01:19
absolutely. I'll start with a few projects. So I found some really good projects again this this month. First off, we have Isoterica, who have released their latest music video, and it's another fab one created in Unreal revealing even more of that astonishing story world we talked about a few months back. I think it was in episode about, it's about 30 episodes ago. I think, anyway, I'll put a link in the in the show notes. Esoterica
Phil Rice 01:51
is that, is that the music video that had, like the kind of a cybernetic yes man suspended in almost like a jungle or something, and all these wires coming out of the head and stuff really evocative, looking, okay, exactly,
Tracy Harwood 02:06
and very memorable video. And the young woman with the magic mushrooms, right, right, right. So this is actually a bit more of the lead into that part of the story. Actually, it's quite interesting. It's called dis utopia, and brilliant song as well. So definitely check that one out. I also saw, well, I picked up on this, but I haven't actually sat and watched it a full two hours, stage play of Hamilton made in Animal Crossing, I would say it's not really my sort of thing, but it's an interesting use of the game to audio, which has clearly been taken from a stage performance, and that's by GK animations. And I'll put the link on on that. There's quite a lot of comments on there saying, Yeah, it's great idea. I've sat and watched 10 minutes of it. Not sure I can watch out two hours, but I'll see
Damien Valentine 03:06
Animal Crossing is a very unique game to make machinima with. I think I chose a film way back or a sci fi thing. It's obviously native to Nintendo Switch, which is a portable console. I'll be quite intrigued to have a look at this. I don't know if I want to watch the whole show. I've seen the play of Hamilton. It was very good. I'm interested to see how it translates into Animal Crossing. Yeah, yeah. And I got a friend, I think, who will really appreciate this, so to send it to her as well. So brilliant.
Tracy Harwood 03:39
Yeah, check it out. Let's see what folks think to this one. And then another film that I picked up on is a is what's described as the final cinematic of No Man's Sky, which has been released by evil Dr pork chop, because it's actually a machinima made with mod tools created by somebody called Bab school, who, very sadly, has stage four cancer. And the film is actually there to promote a Go Fund Me for him. So I'll share the link take a look at the film. It's a beautiful film, and if you've got a few shekels to push his way. Then I would, I would do that too. So that's that one. And then Phil, you created Chuck Norris versus 50,000 cavemen made in ultimate Epic Battle Simulator too.
04:43
And icon. And
Tracy Harwood 04:45
I, well, yes, and I
Phil Rice 04:46
candid with some icon, yeah, I have
Tracy Harwood 04:48
to say I absolutely love your scientific experiments and the way you talk about one, and this one the lead into the 50,000 Cavemen versus China. Brilliant, absolutely brilliant setup. You've got to make more of these. These are fantastic.
Phil Rice 05:08
I'll tell you. I was going to tell you between recordings and I forgot. So I'll tell you now the way that this evolved. So ultimate Epic Battle Simulator. And now number two is a tool that, or a game that, or Ricky introduced me to probably two years ago. He brought it up. I don't think we've ever reviewed, maybe we did review a film made with it, because I think Ricky picked one, and it was like, you know, 100,000 Santas versus 100,000 penguins, or something really absurd like that. And that's when he first called my attention to the tool. So I had picked it up on Steam back then, and have had it, and just thought at some point I need to do something with that and see what the possibilities are. So there was a Saturday afternoon that I just went through and just played with it for, you know, a few hours, and ended up recording all this footage of several different scenarios, but one of which was this absurd one where there's this supremely overpowered single Chuck Norris character that, as it plays out in the in the game, he defeats all 50,000 cavemen, yeah, and walks away At the victor, yeah, and doesn't, doesn't have a scratch on him, you know, indeed. So I had recorded all this footage of it, and I did some old fashioned, uh, machinima camera work, where it's, you're live in there, and just kind of flying the camera around. I just recorded all of that just in one pass. You know, our it, it took, it took quite some time for the battle to complete, and I think I ended up doing two iterations of it, because on the first one, I had set the time to pass, and it became night time, and then it just didn't look as good. So I ran a second one where the time was frozen. But anyway, so I had all this absurd footage, and so then I, then I just thought, Okay, I don't want to just release a video that's just ultimate Epic Battle Simulator and just this. It's just not, it's not the way I do things. So can I come up with a premise that fits this idea, this crazy idea of, you know, this fantastical 1980s movie, basically, you know, can I come up with something that at least holds together, you know, for the purposes of the story? And that's how the the intro was written. So yeah, and I ended up being more pleased with than I thought I was going to be. I really thought it was going to be kind of a throwaway thing, but I ended up really liking it. Spent quite a bit of time on the the icon part of it to to tune up those performances and stuff and and then the very there's a there's an ending bit with the tidal wave. That was something that the entire film was already done, like it was in DaVinci Resolve. It was edited, it was color corrected. Everything was ready and but it was just ending pretty abruptly. Of just, you know, him still fighting, and this the sun going down, and then just my, you know, my outro logo. And I just thought, Nah, what if we could? And I had recorded some footage of right at the tail end of of the battle, there's these elements where you can play God with the weather and have these, these catastrophic events happen. And so I did some of those and caught footage of it. And so I thought, what if, now, can I write an extension to the premise to make that make some sense? So it's really weird how this is not how I normally approach a movie. I normally, I'm a big planner, so I chart stuff out ahead of time, and there's, for most productions, there's not a whole lot of improv that late in the game, you know. But this one really, the footage came first, and then it was a matter of, what, what can I do with this? Can I actually construct a story around this that, while silly, still makes some sense. So yeah, I'm pretty happy with it, and the viewers seem to be pretty happy with it too. That it just, it's, it's silly and fun, and I love that I did it. I don't know, I don't know how to, I don't know how to do other ideas with it. I have done one other film with with the battle simulator, but it was a music video one, and it was Zeus on Mount Olympus fighting off this horde of soldiers coming up the mountain, and like this cascade of blood starts spilling down the mountain. And it was just this really wild image. And so I paired it with some kind of, I don't know, Hans Zimmer style, epic music and whatever. And that one wasn't. That was not, not quite as impactful, maybe because it just doesn't have to any comedy in it whatsoever. But anyway, it's a fun tool to play with, and I'd recommend it. It's not really a game, per se. It's one of those that's more of a sandbox type thing, and you're mostly just setting up weird scenarios, and there's a pretty active modding community that add different types of, you know, characters that do battle, and you can do some pretty crazy stuff. Lot of lot of intellectual property from from known universes represented. I mean, like you saw that Chuck Norris, who in there they call chunk Norris, because he's a little bit over, has eaten a little bit more pizza than the real Chuck Norris ever has, I think, and they've got a lot of Lord of the Rings stuff in there. And there's some some different anime characters that I didn't even know who they were. So it's a fun tool to play with. It's not really a serious thing, but it's, it's fun. So anyway, yeah, that's the story behind
Tracy Harwood 11:04
that. No, not withstanding the game. The bit that made me laugh so much was, was the scientific experiment leading into it, your wit and humor just so comes through on that. Yeah, setup. It's brilliant. Yeah, the
Phil Rice 11:20
press releases. Yeah, fantastic. It was fun to write. It was really fun to perform. That's another one that I used 11 labs on, by the way, for Dr feckles. I so that way I got to perform. It actually the receptionist has one one line too. And that was, again, 11 labs, voice synthesis. I've really fallen in love with that technique, because if I were ever going to embark on a long term project, like a long series or or a feature length work like Damien does, I would do what Damien does, and that is aggregate a cast and get get other people involved in stuff, because there's something uniquely gratifying about working with other people in that way. Right now, the phase that I'm in is a lot of one offs, a lot of we're just going to visit here briefly and then do it and it just and I'm trying to keep a kind of a crazy pace. I'm releasing a video every week, and I've done so for over two and a half years now. It's nuts. So for expediency purposes, this, this, this works really well, or for someone who is just, would would rather do things as a solo creator, it's a really nice option, and it's I do not like the outcome of what I would call AI generated voice, like the text to speech. It's horrible. It's very inhuman sounding. This was a way that I don't know, maybe I'm making excuses here that anti AI purists would criticize, and fair enough, but for me, a solo performer, it's basically a way to be able to do impressions that my voice isn't capable of, but I still want to control every syllable of every rhythm of delivery. In a longer term project, it makes more sense to actually get an actor involved, and that way, when you get the lines back, I'm sure, Damien, you've experienced this countless times with your with with Heir to the Empire, that you have some surprise, some some pleasant surprise in what they what they delivered based on your your text, that's there's nothing to be taken away from that. That is a whenever you can do that you should, for sure. But those voice synthesis feels like kind of a happy medium for me, for for my situation.
Damien Valentine 13:40
I didn't know 11 Labs had that feature, which I'm quite intrigued by, because when I'm doing Captain Pelion in s The Empire, to make him sound initially, I didn't have that gravelly voice, but he's a he's an older character, so I sounded too young for him. And I thought at one point I had a cold. So I read all of his dialog for the entire book. While I had that cold, I don't want to get another cold again just to do this dialog. So I could do this. I could put in my, yeah, recorded dialog before as
Phil Rice 14:11
the first for bit parts in particular, I think that would make a lot of sense for ones with with identifiable voices, like Han or Luke. I don't know that you could pull it off without some some real finagling, and you probably wouldn't want to, right? But for, yeah, for for other parts like that, who don't have an already defined voice, there's an interesting feature that you can pair with voice synthesis that will let you create a voice clone, so with your cold Damien, for example, yeah. And now that you've given me this idea, I will probably do this the next time I get a cold. Is you, you record one minute of talking, and it will create a voice that then you can use to through voice synthesis to make it say anything. And it will, it will honor that timbre. So. I've done that for some of the there's two different music videos that I've done that are hip hop, and I used that technique where it was actually a cloned voice that I created and then performed through like, it's almost like a mask that you're wearing for the thing. It's fascinating stuff. So anyway, yeah, that's, that's how that came to be. It was so much fun to make it's
Tracy Harwood 15:27
even better to watch it. Thank you. Well, I picked up on another project as well. By the time this episode goes out, we'll know the result of this. But this is the remarkable life of ibelin. I think we've talked about it before. Well, it's made the documentary shortlisting for the 2025, Oscars. It's the story of how a young man with a terrible muscle wasting disease who lived his best life in World of Warcraft was where that story was discovered by by his parents after he passed away. So it's quite a quite a tragic story, but it's also a very uplifting story about the role of a of a virtual world in in somebody's life. I guess. Have we
Phil Rice 16:18
talked about that film before, or having a similar story. Wasn't there a similar story with someone in Second Life where it was a similar thing? Oh, maybe not. Well,
Tracy Harwood 16:28
it's not a unique story for for virtual worlds, that is for sure. I mean, I can remember having conversations about events that were taking place in some of these, you know, Metaverse like like worlds that celebrated people's lives in different ways. But this one is the first one I think that's got all the way to something like the Oscars. So as we don't know the outcome at this moment in time, I'm certainly wishing that this is the one that wins. And no doubt next time we speak, we'll know the outcome of it
Damien Valentine 17:04
must be the first machine related film ever got to the Oscars.
Tracy Harwood 17:09
Indeed, it is, although Phil you were saying earlier about a blender short, it's actually a feature length. Feature length. Is it okay? Feature
Phil Rice 17:18
length film called flow, made by the, the, the, I say company, but it's very small team Janice films and the the lead filmmaker, he's got a it's against zilbados. I think I don't know how to pronounce it. I'm butchering it, but, yeah, but he's, it's Latvian group. The film is, is extraordinary, like I compare it to, it's, it's something that, if it had emerged out of Pixar at Pixar peak days, you know when, when all that whole series of really good early films that they did this. This fits right in with that, like, it's, it's wonderful, and yet it's got a strangeness to it that I don't think Pixar was ever daring enough to really incorporate it's, it's, it's mesmerizing. There's no spoken dialog in it whatsoever. It follows animals, primarily a cat, but there are some other animals who are major characters. And this adventure, and I won't spoil it, because the plot device that's ends up playing a major role in it, was kind of a surprise to me, even though I'd seen the trailers, and it was a really intriguing surprise. So that's one worth looking for. It's not, I don't think it's on any streaming networks yet, but it's bound to be soon. Yeah, it's, it's really and it's a neat story. I follow him on on x, the filmmaker, he's been posting quite a bit of behind the scenes stuff about how it was made. One, one tidbit that stuck out to me that I found humorous was all the animal sounds in the film, you know, the birds, the cat, etc. They're authentic, every single one of them authentic animal sounds. But there's a capybara who is one of the characters, and they don't make any vocal sounds in real life. So he used the sound of a of a young camel, like a, almost a, like a cross between a bleat and a growl, right this? And it fits perfectly, like it's it works wonderfully to characterize the that character. So anyway, that's one to definitely watch out for, and that one's in the Oscar running. In some regard, it's been named
Tracy Harwood 19:44
so unique year then, because two, yeah, films with machinima. You know, machinima sort of, what would we say? Connections, leaning. Yes, yeah, leanings, yes, absolutely, in the in the mix. Fantastic. First year ever, brilliant. So we'll look forward to reporting on that next month, I think. And then I've got a few tech and product updates for you. Firstly, John Gaeta's escape, AI platform for emerging artists, has now gone to beta early, I believe, and I'll put a link for you to check that out. It's basically positioned as a creator marketplace for emerging forms of entertainment. I don't really know a lot more about it than that, but I'm quite intrigued to see what he's up to, because he's always coming up with novel, very interesting ideas.
Phil Rice 20:39
I feel dumb asking this, because I should know it, but remind me where I would know John gate, his name from. I know. I know the name, okay, associated with Mass Effect, no,
Tracy Harwood 20:48
John, okay. Is the bullet time man, oh, okay. And actually a long time you will know Him also, long, long time connection with machinima community, where, in those very early pioneer days, he went under the pseudonym of dolt wisnie, okay, but it was Industrial Light Magic at the time, and he and Kim Libreri won the Oscar for the special effects, for creating the matrix, Bullet Time, shot Gotcha. So there you go. He's somebody that we follow, yeah, and vice versa, I think actually in fairness. Okay, so that's that one I saw, another and perhaps more fun version of Beam NG's auto carnage game that we covered in a film. Pick your film. Pick Phil last year, where we were a little exercised, yeah, on the morality of the game content. Should we say this one's called at all costs by Studio, far out games. I don't think it's out actually yet, but there is a cracking trailer for it. What I really like about it is the esthetics of it. It's a little bit like sort of a mash between GTA and tf two, Team Fortress two is kind of smashed together. I quite like that, that look of it. Quite what will come out of it, I don't really know, but I I am looking forward to seeing it's got great physics in it as well, which is the, it's the GTA side of it, although it's, yeah, highly,
Phil Rice 22:27
highly destructible environment, like city wide, is one of the features that they tell for it. There is a demo available on Steam right now, a free demo. Oh, that's probably what I and I've watched some some, let's play video of the first probably 2030 minutes of the game, right? Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's an interesting vibe, yeah, definitely
Tracy Harwood 22:51
like the look of that far more than I do the beam ng one, I have to say. And then I've got a couple of AI related matters. Firstly, Second Life has launched its AI character design at all. There's a great video introduction to it, which I'll put a link to, then project Odyssey, which is a an entity, organization, or whatever that's about supporting an AI filmmaking creator community has announced it Season Two award winners. They had something like four and a half 1000 submissions, something like 190 hours worth of film submitted, and over 30,000 sign ups for this, which I think is an astonishing achievement considering all the kickback everybody's giving AI generated content at the moment, there's a live stream to the award ceremony, which I'll put a link to, and then also put a link to the website where you can actually watch the winners and the runners up. Fascinating content, I'd say, not as good as the stuff that I shared a link to last year on the runway Film Festival last year's runway Film Festival, which I think at the moment, has also got another film festival running, which we talked about last month. And I think that's still open as we speak at moment, thinking,
Damien Valentine 24:14
regardless of how you feel about AI or not, just watching all of those submissions and deciding who wins is a huge undertaking. I remember when we were doing the Machinima Film Festival, and that took a lot of work to to review those films. And we did, we'd get 100 maybe 200 at most. And, you know, I was thinking that was films to watch, yeah, so when you've got that many,
Tracy Harwood 24:38
yeah, I don't know there's a there's a hell of a lot of people involved in that. And I have to say, I don't know a single one of the names. When you look at that, they're all it's, it seems to be a European led project. I'd say 50 or 60 people are named on the on that website. The or of that order. Yeah,
Damien Valentine 25:01
it's a lot more sense. We have a team of about five. Yeah, this
Tracy Harwood 25:05
is a massive, massive kind of endeavor. Kind of makes me wonder what it's really all about. And there are some questions about the commerciality of what they're, what they're, what they're doing, but, um, definitely worth you know, I'm kind of interested in in how it unfolds. So I'm kind of following all of these things at the moment, just to see what the direction of travel is with this and this one seems to have certainly hit a sweet spot at the moment, so we'll see where it goes. I think then I was also following up this month what Getty has been up to, and it's been commenting basically on the UK's copyright and AI government. This is UK government's copyright and AI consultation process, which which actually has now ended just literally a week ago. As we're recording it's arguing, what the what the UK Government proposes, which is to add an exception to the law, which would enable companies to train on content for free unless rights are proactively reserved. It's basically claiming that that is unworkable because it will not recover anything that's already been used in any of them, in any of the models, or where content becomes detached from its author, downstream so models using generated content as its own training source, and it's asking and arguing, therefore, that the the process is required to protect IP basically unfairly burden the distributors of creative content, such as the likes of Getty. Now it's required under the UK government's guidelines to actually make this statement, and it's providing links that people could follow through in order to sort of engage with their local MP. But it kind of, you know, it resonated a little bit because, well, you recall, if you if you watch this last month, I also talked a bit about this as well, where we reflected on the US copyright court's decision not to allow copyright on content created by AI, and how I felt at The time that ultimately what that was going to mean is that the likes of Getty will become a kind of a bank for creators. And what's kind of interesting about this, this current sort of development, is that actually that seems to be playing out here, because that does seem to be one of the arguments that these guys are making that they are indeed going to be overburdened with administration, so they're kicking back on it. Clearly, I think it remains a very hot area for discussion, and one I'm sure that will continue to follow, not least because Gettys merger announcement with shut stock also highlighted that they were open to enabling creators to promote work on their platform that included not just image, but also music, 3d assets and what they referred to as other things, whatever they're going to be,
Phil Rice 28:19
right?
Tracy Harwood 28:19
So, yeah, bit of a mishmash there, but that's it for me this month.
Damien Valentine 28:27
All right. Well, I got some news, not as much as last month, but got a few interesting things. First off, the BBC Radiophonic workshop is a very famous parts of BBC that produced lots of sound effects, especially for shows like Doctor Who and the hitch Guide to the Galaxy, and pretty much anything the BBC produced, anything sci fi is in particular. Well, the sound archive for Doctor Who and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy have been made available now. You do have to pay a subscription to access this content, so I have not done that, so I don't know exactly what's in there, but it's available for composers and sound effects engineers and to make use of as long as you pay the fee, which is 149 pounds, I think that's for a year. I'm not sure. And I believe you can use those effects however you like. Some of these sound effects are still in use today, like for Doctor Who, you know, the dialect sound effects, they make this kind of buzzing sound. It goes all the way back to the original series. They still use that sound effect now. So these are good sound effects you can use. So that's worth checking out, especially if you're making something along those lines.
Phil Rice 29:51
Did I understand you? Right? That Damien that it's a it's a subscription,
Damien Valentine 29:55
yeah, I believe it's a for a year. I haven't actually. Actually looked too closely at it, because it wasn't something I was planning to do, but I just saw it came up, I thought, Well, I'm sure there'll be some people out there who want to access these sound effects. So So
Phil Rice 30:09
it's interesting, because I wonder, sometimes I wonder about how licensing works for something that is sold as a subscription instead of a perpetual license. Back in the day, long time ago, used to, you know, someone that was in the professional sound mixing, you know, environment, you would purchase a library. Oh gosh, there was one company out of LA that did a lot of them, Hollywood, something or other, they called themselves. And you could purchase that actually, back then, they sold it on CD, but you could, you could purchase this volume, and it came with a license certificate, and then you could use them with within certain restrictions. You know, you couldn't resell them and things like that, obviously, but you could use them in productions from that point going forward, and you had that license certificate, so if any issue came up and you know, you're you were ever questioned about it, you could show, yeah, I have the ownership, I have the license to be able to use these so on a subscription, I'm what I'm wondering about is if someone subscribes to that library and they implement those sound effects into their production And then they stop their subscription at the end of the term. So how does the licensing work for that? Because that video might not be released until after the subscriptions up, or it might be that it it endures long past that, right? It's just, it's just, I just wonder about that, like, how does, how does that work? Maybe for sound effects, there's, it could be argued that there's, there's no enforcement mechanism currently, like there is for music music, YouTube can detect that even as background music on a stream, it can detect commercial music, and it will take care of whatever license exact action is they're set up for on it with sound effects. I don't think they're doing it that way, but that doesn't mean it won't be possible in the future. So I don't know. I wonder. I guess probably I need, would need to read through the terms to see how they address that, because I'm sure they do. So I've never understood how that works. With a subscription product for for a licensed piece of audio like that,
Damien Valentine 32:25
right? So I looked that up as you asked the question. So I've been out of here. I gotta correct myself. It looks like it's a one time purchase. Oh, okay, for that one. So it doesn't look like any. There's no mention of subscription actually, on the website. Okay, very good doing it. So I think, well,
Phil Rice 32:46
everyone then, then, let me rephrase the question. Then it applies to there. I know there are some listeners out there who they use either amuse music or a sound library or a combination of both. There's, there's many companies out there that offer that as a subscription, where you can, as long you're subscribed, there, you can make use of their assets. So now I'm curious about how it works for them, like, if I, if I, if I, in 2024 have a subscription to I can't think of any of the names of them. Now, that's so stupid, but, you know, there's a song, and I put it in my video, and then I release it, you know, now, or late last year, or whatever. But I'm not continuing to pay for a license for that. I'm really curious how that works. I
Damien Valentine 33:36
don't remember what it was, but there was one site that was subscription based for content. It might have been 3d models, so not necessarily musical sound effects. And I think they said that as long as you release your product before the subscription expires, then you're free to Okay,
Phil Rice 33:58
fair enough. But that's going to be on an honor system, really, in in this environment with sound effects, anyway, it's going to be an honor system, but at least there's a parameter there that kind of makes sense, I guess, because otherwise, why continue to subscription? You know what I'm saying, like, why wouldn't someone just subscribe for a month or a year or whatever? The minimum is, download everything they can within the limits, and then cut off the subscription. They have to guard themselves against that somehow. I just don't know how
Damien Valentine 34:25
it works. And the other way around, that would be to get the content you want. Cancel your subscription however long it takes you to complete your project, subscribe for the minimum amounts, so it could be a month or whatever. Yeah, release your project in that your project in that month, and then you're free,
Phil Rice 34:41
which, to me, that's fair game. Yeah, if they're going to let you do that, then that's fair game, you know. But I guess the question would be, if it's a library that you could just go download, like, why would anyone sustain a long term subscription to that unless you just didn't want to bother with downloading and storing all that stuff? Locally, I guess that would would be a reason. But, or they're adding new content, or they're adding new content regularly, right? Yeah, that has to be, I would think that has to be, be part of the draw. Yeah, I'll bet the BBC collection has some gems in there, for sure.
Damien Valentine 35:15
Yeah, now I know it's a one time purchase. I might attempt it.
Phil Rice 35:20
It's not a bad price for a one time, yeah, and that's a bit steep for an annual but that's not bad for a one time, depending on on what the volume of sounds is, but it sounds pretty reasonable, yeah, especially for if it's sci fi related a lot, then obviously you'll, you'll get some knowledge out of that, won't you? Yeah, might
Damien Valentine 35:38
be fun to put a dialect sound effect in the Star Wars thing to see, if anyone knows
Tracy Harwood 35:43
only you, yeah,
Damien Valentine 35:45
of course. Now I've said it, I can't do it
Tracy Harwood 35:50
extra, am I right?
Damien Valentine 35:54
The next thing, Valve have added redest tracking. Valve adds all the Team Fortress two client and server game code to its source mod tools, letting mods, modders build completely new games based on the Team Fortress two and publish on the steam. Now, I don't know if this is directly going to affect machinery or not, but if you want to make something, a game along those lines, or maybe if you want to make some machine, well, using a similar kind of concept to those games. This is probably a way to do that. Honestly, I'm not a coder. I've not looked at this in any kind of detail, so I don't know how any of that's going to work, but I thought it's interesting and worth mentioning for those of you out there who may want to give it a try. The next one is, there's an MMO coming up called dune awakening. It's got a release date, and there's a trailer for it. As I speak, there's a character creator tool that's been made. I haven't had a chance to try it out. I think that's part of steam Next Fest. So that may disappear before the game is released, which will be after this goes out. I'm not sure yet, because some of those demos still stick around. And the reason I mentioned this is these types of MMO and survival games are great tools for machinima, because they've got the open world, and you can get a load of people together to act out the scenes with your characters. The game looks stunning. It's using the same. It's beautiful. Look, yes, yeah, that's the recent films. So if you're interested in making a June or some kind of desert themed film, maybe this is something to look at, and the release date is in May, so it's not that far off.
Tracy Harwood 37:35
Are there worms in it? Yes,
Damien Valentine 37:36
there are sand worms in it, but you can't ride on them yet. Yeah, I think they were worried that people would get on a sound web and just have it navigate and eat everyone
Phil Rice 37:46
else. Yeah, that's a bit what? What's the kid? The term that kids use, it's a bit op, yeah, bit overpowered to be able to ride the worms. Yeah,
Damien Valentine 37:56
I did read that you can put a Thumper down, which is in the dune universe. It's a device you put in the sand, and it's something same but they're still limiting how useful that's going to be for exactly the same reason that you can't just put one in the base of another player that you don't like and have it come up and come and eat the bass, because these structures are persistent in the online environment. Yeah. So there are building tools as well, so you can build your base and whatever kind of settlement you want. The ornathopters, which are the flying aircraft in the June world. In this trailer, they show that someone customizing their own by placing different components. So you're not just customizing the color scheme, you're actually choosing like the cockpit shape and the wing shape and all kinds of other stuff. You you get a lot of flexibility with that. So it'd be interesting to see what machine creators do with this.
Phil Rice 38:47
It's a really gorgeous looking game, I gotta say, like the environments, the architecture, the the vehicles, yeah, and the characters. It's, it's, it kind of almost feels like the look of it feels like a spiritual successor to like Mass Effect that gets on that. It's at that level of cinematic look really gorgeous. I'm really tempted
Damien Valentine 39:09
to try, but it's one of those games that I'll either not have time for or I'll make too much time. I'm not getting anything else done.
Phil Rice 39:16
So I totally feel, yeah, yeah, that's, that's the challenge.
Damien Valentine 39:20
And the last one is a film recommendation. It's not strictly machinima, but it is video game related. And I should have mentioned it last month, but I kind of forgot to add it to our news collection. It's Tetris. Now, this is not a weird way of making a Tetris movie. It's actually a movie about how Tetris, the game, was made, and it kind of goes off into this Jason Vaughan kind of spy movie thing that she did not expect. And I'm sure it is exaggerated a bit for this movie, but there is a it's based on real life. Yeah, I'm sure they've,
Phil Rice 39:56
I'm sure they've heightened the drama a little bit. But, yeah, it's actually. Imagine story.
Tracy Harwood 40:01
I can't imagine. They've actually heightened it all that much, because what was portrayed in there is exactly the sort of thing that used to go on.
Damien Valentine 40:08
Yeah, I don't know how accurate the car chase was.
Tracy Harwood 40:11
Oh, well, things like that. Yeah, yeah, no, I meant the the, you know, one group across from another, and all and all being on site at the same time and all that kind
Damien Valentine 40:22
it's brilliant stories based on what really happened, but they probably added a little more action to it than maybe what really happened. I'd highly recommend this film, because I really enjoyed it. And there are some scenes where they show Tetris, the actual game in progress. So there's a little bit machinima there, because that's real game footage. And there's some moments where, especially in the car chase I just mentioned, it kind of gets this sort of video gaming look where a car crashes, you kind of get that just for a few seconds of they transfer into some more blocky shapes. Yeah, it's really good, really well, really well written, extremely well acted. And it's a very interesting story. So it's worth, yeah, the
Phil Rice 41:07
lead guy, Taron Egerton, is just, he's magic, man, yeah, he's really, really magic. He's, I mean, this isn't the first film that I've thought that about him, but he's, he's terrific.
Damien Valentine 41:20
There's some other famous British actors who I never would have ever thought I'd hear them talking about Tetris.
Phil Rice 41:27
They probably never thought so either.
Damien Valentine 41:29
No, but yeah, I highly recommend that film, and that's it for my machine venues this month.
Phil Rice 41:37
All right. Well, Liberty City, the environment for GTA four, The much loved game has been ported, or is in the process of being ported to GTA five. Oh, the GTA five engine. So basically that whole environment of it down to, you know, obviously buildings, roads, but vehicles and the iconic locations. What was the other thing I was going to mention, vehicles get tired anyway. It's been ported. Port it over. And it's interesting how they did this, because it's a mod, obviously, and they basically created a connection point at the airport, so you basically access this new Liberty City that's GT five by visiting the airport, which is a location in GTA five, and it will take you through this little cut scene where you take an airplane over to and land in Liberty City, and then you're there.
Damien Valentine 42:50
That's a really clever idea, yes, and it's
Phil Rice 42:53
really well executed. It's been, I mean, first of all, it it enhances some of the the beauty that's possible. And then GTA five itself is obviously a better looking game than GTA four was. But on top of that, with all the shader mods that have been released for GTA five, some of them, some of them very similar to what's been done with cyberpunk as well, where it's almost photorealistic that the the water reflections and and the the lighting and all of that stuff. So it's, it's, it's pretty neat to see GTA four, which, which, some, some, not more than a few people Herald as was, overall, a better game from the single player experience anyway, than GTA five was just a, just a more intriguing story with what was the lead character's name and for the Eastern European guy name now, but I love that game. It's, it's, it's, I had no it took no effort at all to summon the energy to play through the single player experience in that from beginning to end, because he was just a really interesting story. This, this kind of a hardened immigrant who's, you know, come to America on this promise and just really wants to make the best of it. But, you know, society is what it is, and he's driven in another direction. And, oh, it's, it's, it's good stuff there rock stars always had, has long had a keen ear for I'm looking forward to GTA six for that very reason I have, I have every faith that they will, once again, present us with a story that is set well within its time. And also, you know, the social commentary of that whole game series is delightful and biting, a lot of a lot of cynical wit, down to the talk radio guy Laszlo, who's been through all the games. So anyway, that's been that's, that's worth checking out. It is a free mod, and it's, it's being hairly, very highly received. So, and if you don't want to download and play it, go check out YouTube. There's, there's lots of, let's plays of it right now, people exploring it. It's pretty neat. It'd
Damien Valentine 45:16
be interesting if they just put the city itself of New York into I know it's not, it's Liberty City, but if they added more to it, or if it's just exactly as it was in GTA four, because I remember when four came out, group of friends I played games with online regularly. One of them lives in New York, so we asked him, is his house in the game? He said, Give me half an hour I'll go and check half an hour later, came back said, no, they left that street out. They was to narrow it down just a little bit. So very interesting to know if these modders put more in, or if it's just exactly what keeps in
Phil Rice 45:52
GTA I'm not sure about that. I do believe that I saw somewhere that they did activate a lot of interiors, right? Just like GTA four had a lot more interior building interiors you could go into, whereas GTA five, the base game anyway, a lot of areas that you never really saw the insides of, except for maybe during certain sequences in the single player experience. But then it was locked out for everything else. And they're a lot of the mods around GTA five were around building out interiors for these, these intriguing looking buildings. And my understanding is, is that this, this port, does have a lot of building interiors as well, so it's a but as as to whether they added more to the city, I'm not sure.
Damien Valentine 46:38
But the interiors ago, especially for machinima, if you're making something absolutely. Yeah. Really, those movie mod tools that are not the models the movie tools are in the part of the game interesting to see what people do in New York Liberty City.
Phil Rice 46:51
Yeah, I'm I don't have any reason to think that the rock star editor won't work or director mode won't work with the mod. But I suppose that's that's worth checking on and testing. I'm not sure. John Martin had a really, really interesting post. John Martin is one of the essentially founders of I clone. He's been with them for a very, very long time. He and his brother both have been involved in that space for for a long time, and he had a really interesting post that he put on his personal Facebook. He probably posted it elsewhere as well, but that's where I saw it, and basically outlining this process that that. So we've talked some about how these AI models work and that these that you can for mid journey and other other things like that, that you there's a, there's a concept where you could have your own training database, right, a private one, instead of the one that's controversial is the one that trains on everybody's art without their permission, and, you know, steals this, that and the other. But you can, you can tune these engines and run a local version of them where they will actually, and actually some of the, some of the online versions, I think it's probably a paid subscription. You can actually get the ability to to create your own training database, which basically your own images. And the process that he was outlining is with cling AI, that's k, l, I N, G, and they basically built a, essentially an AI training database out of images generated from I clone using the two it's Kevin and is it Camera? Is the is it? Camila is the female main male and female stock characters for iClone, which are very high detail that they look very sharp, and they created these AI training engines with these strategic shots of those characters in iClone. And then could then generate these, could generate video with that. I clone esthetic. It was really, really fascinating, a fascinating application of that. I'm sure that the the big audience for that is for the people who are really into the character creator for or, or the metahuman space, or this, this whole notion of that, it's a pretty neat experiment, and he detailed a lot of that. So we'll, we'll include a link to to that where he talks some about how that worked, but basically that the the training database wasn't actually images. It was videos. And it was, I want to say that it was two or three dozen videos of motion with those characters were in there, and then they used that to to be able to generate kind of this pure and character consistent result, which I think is interesting. And again, every time we bring up AI, we always give the disclaimer, because we acknowledge that it's there's controversy around. It. But I think anyone that's that's grounded in reality is eventually gonna say, okay, eventually that's going to be resolved, and these tools are going to exist, and they're going to have a place in the creative process. And I feel like that, that this experiment is almost it's like done with that future in mind. You know, of a sense of this is how this tool could be used in a real production environment and be useful. So I don't personally find any practical applicant, like when I read through and hear it and stuff, I marvel at the result, but it's just doesn't really fit into my process at all. But I think for some people it will, you know, and it might even be that applications like this and like the the series that we reviewed earlier this month of the the Glorons, you know that it's cases like that that I think are going to help legitimize. And for lack of a better word, clean, AI, of the seedier part of its reputation, you know, the the one that's rooted in this idea of art theft. And okay, now let's, let's hopefully resolve in a proper, legal way, all of that, and now we're left with these tools that can do these incredible things, and what are some legitimate ways to use them that are not controversial in that way? I think this is one of them. So I like seeing developments like this, I do
Damien Valentine 51:42
like the idea of being able to use train your own data, and it doesn't use anything else. Yeah, you're only putting in what you've created yourself, although I don't think I'd find that particularly useful myself either. Because if I've got the data, like the motion data, well, I've already done it, so I just exactly, yeah, don't
Tracy Harwood 51:59
forget, though, what general tools do is generate things that you haven't done. So you know, you can put all this data in it in a colab kind of context, where you're containing the material that's in there, and then interrogate it and create stuff that you haven't done. That's the whole purpose of it, really, so
Phil Rice 52:20
within confines that you've defined, right? Yeah, no, that's useful, especially for someone who's going to want to continue produce stuff that maybe isn't, yeah, isn't well defined yet, you know. So you know that you want a certain look or a certain esthetic, or you want a certain character, you know, you think about like for like, a product, spokesman, for example. Spokesperson, yeah, to have, you know, there's, I'm sure there's better examples than Jared from Subway because of his history, but you get the idea that, you know, so, yeah, that could be interesting. And there's also some ways that it could probably be used that are going to be kind of creepy, you know, to the, you know, the Marilyn Monroe version of it, for example, or any other deceased person, then that's going to raise some different ethical questions, right? So, but it's I love, that the the ground is kind of being marked out for some legitimate purposes of these tools. And I don't think today is the day that that gets fully realized. But what I liked about this a lot was that I think this process has actually been available for a while, but it has not been particularly accessible.
Tracy Harwood 53:38
Yeah, it's not to know what you typically it's been
Phil Rice 53:41
technically very, very complicated and and much more resource heavy on the user and and just plumb hard to do. And this process that he described, even though it's not one that I'm I'm personally reaching for at this point, it feels accessible. It feels like okay, if I wanted to, I could do that. And I think that's a good thing, you know. So anyway, we'll, we'll be keeping an eye on that and see, see what else becomes of it. The last thing or second to last thing that I wanted to mention. And Damien, I don't know if you've noticed this, the NVIDIA Omniverse launcher. When you open it now, it says that that launcher is going to be deprecated. In other words, go away october 1, 2025
Damien Valentine 54:33
Yeah, I know pop up a few weeks ago when I was using it,
Phil Rice 54:36
yeah. Well, here's the thing that's that's stupid about this is that I've known about I clone to Omniverse since I started using I clone. And I it's one of those things where it's like a slap my forehead moment where, okay, this week is when I decided to actually dig in and learn how that works, and when I launch Omniverse as that, yeah. Missed it so, but maybe I'm over reading into it or whatever. It doesn't sound like that. The that the tools themselves are are going away, necessarily. But you know the launcher is, is kind of how we invoke those tools and use them. So do you know anything more about what, what the ramifications of that are? Damien, well,
Damien Valentine 55:20
when I when that first message first appeared, there was a link to say that you can learn more. So I clicked on that, and it didn't tell me anything, right? Still, the case, but in the article that you posted there, there's a bit more detail, which I was having a look at just now, and the part that affects us, which is we want we use, I'm assuming user as well composer to do the
Phil Rice 55:45
right, yeah, yeah, there's an icon connector that. But ultimately you're rendering a USD file and and bringing that into the composer, right, right? That is
Damien Valentine 55:55
still going to exist. That's what I thought. Okay, and the USD explorer,
Phil Rice 56:02
that's all so it'll just become a stand is your understanding? It'll probably just become a standalone application. At that point, instead of being launched, it looks
Damien Valentine 56:09
like some of the various applications are disappearing, which I'm looking at the list. I've never touched any of these things, so I don't know how useful they are anyway. But then it looks like composers still going to exist, which makes me happy. I was a bit worried about that until I read this, because I also use that for the Empire and my other projects I'm working on, right? I don't want to lose that, because
Phil Rice 56:36
I was the first thing I thought of when I saw that. Notice. I thought, Oh no, because for me, it's one thing. It's like, well, I guess I won't do that if it's gone, you know. But for you, which even, I mean, your your production process has incorporated that, and I think didn't you start using that like part of the way through Heir to the Empire, and that's why you went back and re rendered some early stuff, when in the final remaster, is that right?
Damien Valentine 57:02
So I'm still doing that remaster, but it was, it again, the accessibility. To use it with chapter 17. I didn't know how to use it, so the only time you see it in chapter 17 is, I remember
Phil Rice 57:14
us talking about it, yeah, that you were interested in it, but you hadn't learned it yet. Yeah,
Damien Valentine 57:18
yeah. So it's only the space shots, the ships flying around, because they're fairly simple. I can't figure out how to get the characters looking right. So it's actually not until chapter 18 that I fully switched over to it. And then, yeah, it's made such a huge difference between the especially the the very first chapters of head to the Empire, which is the icon seven, but before they did the character updates, so the early versions of the characters come a long way since then. Yeah, yeah. I think chapter three, there's only the huge jumping quality between the characters, and then again, when I switch over to that Omniverse, but I want all of those chapters to look as good as what I thought. Of course, I'm in the process of rearranging about more than a quarter of the way through now, which is good, but when I saw that, I thought, am I even going to finish this in time of october 1? But yeah, it's maybe very happy. I don't know why. They just don't take out the bits they're not going to use and keep the launcher, because it's a nice, handy,
Phil Rice 58:20
yeah, I found it strange. And my initial reaction to it was kind of a not panic, but just a little bit of alarm, because I remember when this, when the launcher first came about and Omniverse first came about. We talked a lot about it on this show, and it was this very exciting sign of Nvidia kind of setting itself up to be the bridge between all these different platforms. And of course, iClone got in on that early, and we were so happy about that and impressed with that. And then it tied into blender and it ties into Unreal Engine. It's like, wow, this is really neat stuff. And so when I saw that notice, I thought, Oh
Tracy Harwood 59:02
no, but there's stuff that they've knocked out. Is
Phil Rice 59:05
that going away? Or is it just that now they just don't need the launcher to facilitate those connections anymore? I don't quite know. I
Tracy Harwood 59:13
would imagine it. I would imagine it's that thing the latter. Okay, yeah, the reason I say that is because the nucleus stuff was all the enterprise stuff that was used for things like the architecture workflow, not not or, you know, a workflow that's a different one to an indie creator kind of workflow.
Damien Valentine 59:34
But indie creators could still use it so they could,
Tracy Harwood 59:37
but nucleus specifically was, was enterprise level staff. It
Damien Valentine 59:44
was accessible to everyone in the early days, because I think they wanted people to test it out. And I looked at it, and I could see why it'd be useful for teamwork, but it seemed like such a hassle to set it up, I never really bothered.
Phil Rice 59:57
It was a daunting process. Yeah, I look. At it too. But that
Tracy Harwood 1:00:01
would have been used for things like building development projects. That's That's my understanding of how it was positioned.
Phil Rice 1:00:11
Yeah. We could with collaboration being being central to it. Yeah.
Tracy Harwood 1:00:15
So my guess would be that actually, whilst it might have discontinued it in this form. It's probably going to be a standalone product suite, sure that makes sense, sort of hived off from the kind of workflow that you guys work on,
Damien Valentine 1:00:30
although we could still if Phil and I had wanted a team up to make a film using Omniverse, we would have had to use nucleus to do it, to be able to easily share the assets, right? So that's probably not going to be something we can do in the future. But then, do you reckon? I don't know.
Phil Rice 1:00:47
We'll have to wait well, and it remains to be seen too like well, didn't I don't, I don't know how much for, like, a small scale collaboration like that, how much more useful would nucleus really be then he and I just being careful to, okay, I've, here's the USD. I'll put it on Google Drive for you. You take it, you work on it, then send it back. You know what I'm saying? Like, that's not a horrible process. That's still, like, mind blowingly cool compared to what was possible 20 years ago, right? So, yeah,
Tracy Harwood 1:01:17
yeah. But do you think what they're talking about now, and maybe this is the move towards, it is to get rid of the the the NVIDIA Omniverse wall that's blocked out loads of people using Nvidia chips. Do you think this is a, do you think this is a step towards that?
Damien Valentine 1:01:37
No, I think it's always going to use a RTX, yeah, I
Phil Rice 1:01:40
don't know. I don't, I don't, I don't see they them having any incentive to back away from that. Okay, yeah, it would be, it would be nice if they would, but they've, I think that's how they justify spending money on this stuff at all. Yeah, they're not making any money off of this. But it's the, it's, it really is the hardware is where they they make their their bones, yeah, but I'm glad to know that, because I think you know for people who are particularly for iClone users. So yeah, certainly the render quality that you can get out of I clone itself has improved over the years, and I hope, I hope, they'll continue to invest in that area. It doesn't seem to be a priority. Right now,
Damien Valentine 1:02:24
I had any updates for one right when they are updates, though, they don't seem to add a lot. It doesn't
Phil Rice 1:02:29
seem like it's a priority. Yeah. And so for the people who want more of a polished look to things, I think Omniverse is, if you've got the right hardware is the easiest overall way to achieve that. The other, you know, the other alternatives are Unreal Engine, which I would rank as second easiest, but still quite difficult and quite challenging and quite resource intensive, you know, to run the live link thing, man, your PC better have some muscle, you know, it's tough. And then they have a blender connector too. But Blender has its own challenges. Of in terms of, you know, it's, it's a complex and powerful software and hard to use sometimes. So Omniverse. All in all, you don't really have to learn a new
Damien Valentine 1:03:18
language, daunting the first time you load it up, but once you figure it out, is very straightforward. There's
Phil Rice 1:03:23
amazing, no, there's an amazing number of parallels between how you interact with objects in I clone and how you do in Omniverse. And for me, that right now, I'm an infant with it so but for me, the challenge is that I'm wrestling with right now, as the early on challenge is, lights don't behave the same.
Damien Valentine 1:03:47
I can use some advice there, which I'll say now, we'll, we'll
Phil Rice 1:03:50
have to discuss for sure. Yeah, I'm going to continue to play with it, but, yeah, you can use some advice.
Damien Valentine 1:03:56
No, I can share some advice with you now, right now. Look, I'll share it now, because everyone else listening can get it as well. Great. When you export your scene from iClone to Omniverse, first thing you should do is just delete all the lights. Because what I do is I place my own lights within Omniverse. Okay, because those ones are set for the ray tracing environment, and very rarely do I still use the icon license gotcha
Phil Rice 1:04:24
usually. So let me ask you this, right? Let me ask you this. I've been dying to ask questions like this of you for a while, so we're gonna, we're gonna do this in front of the audience here. But okay, okay, and I would ask the same thing of Ben Tuttle if I had him as well, because he does the same, similar type of thing with with Unreal, you know. But do you even bother trying to light your sets in a meaningful way in I clone anymore?
Damien Valentine 1:04:51
Um, if it's something that I need a an animated like, like, let's say you're on the bridge of a ship and you it's, yeah, they're in the battle. So you want a red do. Red Alert, like flashing. I'll animate that. Otherwise, I just have lights
Phil Rice 1:05:04
for mood and atmospherics and stuff. You just don't even you just basically light it so you can see what you're doing, yeah. And then you delete all those, except the one that you want to keep, bring it over to Omniverse. And then you do your lighting there. So you're not, actually, you're not, you're not properly lighting the scene twice. No, you're doing kind of lights for again, just to be able to see what you're doing exactly. Okay, okay, that's comforting because, because I spent quite a bit of time on my lighting, and just as a test, I took one of the Ralph and Chuck shorts and brought it over. And of course, the lights are just freaking insane, like what? It's like, what? Yeah, I think so the but I do like that. It brings over cameras. That's pretty cool. Yeah,
Damien Valentine 1:05:47
that's very nice. And it does keep the depth of fields, but once, another tip I'll give is the depth of field. Keep that very low, but you want it to be almost you can barely see it in the icon, because
Phil Rice 1:06:04
when you bring Okay, that's good to know.
Damien Valentine 1:06:08
So if you have what in icon, if you have it the way you'd actually want it to look, you're going to be the background is gonna be so blurry, like even the actual character's face, like their nose, might be blurry compared to, like the actual front of their head. That's how strong it can be. So just so to be very basic, minimum level,
Phil Rice 1:06:28
very cool. Maybe we'll do a if you know what, folks let us know in the comments here. I think we're almost done. Yeah, we're done for today. I'll bring up that machinima song thing. We'll bring that up next month, see if we can learn some more about it. There's a strange mystery we'll need your help solving. But for now, if you've got any questions or comments, feel free to send us some feedback at talk at completely machinima.com, or leave a comment wherever you've seen if you're watching this on video, and if you're if you're really interested in more on this Omniverse discussion, let us know. And if there's, there's even a little bit of of interest out there, then maybe what Dami and I will do is, when I, when I get him together to to pick his brain like I've been meaning to about it, we'll do it on a recording and let you all hear as well. If not, we're just going to keep it to ourselves. So let us know if you're interested. So that is our News episode for this month. So on behalf of myself and Tracy and Damian, thanks for joining us, and we'll see you next time bye, bye. You.