1. I've been following this book over the past week and I'm wary of their SL view as well. The authors seem very chuffed about moviestorm (i've been a beta testing it for a while and its not bad but has a long way to go). I'm skeptcial about them and the book. They seem to be a bit full of themselves and have a very small picture of machinima at large (especially with their view on SL).

Posted at 11:10AM on May 12th 2007 by Grendel Femto

2. I think the For Dummies says it all Grendel.

Posted at 12:01PM on May 12th 2007 by Fritz

3. It's a tough call - particularly with the recent announcement about an open server. There were a lot of engines we'd have liked to cover - we're 60 pages over our original wordcount as it is.

I'll be emailing our section on Second Life to you for comment this week, actually, (Moo Money) - I want to get another perspective on it before we go to print.

However, yes, I am dubious about Second Life as a Machinima medium at present. With the open server? Maybe less so.

Posted at 3:02PM on May 12th 2007 by Hugh "Nomad" Hancock

4. Hugh, it is interesting that you are dubious about Second Life as a machinima medium. Last November at the machinima festival in New York, Linden Lab's machinima "Silver Bells & Golden Spurs" won an award. Just last month, another machinima made entirely in Second Life won a place in two film festivals in Toronto and Amsterdam for non-machinima films.

While I haven't read any galleys of this book, a red flag goes up for me when I see that your blog promotes your Moviestorm product as if Machinima-making has been ineffective until now. How much of this pro-Moviestorm viewpoint will be seen in the book?

Posted at 3:32PM on May 12th 2007 by Ute Hicks

5. I must begin to question the vision of anyone who is 'fairly skeptical about Second Life as a Machinima platform.” It seems obvious to me that serious research into the inner working of this virtual world are in order. For a book that most likely will become an introduction into this new film production method for many aspiring machinimist, to only give Second Life a cursory glance is indeed disappointing.

The 20 grand estimate to create “Bloodspell” in SL is greatly overstated. I realize that the production took couple of years to create. I firmly believe the reason for the time sink is because you decide to use a video game engine not a virtual world.

If you would like an informed opinion from some one who has been in the trenches of creating machinima in Second Life for three years, the before mentioned project could have been finished in six months and visually could have looked quiet similar. The only difference would have been the need to create custom heads using the 3d modeling tools in SL and animating textures in order to create facial expressions. Sets and props would most likely take the first three months to create. During this process you could use the numerous sandboxes to develop this assets at no cost since these regions are completely free for anyone to use. For the next three months you could easily rent an island for 400 a month to ensure good frame rates. An animated feature film at an $1,200 investment and full time effort is indeed a bargain. Most importantly and often over looked, when your film is complete Second Life allows you to retain all intellectual property rights. Suddenly you have complete control over the distribution, marketing, and profiting of your art so you can continue to create machinima. I believe it would be quite challenge getting similar terms with any of the other video game engines. Its is my opinion that such an important book that overlooks Second Life is indeed providing the machinima community a great disservice.

Posted at 4:47PM on May 12th 2007 by Pierce Portocarrero

6. A quick reply on Moviestorm, since several people seem to be interested:

Yes, we are enthusiastic about Moviestorm, as it's an excellent platform for creating Machinima even in beta, and is getting better fast. Still, as I've said before, the guys producing Moviestorm could still screw it up.

We're featuring four engines in the book, in total: The Sims 2, Moviestorm, World of Warcraft, and Medieval II: Total War.

Moviestorm gets a chapter and a half total, about 35 pages, of a 400-page book. The Sims 2 gets rather more, as it turns out.

Posted at 8:25AM on May 14th 2007 by Hugh "Nomad" Hancock

7. OK, this one's a long one...

First up - I've asked Moo Money to review the section in the book on Second Life, and I'm asking Eric Call to do the same, so it will have a pro-SL view on it before it's released.

Thanks for the correction on island fees, BTW - I'd either misread them or they've changed since I last checked.

A few questions and comments, since it seems people would like me to expand a bit on my reasons for being dubious about SL as a Machinima platform:

- BloodSpell involved multiple fight scenes with between 20 and 40 characters all fighting at once. Often these fight scenes took several days to film, working 8 hours a day. Now, as I understand it, SL doesn't allow any NPC characters, so all of these guys would have to be actual people. Do you think that it's likely I'd manage to attract a cast of even 25 people who were willing to turn up day-in, day-out for 8 hours stretches, for weeks or months, without pay?

One of the major reasons I'm dubious about SL as a Machinima platform is its one-avatar, one-person rule. That's a HUGE, and totally unnecessary from a virtual filming point of view (no matter how necessary it may be for SL architecture), limitation. There are very few scenes in BloodSpell which involve less than 4-5 characters. Most of those were filmed by two people. In SL, I'd need 4-5 people controlling individual characters, plus a cameraman, probably plus someone else cueing special effects and set activity.

The same is true of other well-known Machinima pieces. Male Restroom Etiquette? 4-person crew minimum. Edge of Remorse? 6-7 people. That's a limitation other Machinima engines (like The Sims 2 and, I hate to say it, MovieStorm) don't have.

- Graphics. Sorry, but SL just isn't that pretty. I'd grant that it wouldn't be impossible to achieve the visual quality of the first episode of BloodSpell, but frankly that ain't a compliment.

I've never seen anything shot in Second Life that didn't have its trademark flat lighting. There's no shadowing in the graphics engine that I'm aware of (certainly there wasn't in the build we used), which is a huge, huge limitation (sure, you can bake textures to get around some of that, but character shadows are still a problem). I asked Eric specifically about darkness in the engine - apparently it's not possible to achieve zero lighting, unless I misunderstood, which again really limits filmmakers graphically.

Can you show me anything that would change my mind on SL's graphical quality? Against modern engines like Half-Life 2 or Medieval II: Total War, it really doesn't look great.

- Land fees are still a problem. The entire premise of Machinima, to many people, is that you can create huge, impressive films without spending very much money at all. Again, I did my research on this, talked to Eric and Moo, and the consensus seems to be that, as you say, Pierce, you need to have a dedicated island to achieve stable framerates. That's a downpayment of $1,675 plus $295 for maintainance to start with (taken from http://secondlife.com/community/land-islands.php), which really isn't something I feel comfortable recommending in a book about starting up with Machinima! That's enough to buy a cheap HD camera, a copy of Maya, or a LOT of editing software and hardware.

And my understanding is that without that island, you're much more limited in what you can do.

(Moo - I'm interested to hear more about Lukanida. Can you give me more details on that, either here or on PM?)

I recall that Eric Call's presentation on "Silver Bells" included a dollar figure for the budget of the film of approximately $550 dollars. That's a lot when you consider it doesn't cover buying non-SL software, for such a short film. By comparison, my understanding is that "Male Restroom Etiquette", which won an award at the same festival as "Silver Bells", has been covered on Animation World News, and has just been featured on the Stage6 DivX festival, cost approximately $0 for the same part of the budget. That's a better price for non-pro Machinima creators.

If an open server were available, this problem goes away. Woohoo!

- Offensive content. It's not a problem for me, but it's a problem for a lot of people. One of the reasons that I'm enthusiastic about the open server, and one of the reasons that we don't have a chapter on SL in the book right now, is that it's very hard to see how people can reliably avoid running into offensive content in SL at the moment. In our research, staying out of "Mature" areas, we were confronted with a full-screen picture of (real-life) bukkake within an hour of leaving the newbie area.

Is there any realistic way to teach a newbie to avoid that without just saying "leave the newbie area. Go to this island. Never leave it. Do NOT use the search function."?

Again, I wish we were writing after the open server was released. Then we wouldn't have to consider this problem.

- Modeling time. Interestingly, when we originally started producing BloodSpell, we thought it would take about six months too. We wuz wrong.

Pierce, I respect your ability, but your estimates seem optimistic. There are over 100 unique characters in BloodSpell, each with their own costume and face. There are hundreds of unique props. There are more than 25 large, detailed sets, many with new or modified texture sets. There are approximately 250 varied visual effects used. There's an animation set of approximately 200 animations, of which about 50 had to be created uniquely for the project (totalling about 7 minutes of animation, or about 21 weeks of animator-time). There are around 325 unique facial skins (BTW, animated textures wouldn't work well unless we created a seperate animated texture for each line in the 90-minute film).

The workflow for SL is very similar to conventional 3D modeling, in my understanding. Animations are imported from Poser or another 3D package, so there's no time saving there. Textures are created in Photoshop, so ditto. Sets are created from prims and pre-created props, in a very similar way to NWN. SL has a fairly standard particle effects library. I don't see any way that all of these tasks would have been made faster by working in Second Life, and we'd have had a lot more assets to create to use SL than to use NWN.

We had approximately 1 person working full-time on creating the assets we needed. The only way we were able to make BloodSpell at all was using the huge library of content in NWN.

I understand that your estimate includes buying props from other people (which increases the budget, of course), but from looking around and searching, I'd say that there were substantially less usable props, sets and costumes that we could reincorporate into BloodSpell than there were available to us in the NWN community, and it took a lot longer than three months to create the assets for BloodSpell there. There's a lot of content in SL, but most of it seems to be rather heavily targeted at either fashionwear or the adult market. And as soon as you start creating your own props, sets, special effects, and costumes, you require both the skills and the time investment of conventional 3D art.

One of the other reasons I didn't rate Second Life as a Machinima tool is the sheer amount of asset creation you have to do - and the fact that in order to do it really well you need to have professional-level 3D art skills.

Again, for a beginner, that's a problem. You can use the assets available, sure, but they do limit what you can do in the engine. It's no coincidence, I don't think, that many of the less-professional SL films I've seen feature dancing girls or strippers.

- Lipsynch. Currently, as I understand it, there's no fuctionality for either morph target animation of faces, or rapid texture swapping. The only way to achieve lipsynch-like effects appears to be Eric's approach of streaming a movie to the lips, using an animated texture to do the same thing, or using a tool like TOGLFaces.

Is that an accurate summary of the state of play in SL?

- Awards. Yes, I was there when "Silver Spurs" won its award, and damn well done to it too. Eric did a great job with that film.

It's possible to make great films in all sorts of engines. We're not covering "IL2 - Sturmovik" either, for example, despite "Bill and John", which won 4 awards at the MFF 2006. Nor are we devoting a chapter to Unreal Tournament 2004, despite its numerous festival wins in the past, or Half-Life 2.

We're not even covering Neverwinter Nights, despite the fact that we just made a feature film in it! We had only a very small number of slots (4) and a lot of great engines to choose from.

----

I'm very interested by Second Life. I think that there are huge advantages to it, and I say at one point in the book that I think that Second Life, or something like it, is the future of Machinima - partially because of the commercial aspect, which is definitely something that's very important. But right now it has these huge limitations and problems.

I'm very impressed by people who do manage to create great work in it (like Eric and Pierce). However, currently I don't think, from a decade of experience with dozens of Machinima tools (several of which I designed myself), that it's currently the best choice for Machinima newbies.

Posted at 8:57AM on May 14th 2007 by Hugh "Nomad" Hancock