Admittedly, I’ve been spending more time working on tools to make movies rather than the movies themselves. The possibilities for machinima are almost limitless, yet the knowledge to do so is often difficult to obtain. I am trying to do my part to advance the medium, which should benefit anyone who wishes to learn (including myself). Here are a few of the things I’m currently working on.
Biped Animation Database
Biped animations can be hugely useful when making machinima. However, there is no easy way to share these with others. I’ve been working on a database that will allow people to upload, download, search, and preview animations. There are many people who just want to tell a story and don’t want to deal with the pain of creating custom animations. Hopefully this will address that.
Machinima Database
While I love watching and creating machinima, I’ve found it can be difficult to find the good stuff. The term “machinima” has been twisted to the point where more people associate it with a company than what it really is. As a result, this has thrown off search results and you get a lot of game commentary with “machinima” in the title. I’m working on a site that will list only real (story-based) machinima, if nothing else just for my own use.
Machinima Tools
If you’ve taken a look at my tutorials you may have noticed I use a bunch of messy PHP scripts to convert data. While it’s not pretty, it gets the job done. I’ve slowly been teaching myself Python with the hope I will be able to create a standalone program that can replace those scripts. Don’t expect it anytime soon though, there’s a lot for me to learn.
In other news, Source Filmmaker looks like a really interesting new tool. I haven’t started working with it yet, but some of the videos other people have created look fantastic. Valve has taken a big step in the right direction by releasing this tool.