Damien Valentine 00:00
We're recording, we're on. Okay. Hello and welcome to another instalment of And Now For Something Completely Machinima. This week, this month I'm producing the show. I'm Damien Valentine, also known as Darth Angeles, and I'm joined by Ricky Grove.

Ricky Grove 00:44
Hey there,

Damien Valentine 00:46
Phil Rice. Hello. And of course, Tracy Harwood, you. So we're going to be talking about news and different things that we've found out this month. And I'll get straight to it with the ones I've got on my notes here. So the first thing is Reallusion have you got iClone 8's coming out sometime this year. And they keep releasing working progress videos showing off the new features that are going to be in iClone eight, and a week before recording, they released this new one. And it's got these new features that they're kind of quality of life enhancements, you can still do these things in icon seven, but it's a lot more work to do. So one things I showed off is you can put objects and characters in groups. So you can disable them make them disappear, which is very helpful when you're producing big scenes. Because when you've got lots of stuff happening on screen in iClone, it can really slow down your system, which makes it harder. Yeah. So you can turn these things on and off very easily just to get a grip. So you just turn the tide grip on and off with one mouse click. And that's always gonna be helpful. If you're rendering things in layers post production. So you can have the whole scene, so you get an idea of where everything is. But if you only want to see render the furniture without the characters, you can just do that. Because you put all your furniture one group, then put your cogs in the group, turn off the characters, render the furniture, and then you can then swap it round to render out your characters as a group, and then you can do a post production you want to do. And if you can't do that, in iClone 7, it's so much work to go through the list and turn off everything you want on and off. And if you forget something, and you've rendered all that, and you have to do it again, it can be a real pain. So this makes it's not a massive, exciting feature, but it's something that is gonna be very useful. And I'm quite excited about myself, actually, because obviously, I'm a big iClone user. So moving on from that,

Ricky Grove 02:54
you know, hold on, I got a couple things I want to say about that. Okay, one thing, I'm really glad you've picked this because it fits in with our theme for the month of April, which is focusing on Reallusions, I clone and related products, our films were all Reallusion iClone films, so we're going to be looking at that quite a bit. The work in progress videos, the one you looked at as the most recent one, they've released three videos. So far, the one you're referring to as the one on file and scene management. The very first one, though, was on their whole their entirely new character animation system, which is, I think, the most dramatic, because animation has always been a bit of a problem. And iClone. And this solves a lot of the problems that they've had transitions getting characters to interact with each other, getting to move to the places that you want them to, and more believable transition between one animation set and another animation set was oftentimes abrupt. You'll see that when you when we show some of the films that we're picking, you'll see see what that is. I've been following iClone since I think iClone 2 way back and I actually have I'm gonna include it on our show notes this year. But I actually have a documentary that I shot way, way back in the early 2000s. At one of the Machinima festivals in Queens in which iClone have their first booth set up to demo iClone and you see a very young John Martin showing the basic video setup, but all include that on the show notes. Did you get any indication of when iClone 8 was do it all gives a quarter.

Damien Valentine 04:54
They said second quarter when they announced the second quarter when they first announced I coordinate. But I don't know if that's still a plan or if it's been pushed back. Because obviously development with the ongoing pandemic does slow things down. So it says, as far as I know, though, it is still second quarter, but it could slip into three. Okay. Well, I guess we'll just keep an eye on it. And we'll keep talking about iClone as more is revealed in following news episodes in the podcast. So sounds good. Yeah. And I remember that documentary, Ricky, and they were giving away these free CDs with the yes, the first copy. Oh, yeah, I got my copy somewhere. Ah, it's come a long way since then.

Phil Rice 05:45
The sure has, yes, it has. Yeah. Alright, so

Damien Valentine 05:49
moving on to the next news. We've been talking about. throughout the life of this podcast, he talked about the Mandalorian. In the book of Boba Fett, there's Star Wars shows that use Unreal Engine to create all the environments for the actors to be in. And the next one coming up is Obi Wan Kenobi, which is the same technology and they just released a trailer for it. And they've got some even more impressive environments. They seem to creative because show so far seem to concentrate on desert planets stay, as always a desert plates Tatouine or this other one from Mandalorian that I covered the name of it right now. But they all look very similar. And I guess it's because they're creatively assets, and they can they just retinting them. So they don't have to rebuild everything from scratch for these new environments. But here, everyone can be they've got some kind of almost like a cyberpunk city. Like you'd expect from Blade Runner, it's all dark, and there's neon lights everywhere. And then there's this planet, which is from one of the video games where it's a secret base that's underwater. And you can see that and there's characters talking this room and the windows outside. It's all obviously, the ocean is out there. It's all greater than iClone that same virtual environment technology. So I'm excited to see not just because the Star Wars fan. I'm excited to see what kind of locations they're create that can be very different from what we've seen so far. I think it's a case of, they've been using it so much that now that they are getting a better feel for what they can do. And they're kind of pushing themselves to see what else can they do. So it's a great way to see what the technology can do.

Ricky Grove 07:31
Yeah, it looks really great, you know, and I like the way that they're sort of reinterpreting the Star Wars style away from comic books simplicity, and making it much more like current written space opera. Authors, like Adrienne Schakowsky and Ian banks had been redefining space opera into a more gritty and darker and more varied style. And the look seems to reflect that I liked it, I thought it was good.

Damien Valentine 08:01
So the series is going to start on May the 25th, which is actually the 45th anniversary of the very first Star Wars film. So yeah, I'm excited to see what they do with that. Next piece of news, it's related to this live action TV show Star Trek Picard. And it's sort of sort of a continuation of Star Trek Next Generation. And what we're talking about why I'm talking about this now is they had a fleet of ships appear in last week's episode. And the designs of those ships were from one of the Star Trek video games, to normally get the video game. And they all bring content from the films and TV shows. So make video game models of its most simplistic models and for the games to, you know, be able to run on these people's computers. But this is kind of the complete opposite of that, where they've taken something from a video game and put it into a live action TV show. And that's not something that I it's not necessarily machinima, but it kind of is because we take video game assets and make films short term. And it's kind of taking it a little bit further by taking those designs. And then I guess they must have made more high detailed verses of the ships. For that, you know, for the visual effects closer they want for the TV show. But this then, is a documentary about how the designer of the ships got the job, initially as a fan of the game, and he entered a contest and they liked his work. And then he got the job. And then he designed the ships and now he's actually seeing his creations in the proper official live action TV show. And it's Wow, cool. Yeah, that's cool. So my news is that documentary so you can see that sort of process and he's obviously very excited about it, and I don't blame him. It's a big achievement for him.

Ricky Grove 10:02
Yeah. I like the documentary how, however, the sound recording was very poor. For the promo in the documentary, I'm not sure. I mean, given the fact that you can buy a $49 level ear mic that is crystal clear when you're recording, I don't know why they screwed that up so much. It made it hard to watch a lot of the documentary for me, probably because I just sensitive to sound like that. But I like the idea of it. And I thought it was pretty cool. And it was neat to, to hear his story. I thought that was pretty cool.

Damien Valentine 10:39
My next find was a series of tutorials for Nvidia Omniverse by JSFilmz. And he's, he produces any videos throughout the week, and he kind of alternates between different subjects, but it's the Omniverse ones that I've been following, because I've been teaching me a lot about how to use the software, and he makes it very easy to follow. So if you're interested in learning about Omniverse, or you, maybe you're using it, but you don't quite know everything does yet check out his playlist. I don't think he's covered everything yet. So I'm sure he's got more coming. But he also thinks between Unreal videos, which I haven't checked out yet, but if they're anything like his Omniverse videos, then it's definitely worth having a look at his unreal content. And he is playing around with the was the character

Ricky Grove 11:35
introduced the unreal guy,

Damien Valentine 11:38
he has the unreal character to work on it was called Yeah, I remember him. Yeah. But he's basically produces lots of tutorials are really good machinima. So check out his YouTube channel, and you find that in the show notes,

Ricky Grove 11:53
I thought it was a little, it's a little odd that there was quite a big push when Omniverse came out with the Machinima aspect of it. But there's been nothing since. Actually, there was a little thing a couple months later, but there's been nothing in the last four or five months. I think there's still working on it. But just think that's kind of odd.

Damien Valentine 12:17
I think they've done is Omniverse isn't just one piece of software. It's a launcher. And then there's all these different programmes in it. There's create an sp right and then machinima. So create is the one that I mainly use. Because if I'm taking my animation from iClone, I just load it up into creating stare. But Machinima is kind of the same thing, but also has the animation tools. If you want to create animation from scratch, you would use the Machinima tool rather than Create. I haven't used machinima permission to talk too much. I've played around with it a little bit. But because what I'm doing is mainly animating everything in iClone. I don't need to animate again in Omniverse. Got it hasn't. You right, though it hasn't actually been updated in some time. I've had it installed, had any updates for months. And I've had one for Create in that time. Which itself was quite a while ago, but I think we'll see more about that. At the GDC conference, hopefully, yeah, they're gonna talk about it a bit more. Which by the time everyone is listening or watching this, that will have already happened. Okay. And that's it for me. So Ricky, what have you got?

Ricky Grove 13:43
Oh, as usual, I've got a tonne of things. I'll try not to talk your ears off. One thing in particular, I want to discuss but I'll give you some brief things. Unreal 5 Preview is out. I just added that this morning, because I discovered that they've made that available in quite a few interesting tutorials. There's some pretty significant changes in Unreal 5, having to do with scene management, similar to the iClone thing, but also rendering of lighting has been completely redone. We'll put a link to a couple interesting tutorials in our show notes. And I'm looking forward to trying it out a bit more. I've been doing a series of digital landscape tool reviews at Renderosity magazine. And I'm going to be moving into Unreal in a couple of weeks. So that's going to be fun to play with. My second piece of news is a half life mod called Half Life Field Intensity, which is actually been in development for 13 years, and it just released this month we're recording in March. It was created by a group of three veteran modders known as the Hazard Team, and their previous work includes a 2009 prequal mod, Half Life Induction. It's a substantial product project. It has all sorts of new levels and new material. It's looks like a lot of fun. Interestingly, the team is a mix of Russian and Ukrainian modders manners. And well, obviously, obviously, they've had some troubles trying to communicate with each other. They're fine. But it's been quite a, quite a journey for them or releasing this. And then suddenly Ukraine gets invaded. And so it's a mess. We'll put the download link for it at the mod database.com and mod db.com, which is in general, a really great place to look for mods for your game. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 tier is now available monthly for 1999. It allows you to use 3080 RTX hardware to stream your Epic or Steam games for a monthly fee. Which means you don't even if you have a poor GPU, you can use their GPU to stream it. It's $19.99. It looks like an interesting deal. They're just starting out. So I'm not sure if I'm not sure how that's gonna work. But if anybody uses that, I know there are a lot of Steam game people who watch this. Definitely take a look at it and let us know about it. But it looks good. Also, it seems that the graphics processor market is loosening up a little bit. If you remember, six, eight months ago, Phil and I did a episode of building up a machinima PC. And we were talking about how difficult it was, and how expensive cards were it looks like that's loosening up a bit. Have you? Have you been had had that in your business? Because I know you deal with that all the time?

Phil Rice 17:04
Yes, yes, the prices are still higher than then they probably should be. But now they're at least within reach. Nvidia themselves has helped with that by releasing the 3050 series of card which is still very competent. It's a good it's a really good card. And that's and it's the lowest price of the tiers. So there's there's quite a few choices in there depending on budget. And yeah, a lot more of those are starting to become available

Ricky Grove 17:35
now. Yeah. And by the way, if you're going to use Omniverse, you have to have an RTX card, so might be a good time to upgrade unless you want to wait a little bit longer and see if that frees up some more. Dead Space. If anybody remembers playing that wonderful series of three games. I loved that. I just thought it was fantastic. There's a remake that's going to be launching in early 2023. By developer EA Motive. They ask Dead Space fans when they might be able to purchase. They did a presentation they said it's in the pre alpha stage of development. And they're just a couple of weeks away from being able to do a walkthrough of it. So it looks like 2023 for a Dead Space remake, which I think is cool. That game didn't quite get the the attention it deserved. I thought it was a wonderful space horror game. I played all three of them and just love them. Some of the most frightening and gruesome moments in gaming for me. Now the big thing I want to talk about is Elden Ring from FromSoftware, Japanese. I don't know whether any of you have ever played any of the Dark Souls series. But they're incredibly frustrating because they're just so damn hard. The fighting system in particular, I did the Dead Souls 2, and gave up after about a week or two. Because I just couldn't couldn't get any further. I just kept getting dying all the time. I couldn't get anywhere. It was less fun and more frustration. Well, they just released on March 28 or March. Now February 25 Elden Ring, which is the latest of the Dark Soul style games, and they've made some major improvements. It's an open it's their first open world game. So you can go anywhere you want. And it's much easier to play, although the level of difficulty is still fairly high. I've been playing it for about a week and a half now maybe 20, 25 hours. And I just love it. I think it's great. It's very strange. It's very interesting. You have all sorts of it rewards discovery. It's beautiful, visually and strange visually, and there's a lot of different playstyles and I was hoping I was keeping my fingers crossed that modders when jump in and do something vis a vis machinima. And they have. There's an Elden Ring photo mod created by Otis underscore inf. And although it isn't 100% machinima, it allows you to do quite a few things. One, it releases the camera, which is the biggest thing, it allows you to reposition the camera not only in the game, but in the cutscenes as well. So if you want to use cutscenes, you can reef reposition the camera, you can also keyframe the camera to do movements. And you can do ease in and ease out on it, you can change the field of vision, you can pause the game at certain points. What else do they have all they had, you can change the light the sunlight, so if you want to relight the scene to be more dramatic and, and go in different ways you can do that. Now, the issue with this photo mod is that Steam has a pretty severe policy about no mods for online play, which is completely understandable. So you have to play you have to use this mod offline. And fortunately, we'll put a link in it, he makes it very easy to do. And I, there's a video of a guy testing it all out that I saw on YouTube. And you can see it all will all make sure we either embed that or put the link to it. And it gives you a good idea of how how it works and how to avoid getting slammed by Steam. If you suddenly forget and try to go online, it's not as if they're going to suddenly ban you. They're not going to do that. But it is really really good. And I think it'll open up the world to this really cool game to machinima. And I just on the off chance I checked the mod database and Nexus mods, and there are 35 mods for the game so far. Most of them are the Yeah, yeah, I was really surprised even though the game was only released on February 26. But, but I'd say half of them are look mods, you know, the colour mods, like upping the bloom on certain things or changing or things like shaders, that's that's what I was looking for. So that's pretty easy modding to do. I think in the next several months, it'll be interesting to check those mod databases. And I'm going to do a full report as a blog post on on Completelymachinima.com on the photo mod, and maybe we'll see maybe we'll do a little some machinima with it. But it's particularly good for photography, if you want to make some really interesting photographs. Because the game is filled with just, I mean, give you an example. Um, I've tried a bunch of different characters, and I was going down one route, and I was going through this forest and everything, this misty forest, and there was a sort of mausoleum there, and I glanced at it. So on like the third or fourth playthrough, I decided, well, I'll take a look closer look. So I went in there and there's a little old dias, you know, a circular dias. So I went in there, and suddenly the dias started to move and it dropped down. It was an elevator that took me into this last necropolis underneath everything. I had no idea any of that was there. And it's this massive space that's just completely strange and weird. And, and I had and it was just I discovered it accidentally, it was so delightful. It made me so happy to find these shots. And apparently they're just all the way through the the thing and so definitely take a look at it. As I said it's there's a certain level of difficulty but there's lots of really good tutorials and and features and if you've ever wanted to play a Dark Souls style game, this is the one to do it in

Phil Rice 24:16
There are a lot of gamers over on Twitch right now as well. So if you wanted to get an over the shoulder view of someone playing through it, you'll be spoilt for choice over there on Twitch.

Ricky Grove 24:27
Yeah, that's great. Same way with YouTube, lots of lots of people writing about it. That's my news for today. I think Tracy, you've got something don't you?

Tracy Harwood 24:36
I certainly do. And that's a fact I just happened to be reading Guardian Culture and came across this. This story about a little clan called The Grannies. And it turns out that there has been a documentary short film created about a group of Australian game developers Who are basically explorers in Red Dead Redemption 2 Online. Now, we've commented before on the amazing environment that is Red Dead Redemption. And this is a group of folks who are equally transfixed by that almost photorealistic depiction of early 19th century US places. But they're not making films as such, what they're what they're what they're doing really is travelling to the edge of the game world, literally pushing through that edge into this sort of beyond space, and then exploring an entirely different area of the game and taking photographs and making making up their own sort of fun during which it would appear that they found these really bizarre glitches. So this then has become their mission, they've sort of started to deliberately seek out these glitches and faults and weirdness in this kind of games code and then recorded themselves disappearing into the ether and finding these kinds of, you know, weird places where the, the code mixes and duplicates limbs and what have you. And the thing that kind of caught my eye with the story in the first place was the fact that there this is this horse with a rider on it, sort of floating in the air. And guess who's filmed that reminded me of Phil.

Ricky Grove 26:30
Yes.

Tracy Harwood 26:32
Which so you know, that's really why I kind of got attracted to it, because I think what, you know, what else are they doing with this? Anyway, the film itself, is, is basically a documentary about the about The Grannies themselves rather than a machinima per se, I believe. And actually, what's quite hard is to try and get to the film. So the film is is described as a peek behind the curtain at the game as well. Now, in fact, the grannies were first reported in kotaku.com, Australia in 2019. And there's a really interesting article about what they've been doing, which we'll put in the show notes, because I think it gives you a little bit more insight into how this is, has evolved. And what this film actually is, is a commission for the now play this festival, which actually was it was originally commissioned in 2020. And it's an annual game inspired event, which that particular year was guest directed by a woman called Marie Foulsom. Who has actually curated game related exhibitions around the world, including in London, at the v&a and in New York. And Marie, she's directed and produced this film. But in In fact, the theme of the the Now Play This festival was actually about something that called breaking point. So it was something that she kind of thought was a perfect fit for that particular film festival. Because the problem was, it didn't get showcased in 2020, because the pandemic caused, you know, just destroyed absolutely everything. So, in fact, it actually was premiered at the International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam, last November, and has been the official selection of the London Short Film Festival earlier in January this year. And actually, I'm really curious to know that has been selected at the Milan Film Festival as well, which is, or will have been shown at the end of March, as this episode goes out in early April. Nice. Now, the plan for it, I'm kind of curious how this is gonna play out because the plan for it is to show it primarily in festivals and venues, which basically means we're probably not going to see on YouTube, which I think is somewhat disappointing, actually. And alongside that, another reason they're sort of giving for it not being shown on any of the online channels is that it's also part of a multi channel installation, being exhibited alongside a game that one of The Grannies has actually created called Red desert render. And that's been inspired by their experiences of playing Red Dead Redemption as well. Suffice to say, if you've seen it at the Milan Film Festival, be really interested to hear what your views are of it. And I think it's going to be quite quite a different kind of film, to some of the things that we've showcase showcased on the on The podcast, if you're happen to be in the south of London, sorry, in Central London, south of England that is, in early April, it's going to be shown at Somerset House between the 8th and the 10th of April, as well. So we'll put a few links on the, on the, on the on the blog. And hopefully, somebody somewhere will see this kind of 20 minute long documentary and tell us a little bit about it. So that's it for my news on that one.

Phil Rice 30:32
All right. Tradition, that tradition of excellence exploring the uncharted areas of games goes way back. You know, the, the id Software was the one that I was most familiar with. But in all of the Doom games and the quake games and even the original Wolfenstein game, the developers would actually put easter eggs in the game to encourage that deep exploration they didn't have anything to do with you could play through the whole game and never encounter those but they would put those hidden things in there was a lot of inside references and you know, private jokes. The one that comes to mind is at the end of Doom 2 which was what 1994. You face this this creature that's spawning in all these these demons at the end it's just this big wall with this huge goat like demon head on there and you know, all this stuff spawning out. And this really creepy backward masked phrase plays you know, in reverse. And of course, people extracted that audio and flipped it around and what it said was kind of in like the Pink Floyd tradition of backmasking instead of something creepy it was to win the game you must kill me John Romero. And if you cheated your way into inside the head of the demon on a spike in there was the head of John Romero supposedly, is what this demon and and Quake had tonnes of things like that, too. I mean, not just secrets, but even beyond that Easter eggs. But to me, the the things that were the most fascinating are the kind that these guys discovered, which were the unintentional glitch, unintentional spaces in the game. And I can remember in Quake two, there were certain bugs in certain levels that you could kind of slip through a wall and all of a sudden, you're outside seeing all these surfaces that have no texture assigned. Yeah. Which would create that hall of mirrors effect, if you remember. And what yeah, when I was reading the description of their experience, I thought of those types of things. And they are, they're fascinating. Yeah, when they happen, the only time I ever experienced them was in those much lower fidelity games. So it wasn't as an impactful experience is what they encountered here. It's this richly rendered game that feels like you know, an enormous world and reach the edge of that and it's amazing.

Ricky Grove 33:43
I love that idea of the the glitch in the game that then it's almost, I almost think of it as our world and then the supernatural world that exists at the same time, sort of like the Platonic looking at the shadows on the cave wall thing. I had a one of those amazing experiences playing World War Two game got about 10 years ago. And you know, it was so cute was fun, but I was getting kind of bored with it. And somehow, some way, I slipped through a crack somewhere and I was outside of the game, looking at everything, the entire setup for this whole level was right in front of me and I was just floating, looking at it. Looking at all of the the NPCs I was looking at the the the event it was the Pacific so there were Japanese soldiers all set up everything frozen. And I could just go anywhere I want and nothing affected me. It was almost as if I suddenly left my body, you know, and I was floating around. It was so exciting and so interesting. I love that. I love that phenomenon.

Tracy Harwood 34:54
Yeah, I think but the thing that strikes me about this is it it's it's the it's a documentary about the the players rather than the, you know them doing it themselves. So I'm kind of curious to see what that's about what angle they take on that. So yeah, interesting. Okay.

Damien Valentine 35:15
would be if we do get a chance to watch it, I think yeah, it'd be quite fascinating thing to watch. And like, Ricky, Phil said, some entertaining stories where you escape the world that you're supposed to be playing in and the strange things happened. Yeah, absolutely.

Phil Rice 35:32
I saw a video of probably a year ago of the most recent Doom game. And it was a it I guess it's classified as a reaction video, but they got the developers of the game into a room to watch and comment on a speed runner who had beaten the entire 8 to 10 hour game in like 45 minutes. And one of the things that he did multiple times was he had found one of those cracks. So there's this huge landscape, you know, filled with all these difficult jumps and monsters to take on and he just zips up. And then he's just scooting along the ceiling, passing it all and drops down on the exit. And the developers just going, how fine. And some of them, they didn't even know were there. They were writing like we got we got to patch that one, don't we? Yeah. It's a fascinating, fascinating world.

Ricky Grove 36:38
Good, fine. Good find Tracy.

Damien Valentine 36:41
Okay, so that wraps up our news for for this week. For those who don't know yet, on Thursdays, we do premieres on YouTube for our latest episodes. So be sure to come and join us there. Basically, we will show our latest episode and we'll be there in the chat interacting with people. So that's always fun to do.

Ricky Grove 37:05
12 o'clock Pacific Time, and what is it at your time? 8pm.

Tracy Harwood 37:11
Yeah. We've had some great folks show up. And yeah, I'm real good comments made in that in that premiere chat. So, you know, please do come and join us.

Damien Valentine 37:24
It's fun not just to record this and then put it out. But to actually talk to you guys, as well, as you know, as you're watching us a lot of fun. So you got any feedback? please do send it in. If you're interested, anything we've talked about, or have some views on what we've been talking about that please send us the email address and everything on the website. And that's it. So see you all next time. Where are we talking about films and we've chosen, iClone as the theme so all the films we're going to talk about were made with iClone. So see you then, thanks, bye bye