Ricky Grove 00:04
Hey everybody, this is Ricky Grove. I'm here for the completely machinima podcast. Thank you for joining us. I'm here with my pals, Tracy, Phil and Damien. Hello, everybody. We're going to be talking about our machinima news this week. And why don't we start with you, Tracy, you have a nice long raft of interesting news for machinima filmmakers.

Tracy Harwood 00:27
Well, I've only got three areas that I want to talk about actually, firstly, a bit of an update on contests. And these are these are in things that have happened. And one thing that's kind of on now as we as we go to air, firstly and video have announced the Omniverse Machinima contest results, and they did that at SIGGRAPH, actually as part of a bigger talk. So it's a little bit lost in the recording that they then posted. What they mentioned was that they received dozens of entries and decisions that they made in picking the winners focused on the technical challenges overcome by those that they selected. And then they put them on the Omniverse gallery page, where you can find the links to the films themselves. They're definitely worth watching. The winner was Simon Lavit and runners up were Nicklas Lotz and Ted Sanguindel. And we'll put a link in the in the show reel on the link to the show reel on the show notes and also to the Omniverse gallery itself. Damian, I think you have a bit of an update on that one too don't you?

Damien Valentine 01:39
Um, well, I was actually going to enter the contest. But unfortunately, COVID happened. So they finally got me and I just couldn't enter the contest. So I was kind of disappointed with that. But yeah, the team from Nvidia, the they sent me some of the results to have a look at some very impressive work there. We're going to be talking to them at some point. We haven't quite worked that out yet. And just a little, for our listeners. If you have any questions or Omniverse, send them in. And then I can ask them when at your interview. So if you want to have anything about what's coming or good idea. You know if you've got any questions on your it's just send them in, and I'll include that in interview. Yeah, so I've done questions

Ricky Grove 02:27
It seems like Omniverse with SIGGRAPH, which was just closed That was last week, has made another push for machinima trying to get it that with a higher profile, and putting in more updates and fixes and additions to the machinima aspects of the Omniverse platform. So I'm really glad to see that.

Tracy Harwood 02:54
I'm not surprised that Ricky because I think really as as you know, shows, evidence are really we're seeing more and more content coming out. So it's, it makes sense for them to be part of that story, I think. Anyway, secondly, throughout September, John MacInnes is running his second real time movie contest for Unreal Engine five users. And this time, he's providing all the scenes. So last time, if you remember, he provided all the characters. And what you need to do for the for the contest is create a mood scene with it. Now I had the chance to catch up with him during August. And there's a an interview with John, all about the contests on our YouTube channel. And he's got a Discord server, where he's also doing updates. So watch our interview with him. He's quite forthcoming on what he's expecting, and how he's expecting the moods to be integrated into the movie that he's going to be making with the scenes that he's using. So that's really worth getting involved with.

Ricky Grove 04:00
What does he mean by mood?

Tracy Harwood 04:02
Yeah, that's a good question. Um, well, he makes reference to something called mis en scene. See, so it used to be called mis en scene. And it's basically I think, lighting soundscape. I'm not sure quite what he wants, in terms of blessing in terms of like, whether there's character in the, in the, in the scene or not, but he's basically expecting something interesting through the capture of that scene. So he's giving you all the assets and you've just got to do something interesting with it.

Ricky Grove 04:38
So it's not a mood and in terms of stay at sombre mood, or, or anything like that,

Tracy Harwood 04:45
you can you can do with them what you like, okay, he's really open to ideas. And like I said, he's provided all the assets for you to do it. It's just a case of what you do with it. So it's gonna be quite interesting to see what comes of it and he's got on really fascinating judges panel as well on on the actual contest, including some of the guys that were winners from last year's contest. So it's definitely going to be an intriguing one to watch. And what I was gonna say before before you sort of said that somebody on the discord server asked me Do I, you know, I need to create my own scene and what have you? And I said, well, actually you don't, because he is literally providing you with everything. So it's, it's how you film it, I think, how you create,

Ricky Grove 05:39
the story you you come up with and how you actually shoot it. Cool.

Tracy Harwood 05:44
Yeah, how you shoot is about right. And then thirdly, there's a nice little sizzle reel for Unreal's better late than never challenge for which they said they received something like 400 entries, or 400. That's astonishing. So we'll share a link to the sizzle reel. And there's a really nice little article on 80LV, as well. So we'll put a link into into the show notes about that as well. And then there's a few creative projects to take a look at which I picked up during the course of the last few weeks.

Tracy Harwood 06:19
Firstly, there's there was a really stunning music video by Jackson Wang called Cruel, which was released on the 29th of July, it's up to about seven and a half million views at the moment. And it was made using Unreal Engine five and live action. It's just absolutely extraordinary quality and the choreography in it is astonishing, it's definitely worth taking a look at how it was made as well, because he's released some videos on the virtual production side of it as well as as well as the film. So we'll put a couple of links in the show notes to that one you've got to see.

Tracy Harwood 07:01
And then there's another extraordinary film using Unreal Engine five called Coherence by Sagans and that was released on the third of June. And this one is using a style transfer applied by Disco Fusion. Also one definitely worth looking at. I did toy with whether we should review that one. But I had so many options this month. And I decided not to cover this one in news, but it's definitely worth a look. Good.

Tracy Harwood 07:28
And then technical updates for you. There's a nice looking mid poly module desert kit that's been released, which has lots of assets you can use and modify it all for free. And it's been created by Pavel Oliva, Oliver. And we'll put a link in the in the show notes to that.

Tracy Harwood 07:48
There's a really nice tutorial by Game Art Experiments, which shows you how to turn an AI generated image into a 3d format and the AI the AI images that he's talking about using MidJourney.

Phil Rice 08:06
And it's awesome, by the way, it's awesome.

Tracy Harwood 08:10
Absolutely incredible. I've got the links, I haven't had a play yet. Oh, you should. It's I can't wait. Yeah. There's also a version of the process that he's put this tutorial out for using Blender, which makes pretty much the whole process free workflow as well. So definitely have a look at that when you get a chance.

Tracy Harwood 08:32
And then finally, in3d avatar, Avatars can now be turned into Character Creator 4 avatars, because they have hooked up with Reallusion. So you can create highly customised content based on real people. Without necessarily the amination challenges. Now they look a little bit plastic they're not they're not quite like the metahumans that we're seeing in terms of of what they're doing, but they're not bad. And what in3d does is it uses a scanning tool that you have, I think on your mobile phone, it takes a whole body scan, and their tutorials sort of shows you how to drag it into character creator. So it's quite a neat one to have a look at. And again, we'll put a link in the show notes for you. And that's it for me this month.

Ricky Grove 09:27
Good Lord Tracy, you're amazing. You come up with such incredible news. Thank you. Damian. What kind of interesting machinima news have you found?

Damien Valentine 09:36
I found three things I'll start with it was something I briefly considered as my film selection, but it's actually just a teaser trailer. So I thought well, let's wait for the actual the final film before we review that. It's it's a fan recreation of Star Wars Knights The Old Republic, which is a very popular video game by Bioware. least about 20 years ago, but what they're doing is they're retelling the story using Unreal five and the characters have created with Reallusion's character creator. And so because obviously, it's 20, your character is not going to be something you want to use now. So they're doing this, they're putting a whole tonne of effort into it. We've covered some of the videos before, you know some of the test videos in our reviews previously. So this is the first look at the actual series. The very first episode, they haven't put a release date on it yet, which is a bit frustrating, because I want to see what they've done with it. But I thought it's worth mentioning because it's telling a videogame story in a completely new engine. But still using machinima techniques. Right. So I'm very interested to see what happens with that.

Ricky Grove 10:45
I will have a link in the show notes for that.

Phil Rice 10:48
Yeah, yeah, that game had such a great story. And actually, I bought it, you know, when it came out, and then tried to introduce it to my son a couple years ago. First of all, it was challenging to get it to run on modern hardware. Yeah, boy, the graphics don't, they didn't hold up to great. So I'm very excited because it's a really good story. Through the course of that game, I enjoyed it very much.

Damien Valentine 11:20
We went up the game came home started playing and 12 hours later. So

Phil Rice 11:27
that was an absorbing game. Yeah, yeah.

Damien Valentine 11:31
Yeah. So that's my first piece of news. And when we get more updates on that, we'll talk about it again. The next thing was, it's not necessarily machinima related, it might be because the details are still kind of vague at the moment, but DreamWorks are going to use their moon can release their Moonray rendering platform as open source. And until they actually do that, and people have a good look at it. I don't know how it's going to apply to machinima. But in theory, you could probably export your icon scene and render it in mid range.

Ricky Grove 12:07
Also blender, there's no question in my mind that the blender community is going to grab that one. As soon as possible. I suspect in a future update. Soon a future update. There'll be integrating that moonray renderer? Because it's a terrific renderer they rendered? Gosh, I can't remember the names of the animated films they did. But they're just gorgeous films. And so it's a it's a polished and, and beautiful render.

Damien Valentine 12:35
I look forward to giving it a try myself if I can. Yeah.

Tracy Harwood 12:40
I'm gonna give Omniverse a run for its money, then. Is that what you're thinking? My mind? Because I mean, just, you know, my thinking here is Omniverse. Really, by making it tied to, you know, the RTX. And, you know, the supply of those still being a challenge is basically shooting itself a little bit in the foot and allowing the sort of stuff to come in and take over. But I mean, what what are the, you know, what are the platforms that you can run on? On what kinds of computer? Yeah, and that this, to me seems like a more viable option for those that gets stuck in that supply.

Ricky Grove 13:26
I agree with you. But I think Nvidia has a longer view. I think they're looking ahead because right now, the the there was a dip for of about three months and prices were they were almost cut in half for the RTXs, in any serious gamers going to have an RTX card now. Right. And since the gaming community draw is drawn into machinima, I don't think I think they're looking further down the road when this issue of card supply is going to be relatively minor. So I think they have a longer view of it. But the thing about the Moonray is becoming open source, it's going to allow, like I said, people like Blender and other organisations to get that code. And since they have a strong fan base and strong consumer base, they're going to be able to turn that code immediately into working with their programme. So I think that's a very good thing. And it's part of a trend that we've been seeing in the last five or six years were open sources. And the idea of open source isn't that it's just low class, that that it's actually going to help it's there's a feedback loop where they're giving away stuff and customers are coming back to them. So they're, they're being smart about that whole consumer cycle. And also the open source organisation that promotes it has been doing a really good job of, of getting it out there. That open source is a good thing that it's not just junk.

Damien Valentine 15:01
The other element of Nvidia Omniverse is being made to be something that is fairly easy to learn. I don't know how complicated Moonray is to use. I suspect, because it's been used on such a professional level, it's not going to have that ease of use where you can just sit down with it and have something rendered or made within half an hour to an hour. Even if it's just, you know, a simple scene with some cubes running around, moving around as your test projects, I feel like Moonray is probably going to be something you have to spend more time with to learn.

Ricky Grove 15:38
But remember, the code is open source, which means smart coders are going to be able to reintegrate, they're going to be able to create an interface a graphic interface is going to be much easier to use than the pro level and that they're using in DreamWorks.

Phil Rice 15:57
Yeah, look at well, look at what Blender did to itself. Yes. When it remade itself and it. Yeah, so yeah, anything's possible there. I think

Ricky Grove 16:09
I think you're right, the initial version of it might be somewhat complex, but I think download down the line coders are going to see that go no, we can't do that. Let's do it in a more simplified version. But but that's a good point.

Damien Valentine 16:22
All right. And the third piece of news is more of a heads up that something's going to happen because it hasn't happened yet. It's on the September the 19th to 20 USC is the NVIDIA GTC conference, and I've been told that there's going to be more news about Nvidia Omniverse new reveals and things that's going to happen there, right. So, you know, if you're using Omniverse, and want to learn more about it, keep an eye on that event is I imagine it's all going to be streamed. So you can just watch it from home and in your copy of your home and see what they're going to announce. So that's worth keeping an eye on. It's very

Ricky Grove 16:58
good. I've attended the GTC conference several times and it's a fantastic conference easily rival SIGGRAPH and it's more accessible than cigarettes SIGGRAPH has grown. It's Comicon. It's so big, one day isn't enough to really grasp it. And even if you spend the whole time there, you've only got one little path that you've found. There are innumerable paths that you could follow. And it's so great. I'm so glad that they're streaming that live, it's well worth your time as a machinima filmmaker or creator to look through GTC, they're, they're at the forefront of promoting machinima and making machinima an important part of artistic creation

Damien Valentine 17:43
That's me done for this month.

Ricky Grove 17:45
Thank you very much, Damien. Phil, did you have anything you wanted to add?

Phil Rice 17:50
I've just got a quick bit of news kind of sad, but not not entirely depressing. But the the website film music.io, which is where Kevin MacLeod hosted all of hosts all of his music, where I had have have mine as well. That site was founded a few years ago. And basically, the idea of it was that for artists, you know, like me, that we would offer the base of our soundtrack music essentially, available for Creative Commons use. But then there was the ability to, for someone to purchase an extended licence if they wanted to, say use it for commercial purposes, or use it in some way other than the already pretty generous Creative Commons licence. And Sasha, who is the the guy who has been running that site, out of Germany, just over the past 12 to 18 months in particular, there have been some changes in regulation tax related in particular, where it just made it infeasible for him to continue to pay out to handle the collection of those fees for extended licences, and then pay them out to the artists without there being a lot of bureaucratic meddling. And it just, it's just bad. He's already running the site, basically on a zero profit basis. And this just made it where it just wasn't feasible to continue doing that. But rather than just shut down the site completely, he's basically just now it's purely just Creative Commons. And he he reached out to all of us who have our music there and said, Hey, if you if you obviously don't want to continue, just let me know I'll take your stuff down, but we're gonna go just all creative commons and you can put wording in your bio or whatever, that if people want to do an extended licence, they need to contact you and negotiate that directly. So anyway, it's it's it's unfortunate, but but it's not the end of the world. For sure. And That site is still a great location to, if you're looking for a piece of music to use in an online video on YouTube and whatnot, it's got some of the most generous licencing available. And a wide variety of the catalogue is very diverse. You can search it by genre, or by a particular artist. And again, Kevin MacLeod has his music over there. I want to I want to say north of 1000 songs, maybe even significantly more than that. And there's at least a dozen other music artists over there. So it's film music.io So that's that's the change that happened there.

Ricky Grove 20:41
Well, that's bad news. Good news and bad news. Good news for machinima filmmakers is that film music.io is a great source to go for finding music for your for your machinima film. The bad news is that content creators like such as yourself, are not going to be able to get anything back from your efforts. But I think that was a smart move on his part, rather than dissolve the the site entirely. Turn it into Creative Commons. Now, for those of you who don't know about Creative Commons, usually there's there's several levels of Creative Commons. But usually the Creative Commons is attribution. Meaning that you have to give credit to the composer of the music and also the link to film music.io or whatever length that the Creator provides in the credits. So don't forget if you use music from that site, you need to and that's creative commons, you need to give credit to the composer in your credits. I mean, that's a natural thing to do. But yeah, I think it still should be stated anyway.

Phil Rice 21:50
And you don't have to put it in the film itself by the way, it's nice if you do if you credit the the music artists but you don't have to, it's just got to be in the like, in the somewhere in the description area of of the YouTube video. And when you download a piece of music there it gives you all the instructions and copy paste you can take the the info and you know put it into your video so yeah, it's it's a it's a neat site. And I'm glad he's continuing it. Now he's doing it basically at it just at his own expense. I'm not sure what hosting costs are involved for a site like that, but it's not zero. He does accept donations there. And which is great, because you know that that's what will keep the lights on for them. So

Ricky Grove 22:33
you hear that machinima filmmakers, if you get us three or four pieces from film music, drop them five bucks. Yeah, it'll help him out. And it's the good thing to do. You'll feel good.

Phil Rice 22:45
He's a really good guy Sasha and a very talented musician himself. He's got his own music on there as well.

Ricky Grove 22:50
Excellent, thank you. I've only had three short things that I wanted to share with you all. This is Omniverse related.

Ricky Grove 23:00
Audio to face I had an update 2022.1 which includes the most important update for it is it includes a motion sliders where you can give the face of the standard face that you're animating that you're you're creating at a certain emotions. Now they're brought emotions, anger, fear, grief, things like that. They also gave the model eyeballs because it didn't have eyeballs before. So now you can see blinks, you can control blinks for it. One of the interesting things that you can do with it is you can actually create an emotional, you can let there's an AI element and, and you can actually allow the programme to determine the emotional state from the audio that you provide. And the results, I think, of course, I haven't seen enough to really come up with a solid opinion. But they're satisfactory. I think they're okay. Especially, I mean, and perhaps in a close up, they might be you might have to be choosy about it, but certainly in a medium shot or a wide shot. They're just fine. They're just perfect for it. The programme is basically sliders, and then click box, click a checkmark a box, put in your wav file and it'll automatically determine it. You can further adjust that you using the sliders after you've had the AI decide on what emotion it is. So I think it's an interesting addition to it. Since it connects with real illusion, the workflow could be character creator, create a character bring it into audio to face do the emotional thing. Re export it using the USD dot USD format back into iClone and then you've got a character I suspect that's the kind of thing that would take maybe a half an hour, maybe an hour to put together. So that's something you might want to look into Damien or anybody else who wants to use iClone and, or even Unity, to do character creation. So it sounded really good update. And I think that it shows that they're Nvidia Omniverse team is back making decisions and adding quality of life updates to the programme. So that's, we'll have a link to that in there. You definitely should check it out. It's pretty cool.

Damien Valentine 25:36
I did see a little trailer for that in SIGGRAPH announcement, I thought, really impressive. I've not had a chance to sit down and try it yet. But I'm looking forward to. Yeah,

Tracy Harwood 25:46
The text to emotion is really interesting, I think. But you do have to be careful, because it because it infers the emotion based on the words and punctuation in the text. So you have to be a good writer!

Ricky Grove 26:00
So you could actually actually create some absurd things by putting in a bizarre question, you know, like dash dash, semicolon, Word, Word, comma, dash, and just see how it interprets that. That would be fun.

Damien Valentine 26:15
Very interesting. So wonder is saying the same thing over and over again, in different tones to see if it can pick up on that. Ricky, that'd be something you should try. Because you'd be so good at that.

Ricky Grove 26:25
That's good. That's good. I'll get a hold of Friedrich Kershner. And we'll start working on something weird. Okay.

Phil Rice 26:34
Yeah, that's interesting. If it's if it's taking its cues from the text, but also picking up something from the actual audio as well. Yeah, there's certain types of delivery that I would think it would, would be very challenging: sarcasm.

Ricky Grove 26:49
Oh, yeah. I read that. Or irony,

Phil Rice 26:53
right, where the where the text does not match the intent or tone. So that that would be fun to play with? Yeah.

Ricky Grove 26:59
Yeah. It'd be funny to take some Shakespearean speeches and plug them in there and see what they would do. They did the in one in one of the videos that we linked to they, there's a goofy little series of three sentences that they had, that they use, I can't remember it. Something over the Locks and Queen something. But anyway, they showed different emotions, saying the same lines, but then plus 10 Anger plus then saying the same thing and it was quite amusing. I really enjoyed it. But like I said, it's a useful tool. And I think you should keep an eye on a machinima filmmakers definitely take the look at it, I think it'll be very helpful in even if you don't use it for your entire production, you can use it for specific scenes. Once you get the workflow down, like I said, half hour, an hour, you should be able to integrate it no problem because, again, it's using the dot USD format, which is slowly becoming a universal format for being able to transfer assets from programme to programme. Blender does a USD, Unity does USD and the whole Omniverse is USD. So definitely check that out.

Ricky Grove 28:19
My next two pieces are short, Adobe released a comprehensive Premiere Pro guide for long term and episodic filmmakers. Now that's the title of it the actual, it's in the form of a wiki, which is a really good way to do it. The title of the wiki is best practices and workflow guide. That's a more succinct way of putting it, I wish they would have made that in the title, a long term and episodic filmmakers like what? But workflow guide is really good. Now. The bulk of the guide is basically a premiere pro workflow, how to bring documents in how to add titles, how to do graphics, but one of the things they do is they talk about the collaborative element of being able to use Premiere because some of the updates allow you to collaborate inside of Premiere to work on a specific project. Since Premiere Pro is such a widespread, its usage is widespread. This, I think would be an interesting topic to look at. And since it's in a wiki format, you don't have to read from the beginning to the end, you can just go to the parts that are interesting to you as a filmmaker. Again, Adobe Premiere is part of their premiere subscription only package which is frustrating as hell. But you can the good thing about it is that you can you can rent Adobe Premiere separately from anything else. I think it's like $9.95 a month. So that makes it much less onerous, then the $55, you're gonna have to pay for the whole package of stuff. So it's a good document. I find it Adobe Premiere, not as intuitive as as DaVinci Resolve. I think DaVinci Resolve is a better programme for, editing package for beginning filmmakers, and medium level filmmakers, because it's just so simple and clear. And it's free.

Phil Rice 30:29
Which is weird, by the way, because it has a reputation of being difficult. But I did not find it that way at all. Now I am I'm not a newbie, of course. But I've used the same thing. Vegas for decades. And so I was really based on reputation and from people that I know even saying, oh, that's that's a tough one. No, it's not. It's just different. And if you just embrace the paradigm that they've built, the modules on it is way more intuitive than than Vegas and Premiere I've only dabbled with. But yeah, it's if you've heard that and are have shied away from DaVinci, don't. It's, it's it's not that hard. And actually, and it's extremely powerful. And free, and free.

Ricky Grove 31:22
Thing. Thank you that. So and although there isn't a document, like the workflow guide, to Premiere for DaVinci Resolve there in our innumerable YouTube DaVinci Resolve gurus, yes, it have complete guides for beginners, for DaVinci Resolve. But I do think if you like Adobe Premiere, this is a document you should take a look at. And if you're making short term, short form series, this is a really good way to to bone up and clear up your workflow. So that's it for Adobe, it's really good.

Ricky Grove 32:04
And the last item I have is sort of fun item that I wanted to share with you. It's a in Second Life. Somebody has gotten together, a group of people gotten together and they've created Lynch land. And it's a sim that's devoted to the art and characters of David Lynch. In second lies new world of Wagner James ol reported on the premiere party a few weeks ago, which I couldn't attend. But I Gosh, it sounds like it was a lot of fun. They have a Flickr collection that will put a note in of all of the pictures that were taking during the tech and during the premiere, and also covering a lot of aspects of the SIM. Now if you want to film there, you probably need to get permission. I suspect that they will allow filmmaking I don't know for sure, but I suspect they will. But you have to get permission. But it just looks fascinating, especially if you'd love the work of David Lynch. We'll put a link in there for you to visit it in all your Second Life. That's just

Phil Rice 33:05
wonderfully strange. It is.

Ricky Grove 33:09
Second Life is a perfect platform for David Lynch. I'm surprised he hasn't jumped in on it. So they have a brief interview Wagner James, Allah has a brief interview with the people who put it together and it looks really cool. I, I can't wait to check it out myself. So with that, I think we've covered the news for this month. Just a note to everybody, we probably are going to be changing the format. Next month of our news, we're going to be moving the news to a website, blog only. We will include our comments on the news articles. And if important news come come up, we will discuss it here between ourselves. But primarily we're going to be moving into our blog at completely machinima.com with links and everything. And then we'll also be moving the film section to endeavour each individual film will have an episode of its own. We'll be releasing those every Thursday. That's not next month, but the month after that would be October, right? Yeah, October. So be aware that we're going to be changing the format. Give us some feedback. If you liked that idea, and you want us to keep going with it. Also, if there's any news that you have, that you think we should cover, please contact tax talk at completely machinima.com Also any ideas that you have or comments on the news or films that we're covering? We'd love to hear from you. And films if you've created a film and you think it's worth our time to look at, send it along well, we have a film coming up that somebody did just that they're going to we're going to be talking about in our film section. So that's it for the news this month. Thank you very much and thank you my friends for sharing the news with me and we'll see you the next time in which we'll be talking about machinima films. So that's it over and out. Bye bye

Tracy Harwood 35:07
Bye - we look like a rogue's gallery!