Phil Rice 00:40
music. 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 here with my co hosts, Damian Valentine and Tracy Harwood, hello. Ricky is off working on his cottage cheese sculpture. He'll be doing a tutorial video for that to share with all of us. So be on the lookout for that. It's it'll be exciting to see his techniques there. In the meantime, we're going to cover some news. And Tracy, why don't you kick us off?

Tracy Harwood 01:14
Sure. Well, thanks to Evan Ryan for reminding us about Reallusions 2024, 3d character contest. I think unfortunately for you, our viewers, by the time you pick this up, the deadline will have passed, because it closed on the first of September. It's a real shame. But for those of you that did manage to get something in, I think we'll be very much looking forward to see it. I'm guessing, Evan, you're one of those that are that is submitting to it. So we will look forward to seeing what it is you put in. There's some fantastic entries in it. Phil put the entry page up on our preparation board here for the for the show. I've had a look through some of those. There's one that really stood out for me, which was Stefan Dufour's last chrome chromium, I think. But, yeah, amazing bits of work I really look forward to seeing, seeing what people do with that.

Phil Rice 02:16
So you've looked through some of the entries so far, then I have indeed, yeah, so it's now, is it a little bit more evident why? When you suggested that I enter, I guess that I said I probably should not. Yeah, some amazing there's variety of quality, but the top tier entries so far just really amazing stuff, people using ZBrush to create these very customized characters and bringing them in and, yeah, it's a whole skill set there that it's exciting to I'm glad they're doing this. I wish that they would do contests of this kind for iClone itself. Been a while since I've seen anything like that, but, you know, I the character creator. There's a broader audience for character creator users, because people are using this to create characters for all different kinds of platforms. So it makes sense that they would would center a contest around this. So yeah, I'm excited to see the the the entries as they come in. Yeah,

Tracy Harwood 03:14
do you know when they're going to be out? The the final

Phil Rice 03:18
I don't you figure if the deadline is September 1. That means most people will be submitting their final entries on September 1. Probably be a little bit of time to review it, and I would, I would expect mid September, yeah, okay, yeah, maybe by the time this episode's out. Who knows? Possibly, yeah, we may be, we may be doing a little time travel here. Excellent.

Tracy Harwood 03:42
All right, the next bit of news that I picked up on is to do with Skibidi Toilet, which, as you are aware, has been made using half life two and Counter Strike assets. And it would appear that the creator, who is Alexey Gerasimov, apologies for the pronunciation, is in talks for a Michael Bay movie. Can you believe that? Oh,

Phil Rice 04:11
I cannot. I

Tracy Harwood 04:12
still can't get my head around that anyway, wow, yeah,

Phil Rice 04:19
I don't understand Skibidi Toilet. I think I may just be too old. I probably need to ask my kids. One's a teenager, one's at university. Be interesting to see if they even admit that they know what it is. But I have a feeling they do when they everywhere and I don't understand

Damien Valentine 04:35
it, yeah, when they explain it to you, can you then explain it to us so that we can

Phil Rice 04:38
understand I will. I will. We'll do a little what I'll do is I'll do a we talked a couple episodes back about the dearth of video essays. I'll do a video essay on an old dad learning about Skibidi... I'm actually not joking. That's actually a really good idea. I'm gonna do that. Oh, my. I'm going to do that. Yeah, look out for that. I will look forward

Tracy Harwood 05:04
to seeing that. I will look forward to seeing it too. The other thing I would say, I was going to say about it is that actually, because it's macinema videos that he's creating this Alexi, apparently, the influence for is Garry's Mod. Who knew but speaking about Gary's mod, it's spiritual successor, Sandbox is now available for everyone to use as well. It's being positioned in a similar way to Roblox, and it's being targeted at the user generated content market. It's been built in Source 2 engine, so apparently, as I understand it, what they are trying to do with the launch of sandbox is to de emphasize the link to Valve's games for machinima production, which is an interesting take. So if you are listening to our our year in review discussion, particularly in relation to Unreal to to to to, to, you know, to think about why an engine would do that and what the implications of that might be, is kind of interesting now to see Source doing something similar. Think, yeah, we'll see what happens with that. Because, of course, Source is not as easy, allegedly, as Unreal or iClone or others, perhaps, I don't know. So we'll see what, what happens with this launch of this spiritual successor to Garry's Mod. Smart move on

Phil Rice 06:31
their part. Because one thing you can say for Gary's mod is that it's, it has been, you know, because it was built on, kind of as a like a barnacle on the Half Life two world. Many, many times the really, the only characters you ever see in it are characters that are straight out of the half life two story. So there's a lot of G Man videos. There's some with Alyx. There's some of those stock characters from the half life two, world and stuff. And from the screenshot that comes article that you referenced, which will will include in our show notes, it certainly doesn't look anything like the characters from Half Life 2. They're more stylized. There's nothing, nothing Half Life two ish about it. And that's, that's, I think that only will lead to good things in terms of of Gary's mod creators have been very, very creative, and they've had very limited guard rails in place all this time for how many years now, over it well over a decade. So I think it's an interesting move, and frankly, going for if they are indeed going for more of like a Roblox esthetic that's smart for a number of reasons. One, that means, generally, probably lower poly, lower performance needed to get good performance out of it. I mean, Roblox is kind of in the same tier, pretty much the same graphical tier, as like Minecraft or something like that, and it's enjoyed by a giant audience. Yeah, giant. And Roblox has this whole development platform that is reputedly very easy to use, compared to other platforms for developing your own experiences to share with others in Roblox. I think that's really what I mean, that's the heart of what's kept it going. So, yeah, it's, I mean, they developed it in source, so I guess it's not going to be part of Roblox, but that's, I think that's a smart move to appeal to that audience, because, again, it's just, it's huge. Yeah,

Tracy Harwood 08:43
it is. Let's see what happens with it. I'm kind of kind of intrigued to see how that one unfolds. And then, in another sort of source related news, I found a really cool video paying homage to the Team Fortress to create a community. I think it's an absolute must see for any TF two fans that are out there. It's been edited to Freebird. It's really, really good fun. You'll see some of the the videos, machinimas that we've reviewed also in that promo vid, really. And that's it for me this month. So what have you guys brought? Damien, you want to go next?

Damien Valentine 09:22
Yeah, okay, well, got a number of stories here. The first one is a little bit of a downer, really, but it kind of goes with what we just talked about. How's mods moving away from half life? So Activision have shut down a mod for one of the Call of Duty games because my understanding was they were moving maps from one call of duty, from an older game to the new one, upscaling the graphics to match the new one, or something along those lines. I don't play Call of Duty, so I'm not too up on. Specifics of this mod, but so Activision shut it down because they're worried it would impact the sales of their upcoming game later this year. So basically, that's a big no for modding Call of Duty games, and they kind of have a history of that because, you know, Call of Duty games come out every year, and they don't want modders prolonging the life of these games, which, I think that's a silly attitude really, because modders do prolong the life of the game, but when you release a new game, they're going to move to that anyway. If the game's as good as it's meant to be, then you're going to the hardcore audience is going to, well, the audience is going to move to the new game. And so why not let mods, but let's keep it interesting in between. It's

Phil Rice 10:48
very strange. This the this is not the first developer that's taken what I would consider an unusual stance with regard to modding. Bethesda, of course. I think they've kind of got a history of making weird decisions there. It's all with Bethesda. Everyone seems to suspect Bethesda is the maker of what fall out Skyrim, no, no. Red Dead is

Tracy Harwood 11:14
rock star, of course. Yeah.

Phil Rice 11:17
And Starfield, yeah. Basically they, with Bethesda, they've taken moves that kind of make it seem like that they're out to try and somehow monetize the user made mods, or it's something money related, of course, but yeah, some strange moves there where it the end result is it inhibits the proliferation of those mods. And, yeah, I think that's a really weird move, and seems to go against the current that has been set up. Really, Rockstar has led the way. You know, they're certainly not a flawless company or anything, but, you know, they they seem to love nothing more than to have people mod the GTA games, for example, and they've got a lot at stake for GTA six. You don't see them doing anything like that to to, you know, step on the on the hose for GTA five mods. And GTA five mods have definitely kept that game alive longer than it probably would have, you know. So that's a strange move. I don't know.

Damien Valentine 12:21
The thing I noticed with Bethesda, especially with Starfield, is they've got the built in mod finder in the game, which they released about a month or so ago, and so mod creators can charge points, which you then have to pay your money for. But what my creators are doing is they're opting to make their mods free. There are a few pay mods in there. Some are officially sanctioned by Bethesda, and there are key creators who are opting to go for the page route. But a lot of just saying, Oh, we're just going to make it free, which I think, you know, that's a good thing. Make, make the mods free. It's

Phil Rice 12:56
a way of making a statement, too. If that's a response of sorts, to, yeah, to those moves, is, is basically, and not all of us are interested in that. And I think the same is true for the Minecraft modding community, which is gigantic, just gigantic. And there's whole third party platforms set up to distribute those. And I think the way that the most popular, one of the more popular Minecraft modding platforms, the name, is eluding me right now. My son would, would smack me for nothing but, but basically, they've, they've somehow set up a way to where the creators of mods have a revenue sharing situation, but they don't charge any money for the mods. I don't know how quite how that works. If it's like an ad revenue share thing or something. I don't really know exactly how the economics of that works, but experiments like those, where they're like leaning the other direction, right? It's the emphasis is on rewarding the creators of mods, not not discouraging them. So, yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a weird move. I I don't mean this in any kind of malicious way, but I kind of hope it doesn't work well for them, because then maybe they'll learn Activision I'm talking about, yeah, well,

Damien Valentine 14:12
apparently the game that was being modded is now being massively review bombed by all the people that were looking forwards to that mod. And I'd say, Well, why not? Because people have been buying. They'd actually specifically bought, I think it was a remaster of an old game, and they were bringing some maps over to I don't know exactly, but it's being reviewed bombed because some people actually bought this remaster specifically for this mod that was coming out. And obviously now they can't play it. So, yeah, I understand it either. And obviously, modding is a big part of the machinery community. It's huge, yeah, it's, well, it basically started off as modding. So, yeah,

Phil Rice 14:51
yeah, in our reflection episode, Tracy, there was a point that came up and I was going to comment we ran out of time, but you had mentioned how, like, the early. Actually we were, oh no, it wasn't the reflection episode. It was reviewing Ricky's pick, the video essay about the origins or the history of machima. And you'd mentioned how that he kind of glossed over the fact that the early machinima creators, if they needed something in the game and they didn't have it, they made it and then figured out how to get it into the game, and how that's much less a thing. Now I'm not sure if it's less a thing now it's just that one person or one team doesn't it's been specialized, is what's happened. Because the modding communities have just exploded. If you look at the site, Nexus mods.com There's, like, I don't know, 100 games on there, and just tons and tons and tons and tons of mods, all free. So those are people who used to be you used to have to have that skill to be able to pull off machinima, and now a lot of machinima makers rely on those mods. So it's almost an unofficial partnership with these modders that they may not have ever even met that are doing that part of the work, and then the the filmmakers can can exploit those and use them. I think that that Red Dead Redemption two video that we seem to bring up regularly, where it takes place in that dream world, used a ton of different mods, none of which were made by the filmmaker. He just implemented them into his game and then exploited him. And so, yeah, I think there's a lot of that going on. I know that everything that I've made in in any video game, just about everything I've made has relied on that someone else made a mod to allow certain things to happen. Certainly, that's true in The Sims, for almost all the Sims, like the current, the current crop of Sims, four machinima people. Yeah, they're making use of custom content that were that's been sub kind of subcontracted to to someone else, usually content that's already been created by those people for other reasons, and they're using that in their game. So, yeah, yeah,

Damien Valentine 16:59
I want to get the downer after the wave. We'll go to some more positive news now. So at the time, recording Gamescom has just happened in Cologne, Germany. It's a big video game conference, and companies are there showing off the latest games. So there's a couple of things I spotted watching the big opening night thing, and I want to share them here with all of you guys. So we've got the Dragon Age The veil guard, which is the fourth Dragon Age game. It's got an official restate, which is Halloween. Now, the reason I mentioned this is because the first, the very first Dragon Age game, a lot of people from our community went to work on it. I don't know how many of them are still there working on it, but it was a very cinematic fantasy role playing experience. It is for those of us who didn't go and work at Bioware, this and Mass Effect were heavily influential and inspirational on us as creators because they did things that other games hadn't done with storytelling before, because the cut scenes looked like, oh,

Phil Rice 18:03
they changed. They changed the whole landscape of what's expected from games cinematically. Yes, and

Damien Valentine 18:10
this looks no different watching the trailers for it, I'm excited for this game, and it looks like it's going to be just as cinematic as the previous entries. And so I thought it's worth mentioning because it's, it was a big part of the machinima community. I don't

Phil Rice 18:23
Dragon Age. Is Dragon Age still a Bioware title?

Damien Valentine 18:27
Oh, yeah, okay, work on it for the last eight years. I think, Whoa, yeah. Which I'm more of a Mass Effect fan, and I know, but a very long wait for the next one of those. So yeah, but yeah, I'll play this. I'm looking forward to it. I don't know if it's going to be much of a machinima tool, because I think it's going to be very focused on its own story. But, you know, I can play it and get inspiration from it rather than make it absolutely so, yeah, I thought I mentioned that one. The next one, it was a teaser trailer that there's a risk during over the opening night ceremony. It's called Secret level. Now this is a series that's going to be on Amazon Prime, I believe it's in December. And the idea was, they looked at people who played games, and were inspired by the cinematic quality of some of these games, and said, I wish this was something to just watch. And so they've gone to a number of different video game companies, and they've produced an anthology series focusing on a number of different games, and they've made stories that you can just sit down and watch. They're all animated. I don't think they're machinima, but I still thought it's a way to see video games turn into an animated series. It's by the same people who did the love death and robots series, same people did that. I didn't recognize all the games I saw in the trailer, but I think I'm still going to watch it anyway, because it did look like it would be a very interesting. Series. So that's coming in December. The trailer doesn't really give away much. It's just

Phil Rice 20:05
wonder what engines are are involved there? If I wonder if Unreal Engine will have been involved, or if they're going to be doing it more traditional, like with Maya or something like that, that'll be interesting to see what we can find out when it comes out.

Damien Valentine 20:19
Yeah, I'll be keeping an eye on it, but, yeah, it looks very good. So hopefully they were behind the scenes, took how they did it, and the next thing, it's a game called, I hope I get this right in zoy. It's sort of like The Sims, and at the time of recording, there's actually a character created demo. Unfortunately, by the time you hear this, it's going to be disappeared because they've made it a time limited experience, and there's no release date for the game itself. But what it looks like is The Sims but they've done away with all the over the top, exaggerated animations, everything. It's much more grounded, and obviously, yay. The Sims four is not a new game anymore, so this looks a lot more visually impressive, more realistic. I did give the demo a try. It's not optimized that well for my computer, so it didn't run that smoothly, but it just actually create a character. And there was a sort of cut scene that going into an office, and there's a cat that had some very impressive fur effects on it. And the cat's talking to you about that. I don't know anyway. So it's gonna be a Sims type game, and we know that the Sims is a very popular machinima tool because you got the character customization, you've got the building you can, you know, you build your sets and environments, and then you've got the camera tools. I don't know how what the camera tools in this game are going to be like, but it does have the character creator, as we know from the demo, and it's got the house building stuff in it. So I'm quite intrigued to see where this is going to go, and I think they might be worth keeping an eye on. But, yeah, you weren't going to try the demo app when you hear this, but hopefully they optimize it a bit better before release, because I like the

Phil Rice 22:01
lighting. In the screenshots, the lighting looks just gorgeous. Yeah, I

Damien Valentine 22:07
was quite impressed by the style of it and the videos I've seen. And the characters are moving like real people, rather than flailing around excitedly because something's happened, you know? I mean, right, yeah. So yeah, that's my news. You see lots of other games, games come that I'm looking forward to playing. Don't think they've got that much machine or potential, but you never know. So yeah, that's it for me. For news this month.

Phil Rice 22:34
All right, well, I've got a couple things to close this out, both of them, AI related the first I'll just quick mention. So yesterday, I decided to finally sit down and teach DAZ Studio. I've always wanted to incorporate that into my pipeline somehow. I think that there's some good possibilities there for leveraging leveraging items in their content store which are significantly less expensive than their counterparts, let's say, in realusion zone store. So it's a maybe a good opportunity there, not just to bring in some interesting looking characters, but accessories and props and maybe even some environments and things like that. So yesterday, I sat down and decided to teach myself that. Well, while I was on their website, I noticed a tab for that basically referenced AI, and I was just curious what, what do they have to do with that? Well, they have a a generative AI platform on on their website, it's subscription based, but I think you could try it for free, that uses an esthetic that is similar to the DAZ Studio esthetic, which, at the, you know, at the the array render quality that you can do With an RTX card is very, very high quality render. And there the thing that jumped out to me, because, I mean, quite frankly, now, just about everybody has a generative AI engine, right? It's the thing. But for the paid ones, theirs is pretty cheap. It's like, I don't know if I want to say $4 a month. Oh, wow, which is a lot less expensive than, than Leonardo, for example. Or, you know, mid journey can get pretty, pretty expensive if you're going to use a lot. So it looked interesting. Now, I would imagine, I haven't tested it, but I would imagine that it's probably, it's a limited scope situation, given that it's focusing on the DAZ esthetic. So it's probably not quite as broad a generation engine as the others would be, where you can pretty much generate anything, but. It might be something of interest for people to check out. They don't have a text to video at this point. It's just text to image. They are planning to add image to image and some other other features like that, some some style transfer things which style transfer might be very interesting for that. But anyway, just thought I'd mention that that's a thing. It's called Daz AI studio, and it's on their on their website right now. The other thing AI related is, you've heard me mention many times over the years a composer that I know, Sasha, German composer. He was, he was running for years a site called filmmusic.io, and he's had some some challenges with the site, one of which is the Hugh Hancock challenge, which is, you know, Hugh was a filmmaker first and foremost, but decided to devote a large portion of his life, for several years, to running machinima.com for the benefit of other filmmakers. And that began to eat up his life and energy that he wanted to devote to his own films and Sasha's in the same boat he's running this site, there were other artists on there, myself included, at one point, who could host their music. And it was a Creative Commons type of thing that someone could could voluntarily pay for an extended license, that kind of thing. And the first issue that he ran into was that one of his one of the major composers that had one of the larger catalogs on his site, decided to put all their music into YouTube's content ID system, which significantly messed with the Creative Comments distribution that that the site had promised. And so he started getting all these inquiries in from people who their video flagged by YouTube and for video for for music that they had, that they had downloaded under a Creative Commons agreement. So he got really discouraged by that, and actually is ultimately his response was to kick all of us off of the site, all the other composers. He was just really, really aggravated about that, and just make the site about his own music. And that was only earlier this year that that happened. Well, then, since then, he put up a post that basically, unfortunately, the post is not available now because he's already reworked the site, but he basically outlined that. The quote that stood out to me was the passion that once fueled my work has been eroded by a landscape that no longer values the the art in the same way I will always love music. But the time has come to acknowledge that this chapter of my life is coming to an end. And this is not an old man. This is a young man. I would guess that he's in his late 30s. I could be wrong about that, but he's, he's, he's, he's not elderly, and like preparing for the end of life or something, it's he's just really discouraged by what has happened to the way music is is valued, and the transactional value of music has just plummeted. This happened all before AI, but I think AI, with the latest AI generated music, he's facing a similar anxiety that we've talked about visual artists have about generative AI visual art. And so he basically decided to just he got so discouraged by that, first of all, by the general expectation from everyone that they should just get whatever they want for free. Which, yeah, that's, that's, that's challenging. But then on top of that, now anyone can just go make their own music with AI. And, you know, I think he's, he's struggling with the feeling of being outmoded. So that was the original story, and he actually his final his final song on the website was called Time to say goodbye, and he used an AI music generator to make the song. Just as an aside, he's a really good composer, and his AI song was terrible, terrible, unlistenable to me. But okay, maybe, and I'm thinking, well, maybe he's doing it ironically, you know, as kind of a a finger in the air to the whole AI music community. And that's what I thought, is this is his way of signing off with a with a flourish. But then I went and visited the site just shortly before we went to produce the show here. And yeah, he's, he's reworked it, as he said, and you could still download all his old music under Creative Commons, but he's released several. Pieces of new music, and all of them AI generated. So, yeah, I don't quite know what to make of that. It's it's odd. Anyway, the part that was compelling to me originally with this story was this kind of a sad story of, this is a very talented composer. You know, this is one of the the casualties of of AI, if you will. You know of someone who is just so discouraged by it that they don't see the point in creating stuff anymore? I, I don't relate to that at all, like I don't understand that. I don't I don't feel at all discouraged from creating just because there are new tools people can use to make, to make things. But that's, that's the way he took it. And I think that there's some, generally, artists, who, you know, feel threatened by AI in that way, right? That they're, they're feeling like the, you know, that they're the, they're the wagon wheel maker as as Henry Ford comes to town. You know, I don't, I don't look at it that way, but I think it's, it's a real thing that that people feel so but now that he's gone and he's basically joined the enemy. So, like, I don't understand what he's thinking at all. But I guess if he's having fun doing it, then great. I again, the AI generated stuff, it's a it's the best example I could think of to show that it's not nearly as good as the stuff that he made himself, not anywhere close, not at all. And I think that's generally true for AI artwork as well, that the best of AI artwork is still not as good as what a really good artist can do. And, you know, long may it be so, I guess is my, my opinion on that AI is only going to get better and better, of course, but there's, there's a special something. When someone has created something like of their own, of their own labors. There's an X factor there. You know, there's something

Phil Rice 32:05
special there that I am convinced AI will never be able to reproduce. It may get end results that are very pretty and flashy and and impressive. And have a to reference one of our recent episodes. Have a sense of spectacle. That is, that is jaw dropping. That is, wow, that's, that's amazing. But there's always going to be a place for artists, artists of all kinds, because there is an element that just based on what, what we know about how generative AI works, it is impossible for generative AI to do anything but imitate, and in many cases, copy from real artists. So I hope that that Sasha and other people who may feel that way, feel that discouraged, will just will remember that that you know this too shall pass. AI is not going away. That's not the kind of passing that I'm talking about, but it's not, it's not here for your job, not, not, not some jobs, you know, some, some things I think AI will do and maybe should do, but, you know, there's still a place for For people who create so anyway, that's all I've got

Damien Valentine 33:24
used for this month. Yeah,

Phil Rice 33:26
pretty short one. So if you listeners, if you have any comments for us, feel free to leave that in a comment wherever you're watching or listening to this podcast. Or if you prefer, we do check our email every once in a while, talk at completely machima.com We'd love to hear from you. We don't always air the comments here on the show, so you don't have to worry about, you know, being embarrassed, or anything like that. But we review them all, we share them with each other, we discuss them. And it does shape the direction of the show in many ways, in subtle ways. So your feedback is very valuable to us. If nothing else, it just lets know that you're listening. So drop us a line sometime. So I'm Phil and on behalf of my co hosts, Tracy and Damian, that's our News episode for this month, and have a great day.