Damien Valentine 00:44
Hello. My name is Damian Valentine. I'm here to host and now for something completely machilima, joined by Tracy Harwood and Phil rice, hey there. Ricky has escaped from us this week. We have to try and catch him and reel him back again. But for now, he's he's got away, but we'll get him back. So this week, we're going to be discussing the latest machinima and machinima related news. We've got quite a few things to cover, so I'll get started with my bits. IClone has just released version 8.5 and it's just another big milestone for iClone 8, it's got new features. It's the sim builder, prop interaction and smart accessory. It's a free update, so if you want your iClone, you don't have to pay extra for this thing. And what it does is you can put objects in your world and program them to be interactive with in a certain way, so that you can put a door in and you say where the handle is. So instead of having to manually animate the character walking up to the door, putting the hand on the handle and pushing it, pulling it up to open it, you only have to do it once, and then you can save it. And then you just, in the future, if you want to use the same door again, you set your character, click on the door and press the Interact button, so then it automatically animates the character to open it and close it, or you have already set up, and you can do that for any object. I've not yet tried this because I've been working at the moment, doesn't require this feature, so I haven't actually had a chance to give it a go. But this is a huge time saving feature. It kind of reminds me a bit of movie storm actually, because the way characters interact with that is you, you place it on the ground, you click where they want to go and make them walk along. And if you want them to sit down, you click on the, you know, the seat, and they all just walk up to it and then sit down. And it's all animated for you. This is kind of the same kind of thing. So it put back some movie storm memories for me. Yeah,

Phil Rice 02:39
actually, on a on a machinima forum that or a Facebook group that you and I are both part of, somebody posted about this update and kind of laughingly commented that, well, you know, it only took iClone 15 years to catch up with moviestorm on this feature, which is, you know, touche. But that being said, the way that that realusion has implemented. This is terrifically more sophisticated than the kind of developer controlled, pre predefined interactions with specific objects that movie storm had. And this one really, it's, it's, probably it's harder to implement. I think, just from what I've observed of it, it's a little harder to implement than the out of the box. It just works like movie storm, but it is way, way more powerful and way more versatile. So this, it's, it's, it's an extension of a feature that's been part of iClone eight, called the motion director, which is a fascinating thing that basically, you know, iClone is this 3d animation platform, right, where you can keyframe animations in you can you can import motion capture and use it as animation. But there's this other mode of using iClone called motion director, where you can actually place a character in your 3d environment, set up certain props and obstacles, whatever, and then you hit start, you know, recording. And you can actually record the action, controlling it with typical gaming keyboard and mouse movements to walk, run, jump, etc, through this environment in real time. So, and that is something that you know, the movie storm at its best, didn't ever have, that it had more of a Sims like approach, where you you could click on a waypoint, and the character would make its way there, and you can adjust the waypoints. And that's all fine and good, but iClone has had path based movement for a long time, but this motion director thing is really interesting in terms of, frankly, there's just if you set it up right. Motion director is a much more efficient way to act out a scene in iClone than. Stitching together motion clips and things like that. Yeah, so it's, it's, it's, and this is an expansion of that feature to include more interactions with with different types of props, like doors and things like that. So, yeah, it's very exciting. I haven't, I haven't really dove fully into it at all. I've watched all the documentation for it, and I think they did a webinar after the launch, and I watched that video as well. So yeah, it's pretty, pretty exciting development. Yeah, I'm looking

Damien Valentine 05:30
forward to give it right I'm working at the moment, every character is sitting down, so it doesn't give you any opportunities to make use of this new feature, but it's something that later on, I'm looking forward to giving it a shot. And I do like that. It's not you can't it's not just set by the props that they've set up for you. Like movie still wants. You can customize your own and set them to be interacted with the way you want, and then other people can do that. So you, if you don't want it yourself, you could probably find someone else who's created, you know, the a seat that you can sit down in the way you want, or a door opens the way you want? Yeah,

Phil Rice 06:04
I think, I think it's going to be wise to keep an eye on the content store and the marketplace at realusion, because some of the creators of of things for that, I'm sure that they're going to take advantage of that. And so, yeah, if you don't have the skill or the time to craft something specific for this type of interaction, you're going to be able to get it that way. So, yeah,

Damien Valentine 06:27
yes, it's a huge thing, and I'm looking forward to giving a shot. But I thought it's definitely worth mentioning on the news, because it's a it's a really big update for icon, and I look forward to seeing what other people do with it as well. The next thing, Balder's Gate three. It's a very popular role playing game that was released last year, similar style to the Bioware games like Dragon Age and Mass Effect. It's got, it's a very story focused, cinematic fantasy role playing game, and it was a huge success last year. But they've released the modding tools. These are quite extensive modding tools. I've not played the game, so I don't know that much about what these modeling tools are able to do yet, but people have already jailed broken them. Go into the article I found to access the level editor so you can create your own environments. And how much is going to allow cinematics to be animated as well. And you know, if you played a Bioware go or this game, you know that they're very cinematic, they're story driven. So this could be a powerful tool for making machinima. Obviously, without having tried it, I can't verify that, but it's another tool that exists. And my understanding is people have been making some very impressive environments with these mod tools that they're not they don't even have the full access to at the level they except for what people have, you know, hacked into, modded them. They've modded the mod tools to allow access to this. So it's not really what they're supposed to be doing with it, but, you know, they're doing it, and there's been some impressive results with it. So if you can do that, you can probably do a lot more. And it'd be interesting to see what kind of machinima people can make with the Balder's Gate three, especially with these tools available. Because, you know, not many games release mod tools anymore, so when one does, it's worth taking notes, especially a game like this. So hopefully we'll see some bowders Gate three machinima we can discuss in future episodes. And then the next, last bit of news I've got. I've been following staff fields the last year since it was released, and obviously that also has had mod tools at the time of recording. It's not available yet, but by the time this goes out, the expansion pack shattered space will be released. I don't think it's going to have any extra mod tools available with it. There's a lot more content is being added to the game. So if you're making Starfield machinima or thinking about it, this is going to be add some more content for you to play around with, because I imagine this going to show up in the mod tools available. So it'd be interesting to see, you know, what people make with that, and see what they've done with the game as well. They've got a interesting story that is being added it. I don't know too much about it yet, because I've been trying to avoid the spoilers. I want to play it fresh, but it's a story focused expansion, as far as I'm aware. So we'll see what people do with that. So that's about my news. Who would like to go next?

Tracy Harwood 09:17
I'll go if you like. I've got a fair bit. Okay, sure, as always. Okay. So you remember, maybe hopefully, a couple of weeks ago, we talked about a documentary style review of machinima. Well, I found another documentary style machinima, not so much in its pitch, but most definitely in its content, presents a nice historical commentary on the development of machinima, just from this slightly different perspective. And it's actually positioned as if it was a an update from Gabe Newell on Team Fortress two. Another style isn't obvious. Documentary. It talks within it about some of the stages in the thought process that Gabe went through when they released the Source engine all those years ago. And we don't very often get to reflect directly on that kind of thing. So it's a really interesting Docu style, machinima. It's called Gabe the update, and it's by whov tube, and it was released just a couple of weeks ago. So I'll put a link to that, see what you make of that, and then following up on some of the other things that we were talking about in previous episodes, in terms of, you know, Hollywood being broken. What's what's going to happen next? You know, a lot of that discussion, we sort of said, well, you know, this is the obvious opening for machinima to step into the breach. Well, it's kind of ironic that Andreessen Horowitz was thinking about exactly the same thing in terms of, you know, Pixar's broken, what follows it. And there was this really interesting article that I picked up on, written by a guy called Jonathan Lai, who talks pretty much in the same way that we were talking about in terms of, well, you know, viewers don't just absorb content in the same way that they they used to. And there is a, you know, demand for a new type of content that machinima perfectly fits. Instead of machinima, though, these guys, they land instead on generative AI. And this article is all about, hey, how AI will merge film and games, and it's really worth reading, not least because it goes into a lot of detail about the background of animation, and doesn't even mention machinima. Astonishing, actually, it goes in a lot of depth about all sorts of other types of content lands on them, you know, generative AI, and somehow manages to miss out this phenomenal ground ground swell, movement of content creation and just just, I don't know, steps over it somehow. How on earth can you do that? I don't know. So it's interesting for a couple of couple of reasons, but I'll put the link on to that one as well. And then, as if to prove the point, I found this really nice video which demonstrates very well how gameplay has moved into performance based acting. And there's a really nicely done review by game sprout, which was also released last month. And I'll put the link on to to that as well. And then stepping away from that, I was quite disturbed to see this next item that I'm going to talk about. This is de novo, which has released a new tool called unbotify. Now, you know long it's long been the case that games have been played by cheats running through the through the games, but it would be fair to say some of those cheats have allowed machinimas to and content creators To make machinima films. Now this unbodyfi tool is which was announced in August, I think is alarming for a couple of reasons. Clearly, it's anti creator. They are targeting cheats using bots, which they suggest it can be anything of up to five to 15% of players. And also, you know, hardware is also part of this ecosystem of bot generation, if you like, these guys argue that ostensibly they are aiming to prevent people from selling in game assets gained illegitimately and effort effortlessly through the use of these bots. But I think we all know that there are other purposes for using mods and tools and what have you. And I'm quite concerned to sort of see that this is a thing that's being released, or at least I was two reasons I'm less concerned than I was when I first picked it up. One is, there's not many been that many views of it. And secondly, when you actually look at who they work with, it's broadcast media companies, rather than games devs. So I don't think this has got all that much of a foothold yet, but I do think it's one of those things that should be watched quite closely. I will put a link to it so that you can have a look at it and draw your own conclusions from it. But that's conclusions that I draw from it. At this moment in time,

Tracy Harwood 09:17
I want to go ahead Damian, and then I've got a question.

Tracy Harwood 09:22
I can say Denuvo is actually very unpopular with gamers in general, because an anti cheat, anti piracy piece of software. Yeah, even in single player only games, but it runs in the background, and it has a reputation for slowing performance of the game because it's using up processing power. So a recent example is Star Wars video game Jedi survivor was released last year, and the PC version has this de novo installed as part of it, even though it's a single player in game. So who cares if you cheat, if you just want to, that's the way you want to play the game. It was recently removed from the PC version, and immediately PC players noticed a huge performance increase. It can now actually run on a steam deck. It was impossible to play it before, but soon as they removed that, you could then play it, not because the Denuvo was preventing you from playing on Steam deck. It's just that the steam deck hardware could not handle the game and this software running at the same time. But soon as that's removed, you can play it. And you know, steam deck is a good platform to play this game on, because you just, you know, handheld play it. So it's got a terrible reputation with gamers, not just for this, this what you just been talking about, but just in general, because they hate it for the way it affects games.

Tracy Harwood 16:06
Right? Interesting. Phil,

Phil Rice 16:07
yeah, you made a comment that a lot of machinima has been made possible over the years because of the cheats that this thing would purportedly interfere with or stop and stuff. But I'm just trying to wrap my head around what those would have been. It seems like most of the anti cheat efforts over the years have been to to make the the multiplayer on online multiplayer experience of games tolerable, because if there's a multiplayer game that has been overrun by cheaters, the legitimate players will just not go anymore. It's, it's, it's madness, right to to get that under control, multiplayer cheats seems like a cause that most gamers that played those games would be behind. Now the the specific method of doing so might be debatable, or if it, if it's to the detraction of the performance of the game, then obviously that's not a good compromise that players are going to go along with. But, but I mean, most of the talk that I see of multiplayer cheats being a problem are from the players themselves. Yeah, that that the complaint is that, you know, the these people are being allowed to come in and use bots to correct their aim and stuff. I mean, that's been done since the days of Quake, and when it's unregulated, and when it runs rampant, it completely ruins the game experience for legitimate players. So, yeah, it's a weird issue, because, like, developers have every reason to want to control that, but if we are talking about something that keeps you from using cheats in a non multiplayer environment, yeah, that's a problem like, and that doesn't seem consistent with any objective that the game developers would have. Like, most of them, are the ones who release the cheats to people, The Sims four cheats, which are huge for machinima. Those weren't discovered by players. You know, EA put those out there yes to let people do as they will with the game. And the same is true for for Bethesda's single player experiences like Fallout four, they're published these cheats. You know, it's console commands, basically, with sometimes very limited documentation, but they're there. Minecraft is the same way. Doom is the same way the old Doom games, they released what the cheat codes were to the public. But the idea is, if it's a multiplayer environment, it makes no sense to give players the ability to cheat with a god mode or unlimited ammo, or whatever the cheat may be. And I guess my point with the context of machinima is I can't think of any instance where machinima of note was dependent on the use of cheats that are usable in a multiplayer environment, unless there's aspects of how red versus blue was made that I don't know about. It never occurred to me that just to use red versus blue as the example, that they would have been using cheats that would have made bungee and later, Microsoft really angry that those cheats existed because they could be used to ruin the multiplayer game experience. I never got the impression that was the idea that if they were using commands and hacks and things like that, they were they were doing so not on some public server, for example, and most games, they have safeguards put in place to at least, at the very least, discourage use of those cheats, and in some cases, outright, you know, mess up the game for you if you try. So that's always been rock stars approach with GTAs online experience with Red Dead Redemption that if, if, if the game detects. That you've got mods active, then you won't be able to connect, or you you risk getting banned from the multiplayer experience. That's how Rockstar does it. I'm trying to think of what some of the other examples are. Some games it's very light, like if you turn cheats on, then you you can't get any of the steam achievements for that game, like, even for single player. And that's, again, in the interests of fairness, of those achievements are meant to show that you actually accomplish something in the game and somebody who uses a cheat to do so, you know, gamers use those achievements as kind of badges, you know, like, like in the boy scouts, or something almost so. But I'm trying to think of like a single instance of machinima that depended on multiplayer cheats, and I can't think of one. And it doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. It's just most machinima that is in multiplayer. They just have to work within the limitations of what you can do without cheats. And you know, when I

Damien Valentine 20:58
was making Star Wars machinima with Jedi Academy, yeah, when you create your private server, there's an A mode to enable cheats

Phil Rice 21:06
and see private server. Totally get it, yeah. And who cares what you

Damien Valentine 21:10
do on your private server, absolutely, right? And you know, if you make a machine in a multiplayer environment, a private server is better than doing it publicly, because you can control

Phil Rice 21:19
in every way. It's better. You

Damien Valentine 21:23
can enable cheats, and you could, you know, use them to summon creatures or change the gravity, or, you know, all kinds of other stuff. But you could only do that if the cheats were enabled, and only the server could do that is, I don't think it was actually possible for someone to join a server and cheat with a

Phil Rice 21:43
client side cheat, right, right? Yeah, Minecraft works the same way. Minecraft got 1000s and 1000s of servers that are open to the general public, but they'll have various settings engaged. Sometimes it's a network of servers, and maybe the lobby server has certain cheats turned on, so you can do things, but when you get into the competitive server, then it it those cheats are not available. And, yeah, none of those are our client side. They're all server rules that you can turn on or off at your leisure. And that's the way it should be, you know. But when games that are doing like GTA Online, yeah, where, as far as I know, there's not a public or there's not a private server option for that. It's, they, they host the servers. World of Warcraft was that way, right? It was always public servers for World of Warcraft. So with those, yeah, you you have to police the cheats and make sure someone can't come in there and compromise the experience for others. So, yeah, it's, it's, it's not a simple issue, is it? You know that, no, I don't think it's cheating and multiplayer is something that I think everyone but, you know, psychopaths would see the value of of keeping that under control, right? Because it ruins the experience for everyone else. But if it goes so far as to interfere with your cheats on even your own private computer. Well, that's, that's silly. And I guess Denuvo is something third party, right? It's, it's, it's something that they're probably, they've developed this anti cheat system, and then they're in hopes of selling it to and maybe they've successfully done so, implemented it with certain developers, and that's how they're making their money, right? So with third party, yeah, you can see how they would. There's a possibility they wouldn't be able to be quite as careful as the developer themselves. It's

Damien Valentine 23:35
quite popular with some of the big publishers, like EA, obviously, sure, probably

Phil Rice 23:39
saves them a lot of trouble doing that in house, yeah, but

Damien Valentine 23:42
I don't understand why they put it in single player only. Games like Jedi now has absolutely no multiplayer motion. I kind of wish it did. The lightsaber comeback is great. You can imagine how much fun that would be multiplayer, but it's just not there. So why do you need anti cheat software for that? And

Phil Rice 23:57
I want to think, look, I'm the last person that's gonna that my default position is to give the developers the benefit of the doubt, but let's assume that that's an oversight. Now, if they're not quick to correct it, then any benefit of the doubt kind of starts to fade pretty quick, right? If it was a mistake, and then you just leave it okay. Now this is feeling more like an fu

Damien Valentine 24:19
I'm assuming it came from somewhere right at the top of the company, not the actual game developers themselves.

Phil Rice 24:24
Stop cheats at a single player level. You think, Well, I

Damien Valentine 24:28
think it was the executives at EA probably had to, oh, decided to implement this, okay, and they forced it on the developers, because they without

Phil Rice 24:36
thinking about for it, not without knowing the consequences down the line. Okay, that makes some sense.

Damien Valentine 24:40
Yeah. I mean, yeah, you kind of expect that kind of thing from companies that size. Sadly, yes, yeah, great

Tracy Harwood 24:46
discussion. I can just seeing it have a, you know, unintended consequences. Yeah, that's what it sounds like, which is unfortunate and and disappointing anyway. So that was another thing. The. Other thing that I wanted to pick up on, I don't know if you guys saw this as well, the there's, there's been this update on YouTube app, which is specifically to do with how, how you how content can be organized, basically on on different channels by content creators. So I think it's a tool that's being developed to emulate some of the streaming services, maybe like prime or Netflix or what have you, to make your channel look like other streaming channels. Somehow it's, I don't know if it actually gets as far as you being able to manipulate the algorithm to show different types of content on your channel, I'm assuming that it may do, but there's not an awful lot of detail out about about it at the moment, but I just thought it sounded a very interesting approach, Not least because we've been saying how difficult YouTube is as a tool for discovery of content. You know, I can't really see how this could address that at this moment in time. But, you know, one lives in hope that they are actually listening and taking on board that the fact that we actually need better discoverability tools within YouTube, and it does sound like they're they're on that track with this kind of,

Phil Rice 26:26
at a glance, it kind of sounds just like window dressing, you know, to, yeah, decorate your channel in a certain way. But the algorithm is the algorithm. I'm not certain that the algorithm itself is bad, that it being bad is the reason that it's hard to get. No,

Tracy Harwood 26:42
I don't think that's the only reason. I

Phil Rice 26:44
think it, I think it may be more attributed to the fact that there's just so much just, I mean, if you've ever looked at the statistics of how much new content is added to YouTube every single day, it'll just blow your mind. That's just more video than anyone could ever watch, like, yeah, and, and a lot of it's just crap, you know, garbage. So the fact that we're finding anything worth watching at all is kind of a miracle. So, yeah, yeah, it's, it's, it's a, it's a tough challenge. It is,

Tracy Harwood 27:15
but, but it's an interesting one to see how they do evolve it over time. Yeah, I agree. So, yeah. So that was, that was something. I'll put the link on to that as well. And then I picked up on one or two really quite interesting projects. Somebody called Kelly Bosch, or Bosch, has created some really nice imagery of this sort of steampunk world using runway Gen three, which I which I thought was probably one of the more well presented, generative AI story worlds. Don't think it's particularly great story as such, but a nice visualization story world that's worth having a look at, I think. And then related to that, who knew diesel punk was a thing? Did you? Have you heard of diesel punk before? Oh, yeah, have you? I don't think I had no I haven't heard of it, diesel punk. It

Damien Valentine 28:05
doesn't get a lot of stories told in that kind of environment, but I have heard of it, pretty specific,

Phil Rice 28:11
isn't it? Yeah, well,

Tracy Harwood 28:14
apparently. So I mean, it's had to look it up. It's an esthetic of the diesel based technology of the interwar period through to the 1950s with retro futuristic technology and most and post modern sensibilities. Who knew? Anyway? I found a film made in Unreal taking this genre up, called metropius. What especially caught my attention with it, though, is is particularly that it's probably one of the biggest, unreal projects I've seen to date. This one a megagrant as well, and I think it's by an Australian studio. It's a film, it's a comic, it's a board game, and it's a video game, and there's a whole YouTube channel dedicated to it. I'll drop the link to the film so you can have a look at the film, but I think it's definitely worth looking at how these guys have developed this suite of assets around this, this sort of genre, and, you know, kind of interesting. When I was looking at the definition of the term according to what I was reading, it was a this kind of term was was coined by somebody called Lewis Pollock in the early 2000s and he used it to describe tabletop role playing a particular game called Children of the Sun, but that there was a kind of a collective of different types of content around that as well. So this particular film, the metropius is, is sort of very much tapping into both the genre and also that um. And movement of different types of content under the same kind of banner, which is an interesting way going back doing things, I think. And so that was a project that was quite impressed with, because to me, you know, there's, there's so little money to be made out of creating content, you have to kind of seriously think about how it is you're going to, you know, if you're going to, if you're going to be a creator, what is it you're going to do? How are you going to live doing it? And the fact that they created all these different types of assets that use the same world, but targeting slightly, you know, different audiences, different types of distribution, outlet, it's fascinating. I think, I bet it will succeed. I bet it will succeed. Little bit like, it struck me, a little bit like, what's the one Warhammer? Little bit like, okay, a warhammer approach, you know, the the books, the the tabletop game, the video game, the films, all that kind of thing. Albeit, you know, a little bit more moved on than than this one is so this one's just starting out, but built in Unreal, fundamentally. And then there's also really bizarre. I mean, I picked up several of these videos and, and I don't know what on earth was going on with them. These were made with generative AI. So I've been looking for interesting things being made with the generative AI tools. It's limited still, I think, in terms of the content, but this weird, Mad Max themed, generative AI meme type thing kind of popped out of the internet at me. I think I found the first one that I'll put a link to, called Muppets, which superimposes Muppets into the mad, Max kind of movies, bizarrely. And then I also found one called furry Road, based on Fury Road. I mean, it's just, well, it's silly, isn't it? I mean, that one is just totally Hammy. But have a look at them, because I think it's quite an interesting, you know, story world, if you like that people are building around different types of content, probably because they lack genuine, creative approaches themselves that they're using, you know, found footage from a from a well known film, and dropping it into a, you know, one of these genies, and It's spitting out this stuff with this particular look. They all kind of have the same look and feel, of course, but interesting that that's a way that these tools are being used. And then finally, the thing that I wanted to mention is cane pixels. And who you remember a couple of years back, we talked about the back rooms, and we, we discussed the very first one of the films that were released. Well, he released, literally just a couple of weeks ago, found footage number three. Now, this is the, this is, this is basically a year after the announcement that he'd, uh, he'd be making a film which, according to his IMDb, is probably not going to be out, due out until next year, 2025 or maybe this is it. Maybe this is the film that he was, you know, he signed up to with, what was it called a, a, 21 or whatever. I can't even remember what the company, 24 a 24 There you go. Is this the film? I don't know. It's 45 minutes long. It's real life acted. It's really Blair witchery in its approach. It creeped me out after about five minutes. I have not watched it all. I watched the beginning and the end, and the end is horrific, I have to say, mainly because of this ghastly filter. Um, so it's not for me, but I thought some of you might appreciate it, and to make sure Ricky sees that, I think, well, I don't know, you all got pretty fed up with it when we, when we picked up loads of other memes around it. So whether, whether you all enjoy this one or not, I don't know. It's been a while. So maybe it might be, it might be, it might be, but it literally was, I don't know when it was released exactly, literally, a couple of weeks ago, but it's already got over 2 million viewers. I mean, it's just, it's crazy. There's,

Phil Rice 34:09
there's still an appetite for the well, there's

Tracy Harwood 34:11
still an appetite. And like I said, if, if, if his IMDb is to be believed, the real film doesn't come out until next year, so I don't know. There's no credits with this at all. There's nothing that says who's in it. It was, you know, what? What, what tools were made, or anything like that. It's weird. Just watch it. It's really good fun, but I'll check it out. Not for me. That's it. That's all my news this month. All

Phil Rice 34:38
right. Well, I did want to make one other mention with regard to iClone 8.5 it's a very tiny thing. Most people may not notice it, but basically I clone 8.5 broke grass. So there are certain props that. Very special type of props in iClone that are classified as grass. It's basically plants, and you can drag one onto the set, and then you can there's actually a button that says, start gardening. And at that point, it will you get a brush with which to paint the landscape with varying numbers of you can change the size of the brush, and it will randomly place bits of grass or flowers or whatever to it's a brilliant tool well that got broken with iClone 8.5 and broken in a potentially unforgiving way. So if you're an icon user, it's something to keep an eye out for that. Basically what will happen presently is, if you drag one of those bits onto your scene, it will give a little dialog error box, and then that bit of grass or flowers or whatever that you did will appear on the scene, but it will be an unselectable object. It will not appear in your scene diagram, and you cannot get rid of it, and the undo button doesn't get rid of it either. So if you happen to stumble upon that grass bug, do not save your project within that state, because it stays in the project forever. No getting rid of it. I've reported the problem to real illusion support. They say they're working on a patch. They actually, when I reported it to him, they said that the patch to fix that should be out in the next couple days, as the time of this recording that was four, five days ago. So anyway, they're apparently working on it, but in the meantime, yeah, be careful and keep off the grass. So of course, the project that the short that I'm currently working on is all about sprawling grassy hills that I cannot work on, definitely, so it's a little frustrating. Probably doesn't come up very often in in Biggs Trek's, uh, Forbidden Planet series. I don't think he has to worry too much about grass in that, but just something to keep an eye on. There should be a patch for it soon, but it's not out yet.

Damien Valentine 37:10
Well, if it is in his film, I guess the it's now forbidden grass, because you can't That's right.

Phil Rice 37:15
Well, and it's now there, and there's nothing you could do about it. So let's hope that he doesn't accidentally drag a bit of grass onto like one of the 1950s spaceship control panels and then accidentally saves or that he's going to have some splainin to do, yeah, of why? Why is the grass growing out of that anyway? Sketch fab. Sketch fab is a favorite place for a lot of people who make machinima in Unreal Engine and as well as in iClone. It's a great source for free or very reasonably priced models of varying quality, but there's a lot of good stuff on there, props, whole sets, sometimes rigged characters and sketch fab. And it's been around for quite some time. It's going away. But not like, not not like it's not dying. What's happening is Sketchfab and epics unreal marketplace and one other site that I can't remember the name of, are merging together into a site that's just going to be called fab, and it's going to replace all of those. So it's going to function as the official Epic Games marketplace for Unreal assets. It's going to replace Sketchfab. And as far as I understand, the model is still going to work pretty much the same. There's still going to be the ability for creators to upload free content there, like they do on Sketchfab, and there will still be paid stuff. And if you've ever perused the unreal marketplace, there's a lot of very reasonably priced stuff in there too. So when I first got the way that they sent out the notices about this was a little alarming, because it initially sounded like Sketchfab was just going away, which was a bummer, because it's, it's probably the, I feel like it's the best of all, the of all the the threed model marketplaces that are out there, with regard To, does it have creative commons, you know, freely available stuff. Turbo squid's been around for a lot longer than sketch fab, but the free content on Turbo Squid is just not as impressive to me. So I was relieved to find out that it's not going away. They're just consolidating these are, these are sites that epic owns all of them, and they're they're merging them together. If you're a person who creates 3d models, be it props or even characters, or maybe you're even creating content on the iClone store, and you want another venue by which to make your models available, they offer a very, very you. Uh, pleasant arrangement with creators. The standard profit margin that the creator gets is 88% which is quite good. Now they're having a launch special, because this, this thing goes out in October. So it should be, I think that fab will actually be launched, and sketch fab will kind of start to wind down by the time this episode airs, but basically, for from now until the end of the calendar year, any sales that a creator does in the new fab marketplace, the creator gets 100% revenue share. So they really want creators to migrate over there. Apparently, there's going to be some ways that someone who is a creator on Sketchfab can automatically migrate their listings there. That Epic is really, you know, trying to give incentive to get people to move there. And it doesn't seem like it's a that it's a honey trap. You know what? I mean, it's, it doesn't seem like it's, it's it's the pied piper luring them to a bad place. It actually sounds like it's going to be an even better selection of of assets for machinima creation than than any of those other sites had on their own. So it seems to be a very positive thing. If you've got other insights on that. Be sure to let us know. Listeners,

Damien Valentine 41:23
I got a question about that. Sure, I always assume that the unreal store, the content store for Unreal, was designed so you can only really easily import stuff into Unreal, and you have to do it at first. If you want to take it somewhere else, you'd have to put it into Unreal first and then export it. I don't know if that's correct or not. That's just my assumption.

Phil Rice 41:41
That's been my assumption too. So I don't think I've ever tried that, but there are, there is an ability to, once an asset is opened up in Unreal Engine, there is an ability to export it to other formats, right?

Damien Valentine 41:54
So I'm wondering if, in this new store, something that was previously only available to Unreal? Is that just going to be available to anything like sketch travel? You can download, you know, the sketch trap model so, and you can pick which format you want, and then whatever you want to do with it, it's like entirely up to you. Don't have to load it into one piece of software before you can use it, right? So, is the unreal content going to be like that as well?

Phil Rice 42:19
I'm not certain about that, but my my guess would be, since they are encouraging Sketchfab creators to migrate their content there, and I don't think I've ever come across an item on Sketchfab where the primary format, actually, that Unreal Engine, is not a format that's listed on any of the models there. You're going to see stuff from from Blender, you're going to see FBX. You're going to see, you know, wavefront OBJ files. You'll see some, whatever the ones are called, that are glTF. There's the ones that can go straight into Omniverse, those, those scene type files for Omniverse. You know what I'm talking about, yeah, but I've never seen Unreal Engine. So maybe Unreal Engine, maybe it doesn't have its own format, per se, unless it's going to be something that leverages technology specifically within Unreal Engine, right? Which I imagine the Unreal engine designed stuff. Would they want it that way? Just just like iClone has its own custom file types for the stuff that it sells, and with licenses that tell you whether or not you can export it elsewhere and things like that. So I think the other formats will still be available, but, yeah, but for the stuff that was made for Unreal Engine, yeah, I'm not sure how that will done, and the only Unreal Engine content that I've ever downloaded and fiddled around with was free stuff, and I didn't really, I just when you, when you purchase something in their store, or get a free thing in their store, it just shows up as an asset to use an Unreal Engine. It's all kind of automatic. So, yeah, I'm very curious how that will will work, because I

Damien Valentine 43:59
mentioned there's some stuff that's designed for Unreal only works in Unreal. And that's fine. That's probably true. Yeah, that's designed that people sell in the content store that could work elsewhere. It just isn't available elsewhere, like, you know, static props or crates or things like that. They may look great, but they, you know, they don't. They're not bound specifically to Unreal. Like, if you had a character model that's designed specifically to work with Unreal. That makes sense, that it's limited to that. But, you know, there's probably crops and scenery and stuff that, hopefully that opened that up to other platforms, absolutely,

Phil Rice 44:30
I sure hope so. And it seems like, I mean, given that epic after, you know, January 1 will have a 12% revenue share of whatever, whatever creators sell. It seems like they would have every incentive to make it easy for people who have been creating stuff for Unreal Engine to to make their assets available for other platforms as well. Because, I mean, this is going to be, I think, the major supermarket, if you will, for people who work in blender, as well as people who work in Unreal Engine. And then, you know, a smaller, smaller market is I clone, of course, but you know, there are other platforms that this is a great resource for. So yeah, I hope that it goes. We'll have to, we'll keep everyone updated as we learn more about that. I'm going to be watching it very closely, for sure. Me too. It's a great site. YouTube has has expounded a little bit on their AI disclosure rules for uploaders. This is something that we mentioned in a previous episode and kind of commented on the ambiguity and they've they've kind of expanded a little bit on what they mean by the kind of content that you are expected to declare when they ask, you know, are you using AI? So to summarize, this is what, what things used to say creators must disclose content that first of all, if it makes a real person appear to say or do something they didn't do that, to me, is the most obvious case. You know, they don't want, they don't want to encourage people to make videos of world leaders declaring war or something. You know, it's just that's, that's a that's an obvious one alters footage of a real event or place that too, also kind of falls under the, I don't know how popular this term is in the UK area, but over here, fake news, one of the presidential candidates here kind of popularized that term um, so that they don't want that and then generates a realistic looking scene that didn't actually occur. That's the one that is the most broad, I think, because what is realistic looking?

Damien Valentine 46:40
I mean, any Hollywood movies realistic looking? Yeah, right.

Phil Rice 46:45
And of course, it's subjective, right? There's, there's, there's the So, so they, they attempt to broaden our understanding of that by giving some examples. So they, it's basically, they give a set of examples here that, okay, here's something that doesn't require disclosure and there's something that does require so here's one of the examples applying beauty filters does not require disclosure by creators. So that would include LUTs and, you know, things that maybe even style transfers, right? I would think that falls under applying beauty filters. So if you record your face and then run it through one of those AI processors, and it makes you look like anime or something like that, or or does that, you know, kind of absurd definition of beauty that has emerged from the use of AI. Does. Does require disclosure? Would be digitally generating or altering content to replace the face of one individual with another. So deep fakes, right? So that seems, that seems pretty clear, doesn't require disclosure, synthetically generating or extending a backdrop to simulate a moving car. So basically, the Flintstones approach. Remember the old Flintstones cartoon where it was just the same Hanna babera, same backdrop that kept repeating every every 45 frames or so? So you don't have to disclose that, but digitally altering a famous car chase scene to include a celebrity who wasn't in the original movie that does require disclosure. Again, that's deep fakes, though, right? Oh,

Damien Valentine 48:25
but what if, have you seen those? Yeah, Phil, I think you link me to one. Is like Austin Powers in Mass Effect. So you've got lovely Austin Powers.

Phil Rice 48:35
Well, here's the thing is, yeah, is, here's what's interesting about that is, if they used AI to do that, which they probably did not, by the way, yeah, because if they used AI to do that, then they do have to disclose it, but if they just did some sloppy compositing, then it doesn't. It's just so silly how there's are so easy, yeah? Because

Damien Valentine 48:57
I don't think they usually use AI that, because it's it came out before AI became such a big, easily accessible tool, especially, oh yeah, it's

Phil Rice 49:04
just some some, what do they call it? Just some roto scoped compositing, basically, you can usually see the edges of it, yeah. I've seen lots of those, Leslie Nielsen and yeah, and Red Dead Redemption and things like that, yeah. But

Damien Valentine 49:16
some of them are really good, but, but they're always Oh, they are, yeah, but they they look flawless. They

Phil Rice 49:22
look flawless and and yet they're clearly, clearly identifiable as, as fake, yeah, I think again, that's subjective too, isn't it? You know, yeah, not not requiring disclosure, using effects to enhance previously recorded audio, so cleaning it up, or, you know, noise reduction, like that, EQ simulating audio to make it sound as if a medical professional gave advice when the professional did not actually give that advice. That does require, again, it's deep fakes. Why don't they just say deep fake? Because that's what all of the examples are. But. Well, here's another one. Doesn't require disclosure. If you use an AI generated animation of a missile in a video, but if you show a realistic depiction of a missile fired toward a real city, then that does require disclosure. I'll

Damien Valentine 50:19
go back to that medical one couple years ago, I hurt my shoulder, and I thought, I'm going to have to go and see someone about this. And I looked up on YouTube what kind of I can't the treatment I was going to receive or the examination. I thought, I'm going to see what I'm going to be in for. And I found someone who did a demonstration, and they were a proper medical professional, as far as I could tell. But the algorithm then started showing all these ASMR videos of people pretending to give medical examinations to pretend patients. I watched one out of curiosity, and it was obviously fake, because you could tell the whoever the doctor was meant to be was not didn't really know what they were talking about, right? But they have to declare that because they're pretending to be a medical professional giving medical advice to someone, but they're not actually, and it's not AI generated because it's a is a real person doing it? I don't know where that would fall under this Yeah.

Phil Rice 51:16
So the only other thing that I'll add here is when you drill, drill way down in this document from Google slash YouTube, this is where it gets, potentially interesting and potentially disturbing. Okay, examples of content edits or video assistance that creators need to disclose first on the list, synthetically generating music. Oh, so any use of Sona, you have to that immediately. You have to label your video as using AI. Now, why does this matter? Let's, let's get into this real quick. Because, I mean, AI has kind of become a political issue of sorts, hasn't it? You know, it's, it's more of people's attitudes towards AI or or making it easy for YouTube in the future to decide to make some kind of ruling against all content that has declared itself as using AI. So if there's some kind of legislation, for example, that passes about a new way that royalties need to be handled, or the new way licensing needs to be handled for AI, are we really just doing their legwork by labeling our videos to let them know? Hey, here's where you can find me if you need to come try and collect money from me. That's where it's a little troubling. So we've, we've every time we brought up AI generated music, I've always tried to mention, Hey, be real cautious with this, because right now it's everyone's being encouraged to say, hey, just go and you can just create it and just use it. And it's just so great. And it's like, be careful. Be careful with that. Okay, here's another this is another example of content edit or video assistance that creators must disclose. In other words, they have to label their video as having AI if they clone someone else's voice to create voiceovers or Dubs, that's 11 labs. That's what 11 labs does. That's all 11 labs does is voice cloning. It doesn't say cloning someone else's voice if they're a recognizable person or celebrity or voice. It's just broad, any voice cloning whatsoever. So

Damien Valentine 53:28
even if you impersonate clone your own voice, you still have to declare it

Phil Rice 53:32
well, it does say cloning someone else's voice. Okay, so technically, you could run your own voice through the AI, the 11 labs voice synthesis and create voiceovers and dodge. But let's be honest, that's not what most of this is using,

Damien Valentine 53:49
right? That's true.

Phil Rice 53:51
It's frankly, much less interesting that way. You know, what kind of narcissism would it be? And it's easier only using your own voice

Damien Valentine 53:59
to record yourself saying the thing to go and use the air generator, right,

Tracy Harwood 54:04
right. Oh, speaking, I suppose it is a form of biometric data, isn't it? Voice, yeah,

Phil Rice 54:11
yeah. It is, actually, yeah. I mean, honestly, the fact that it is is why that technology works. Yeah, of course, that that's exactly why it works. So there's other things, and they get into more specifics, but none of those really jump out as being particularly relevant for machinima makers. But, yeah, that's, that's, uh, potentially disturbing. It's too much, I think, I mean, go ahead.

Tracy Harwood 54:41
What else to say? Do you think, if one of the things is, you know, the use of biometric data, do you think there's a possibility that what they're angling for there is royalties to the original voice, you know, the voice stamp owner, whatever

Phil Rice 54:58
I think down the road. That's probably going to become a thing. I mean, we've seen in movies for decades, these indications that, like, high up government intelligence agencies have the ability to to to have a voice profile of someone, and then they can search a recording, yeah, and match it to a voice, right? And at the time that it first debuted, was in, like, I don't know, Tom Clancy movies or something, and everyone thought it was fictional. It's clearly not fictional, you know, if we have access to 11 labs, but you know, then we know that the CIA and MI six, they're decades and decades ahead of us, right? The NSA is the one that here in the US is always talked about, that they've there's this, this rumor, which may be true, that they've got, they've got the ability to to record and monitor all telephone conversations in the entire country, and maybe even worldwide, and it's just all going into some big data farm, and then they can just search it and and develop these profiles and all that. Now, who knows if that's that seems bigger than life, but if you don't have a budget limitation, and you don't have any scruples, and there was actually a, there was a talk radio host that I used to listen to many years ago when this rumor first emerged, and so he he was talking about that the NS were using it to to try and stop the cartels and drug trafficking and stuff like that. But he was found it so objectionable that they would be recording his conversations that he said that he makes it a point every day when on the phone with somebody, to just all of a sudden go kilo, kilo, kilo, just to basically to sprinkle this commonly used cartel word into his own Conversations, just to mess with them. That was like 20 something years ago that I heard that guy talking about that. So who knows what's going on now? Well, number one,

Tracy Harwood 57:07
that was true, and they failed miserably to tackle, well, yeah, I'll tell so, yeah, I can't ever see that. Number two, on the biometric data, if you know, if anybody's ever thinking that actually, you know you'll get a royalty or voice being used. You only have to look at Ricky's experience of being a professional actor in an in an industry where they have singularly failed to meet their royalty commitments.

Phil Rice 57:35
I think that may change. That may change. I think the reason there's multiple reasons why they haven't implemented that. One, the people who have the power to implement it don't have incentive to want to give away any of their money right to people like Ricky. They don't want to do that, but the right legislation could bring that to bear. The second thing that's been inhibiting it is it's just too hard to do it at scale. You can't be selective with if you're going to start doing that with anyone, then you have to start doing it with everyone that's in the Actor's Guild, for example, and and they can't do that, but this tech makes it possible to actually do that. So but we already know that YouTube, YouTube can scan the audio of billions of hours of video and find not just a recording of a song. They can actually detect a cover tune someone else. They can tell that it's a cover tune, and they can identify the song and who should get the rights. And they will flag a video if they detect it. I've seen it happen a cover tune. So someone just sitting there with their acoustic guitar, singing and playing an Aerosmith song, and if they're faithful enough in their execution of the song, the algorithm can actually detect song structure, and even if it's in a different key, even if it's a different voice, even if it's with different instrumentation. So I don't think we're that far off from it being a situation where an Arnold Schwarzenegger inter impressionist could be if Arnold decided he wanted to collect royalties on his voice being used in that way. I think the technology is here to do it. Yeah, because that music, it's, it's a little scary, yeah,

Damien Valentine 59:23
that music thing is done within minutes of your video. Oh, yeah, usually before

Phil Rice 59:28
it's done uploading, yeah,

Damien Valentine 59:30
it's still processing. By the time, right? It's processing, it'll have gone through it, because I get that experience with SDN, like, all the time. Yeah, you've used this music, which is, and it detects the track, yeah,

Phil Rice 59:43
oh, get this. I did a, I did a live stream about a week ago of that space engine. You were there, Damian, yeah. And there was the background music in the video, right? Because at one point I think I put my headphones on. I says, Can you guys hear that? And. The only thing we could hear was some background music. So it was there underneath me talking almost the whole time like I rarely shut up in that stream. It was just talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, two different copyright flags for that music from a game that was deep in the background. It was there the day after I published the video of the stream. Now it didn't like did? It wasn't a copyright strike, but it was a revenue share on that entire video, because it detected that which that may just be an instance of. We talked about this several episodes ago, about this move that we're seeing amongst game developers to publish their music soundtracks. So this, this indie developer who made space engine probably had the foresight to do that and actually published it through a music distributor. And so it's in what's called the YouTube content ID system, and it detected it in the stream. So as as a YouTube video publisher, I was, I had mixed feelings, because part of it was like, I'm a little bit of little bit annoyed, because I would have, I could have easily muted the music I just didn't think to do so. But the other part of me, the musician side of me, is like, that's pretty impressive. You know,

Damien Valentine 1:01:12
I had, like, similar, if a weirder, experience, the same thing, yeah, playing Dark Forces, the last mission has, it's all major music, all designed specifically for the game, but it's got the familiar Star Wars themes in it. And after the stream, it said there's a copyright share. And I thought, okay, it's because I recognize this. That level had music from an interpretation of the death star attack they did it. I thought it was gonna be that. But the when I looked investigated, it wasn't to any official Star Wars music that can tell you. It's a Japanese video, and I didn't know what the title was, because I don't understand the the alphabet or the language. I clicked on the video to try and watch it, and it wasn't Star Wars related. I just was really confused. I didn't dispute it, because I wasn't really sure it was worth doing for something that no one's going to watch, a gift. But right? It's a revenue share, and it's just so weird. It matched me to this Japanese video, and I don't know what they were doing with Star Wars music that was similar to the game. Yeah.

Phil Rice 1:02:17
Well, and that's, that's the thing too, is that the content ID system, while it is quite effective, it's not perfect, and in some instances, the content ID system will identify the owner of the music as the first person who put it on YouTube, if the publisher hasn't officially declared ownership in of it through the system. Oh, okay, yeah, it's really sophisticated. The detection algorithm is scary and impressive at the same time I get notified, anytime anyone uses any clip of mail, rest or Medicaid, in their videos, every single time I get notified, and some people, they're just republishing it without permission, and they just put it up with no credit or anything. They just put it up as their own video. But sometimes, like what happened last week was someone was doing a live stream. It's like a three hour live stream that they did, and they were talking to a friend on there. It was a guy and a girl we're playing this game together. And then he start, somehow their discussion, as they're talking, went to Male Restroom Etiquette, and he says, And he asked, Have you ever seen I've got to show you this video. And so they put it on and watched it together, and he was commenting, and it was the first time she had ever seen it, and it notified me, which was it was cool, because, like, I ended up going and seeing I want to I wonder why this is on this long stream. I wonder what happened. And so I watched them have this conversation. Got to watch two people watch my video and laugh at it in real time and have a good time with it. So I typed a little comment and says, Hey, I'm glad you like the video. He had been searching for the high the upscaled version, but couldn't find it, and he just found the low risk. So I let him know. Hey, here's the link to the high res, just trying to be friendly with it, you know, so, but it's amazing. It was the day after he published his stream in this three hour stream of nothing to do with me. It identified that segment and basically gave me the opportunity to to kind of Ding him with a either i and it's interesting how it works, where you can actually, you're given the option to do, do you want to just do a full takedown notice, or do you want to allow it? Or do you want to contact the publisher of the video? It's really interesting. It's opened my eyes to the fact that in situations where I hear about people getting a copyright notice, some of that is not automated. Some of it, someone reviews it and goes, Yeah, I'm going to choose to make their life harder. That's frustrating. Yeah, right. So I can't change any of that. But I can at least choose to not be that type of participant in the system. And,

Damien Valentine 1:05:04
you know, view, I can imagine that was a huge thrill watching those two what's Oh, it was great.

Phil Rice 1:05:08
It was great happened, like, just last week, like, I can't believe the video I made that long ago. Still, still gets I mean, because he who had seen it before was laughing the hardest. And of course, the girl was kind of puzzling over some of the stuff, and they were arguing about it doesn't make any sense. Why can't you use that urinal? Oh, it's great. I really enjoyed it anyway. That's the stuff to keep in mind for YouTube's stuff is the areas that they've named as specific examples are AI generated music and AI cloned voices, AI generated music. I don't know anybody who's using that in their videos, but, I mean, it's so readily available, I have to think that there are people out there that are that are lured by it, you know that, oh, wow, this, this is so easy to get decent sounding music is, you know, it's something to keep in mind that right now that's not a problem, but if the position that YouTube takes again about AI content changes in the future, it could affect you, and it almost seems like that they're asking us to openly declare these uses because they can't detect them yet. Once they can detect them on their own. Who knows what? What they're going to do with that information? But right now, I don't think they can detect AI generated music, but it's only a matter of time before they will. All they have to do is partner with Sona, right?

Damien Valentine 1:06:33
Um, when they do this, going to be false detections as well. So, so Oh yeah, used AI at all is going to get

Phil Rice 1:06:40
absolutely Same with the AI generated voice too. Yeah, they'll be false on that like crazy. Yeah.

Damien Valentine 1:06:46
I'm starting that with air to the Empire, because I do not use AI voice generator, right? The

Phil Rice 1:06:51
but you're the people. Yeah, some good people are really good. Yeah, so that'll be interesting. Okay, moving on, just a couple things real quick. We reviewed this month, and I don't remember if the episode has already passed or if it's coming up, but Biggs trek, Phil Brown has released a film called Forbidden Planet, children of the Krell and realusion Magazine did a really nice write up an article, like an interview with him and asking about the production of that film and stuff that the articles written by a guy who's very well known in the world of machinima, goes by the screen name of warlord. He wrote the article and conducted the interview with Phil it's, it's very, very it's a great read, and tell us a little bit about how he came to to make that film, which we all enjoyed very much. Yeah, I mentioned live streaming, and I'll just it's one of those rare shameless plug moments, but I just wanted to make it known that I am doing live streaming. It looks like that Saturday is going to be the primary day that I do it. Occasionally, I'll sneak in and do it on a weekday as well, but you can find that over at my YouTube channel, so we'll include that in the link here. And Damien's been doing live streams for for an age now, and it seems like Monday evenings or Monday afternoons are typically when you end up doing is that right? Damian, it's Monday

Damien Valentine 1:08:16
evening. I what I started doing is people kept asking me questions about, How do I do bits of air to the Empire? I thought, why? Instead of just explaining this, why don't just show you guys? And I think about around episode 10 or 11, I can't remember exactly. That's when I started doing it. So it's been going on for a while. But more recently, the chapter I'm working on, I do not want to show right? Because there's lots of things that I want people to see, you know, as it's finished. So I switched over to make playing games. I started off playing replaying the first home world game, but now I switched over to hold Star Wars game, because it's a bit more on theme with air show empire. So I just finished Dark Forces, which was great to play again. That remaster was so good. It's so true to the original, but they just upscaled the textures and but it's otherwise, it's exactly the same game, and they really great job with it. I'm not sure what I'm going to do next year. Brilliant.

Phil Rice 1:09:13
Well, yeah, so yeah, from time to from time to time, I probably won't always be doing machinima creation stuff on mine either there's only only so much of that that you know you can conduct, or there's certain circumstances where you don't want to reveal what's going on, but if you do want to see, you know some behind the scenes of machinima being made, I'm pretty sure there's not a whole lot of people doing this type of thing. I've scoured Twitch, and I've always been keeping an eye out on YouTube, there is one or two other people that that may do this kind of thing, but not very frequently. So yeah, if you want to, you know, it's typically a nice conversation. We're talking with the viewers as we're working on whatever we're working on, or. Playing something. So it's a fun experience, and we'd love to have you, have you come out and say hi. And I don't know about you, Damien, but it seems like the people that show up the most often to mine are more experienced with doing iClone than I am. So I won't say that you'll learn something, but I will. I learned something from my streams. There's been a number of times where I'll get stuck, and Biggs trek shows up quite often, and we'll point out, hey, just do this, or here's the shortcut key for that. So it's a fun experience. We share stories and just have a good time and answer questions. So

Damien Valentine 1:10:36
I've learned something, some big treks from watching your streams as well. So yeah, he's a fountain of knowledge, yeah? But it's, it's interesting to see someone else using icon, because I'm the only person I know in the real world that uses it. So, right? Getting to see what you do, it's great.

Phil Rice 1:10:53
Yeah, we probably, in spite of the fact that it's the same platform, I'm sure there's, there's numerous differences in the way that we approach certain tasks. And to me, the most fun on a stream is to encounter a problem, as strange as that is to say. But I I love encountering a challenge of some sort that I didn't expect, and then trying to figure out a way to solve that so and that's that that ends up occupying quite a bit of the time, which is, I mean, that's, that's what I love about machinima in the first place, really, is it's just a big problem solving exercise. So

Damien Valentine 1:11:26
one of my moments was, I was building a set, is a lounge on lando's Nomad city, and I built the set, and I put the textures in, and it's, it's time to put the lights in. And I thought, I'm not quite sure what colors to put in. I had some ideas, but I thought I'm going to put out to the people watching to give me some and said, This one or this one or this one. And then they chose the purple one. Yeah. Actually, that really works for Lando. He likes he's quite an extravagant character, so he's not going to have standard lighting in in his city. He's going to make it look, sure, quite flamboyant, because he is. And they choose the purple, and it worked really nicely. So when, when the episode got released, they said, the people that watched the students, yeah, we chose that. That's

Phil Rice 1:12:13
awesome. Yeah, wait, that's all. That's all my news. All right,

Damien Valentine 1:12:18
um, so quite a bit of news this month lots of different subjects, and hope you all found it interesting and helpful. So please do check out the streams that Phil and I do and let us know what you think of this news talk@completemachinima.com also do check out our website, completedmachinima.com all the links and everything on the blog. So that's it for this week. From myself, Tracy and Phil, we'll see you next week with another film of you, bye, bye.