Damien Valentine 00:44
Hello and welcome to another episode. Now for something completely machinima, I'm joined by Phil rice and Tracy Harwood, hello this week, Ricky is not here. He sent his apologies. He is playing Elton ring again, which is no surprise to any of us, this week, we're going to be discussing the news related to the Machinima and machine related subjects. So let's get to it. Tracy, you you usually have some good comments for us. What have you

Tracy Harwood 01:15
got fair bit again, I've dug out quite a few bits and pieces. Let's start with the AI stuff. So I usually have a fair bit on this. This is the first one I want to just sort of mention. Is to do with a generative AI called character AI. I don't know if you've come across this one, and it just caught my eye, simply because they have confirmed, apparently, that they will be mass deleting many, if not all, of their fandom character bots. Now this is a company that, basically, they, you know, what they do is a, it's a free tool, if you like. It's a free, generative AI chat bot app that basically lets you chat with virtual characters based on celebrities and game characters and more. And you can also create and train your own AI character with certain personality traits and interests and various different sort of chat styles, kind of making, I suppose, really taking fan fiction to the next level by by allowing you to interact in a more naturalistic way with with the characters. And alongside that, you can also create, well, you can also edit these in a way that makes them more personalized for you. So what's happened here is the company has basically cited that they're doing this mass deletion in order for them, as they say, to adhere to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the DCMA, and also copyright law. But what it's not saying is why it's doing it. It's not saying whether the reason it's doing is it is either pro at proactive or retroactive in in why they're doing it, which I think is interesting, because, of course, there's lots and lots of kickback at the moment on, you know, IP enforcements, where content is being ripped off by these generative AIs. There's lots been in the news about open AI recently, for example. And I guess because of all of that sort of hype around how data is being scraped into those models, this kind of issue of copyright, I think, has been at the forefront of pretty much everyone's attention, a lot more closely than it had been previously, even though, for example, in the world of machinima, we've been aware of some of the allowable uses of IP, say for pastiche or parody or say through transformation of material from one form to another, and have have generally not fallen foul of IP guidelines through those kinds of forms of recognition. But I think looking at what's going on here, those sort of olden days of us being able to use IP for certain things is fading fast. Now, I'm kind of intrigued to see how far this kind of thing is actually going to push our appreciation of copyright law. And for example, a question I've got is, why is performative and interactive content through the likes of this kind of interactive tool, and evidently, form of animation is not accepted. Machinima still is. So yeah, I'm nervous of what's going on with this one. Not surprised, but, yeah, be interested. How this one evolves a little going forward. I don't know if you've got any comments before I move on to my next one. Either of you, no, no, no, okay, alright. Well, another one that I wanted to talk about briefly then is Sora, which has finally launched. I think we first touched on this, or it was the early part of 2024 when that was first teased. And I'd say we're all really excited about it, but it's actually not launched in Europe, including the UK, and according to what I've been reading, I think it's highly doubtful whether it actually will. It's another one of those tools, a bit like runway, where the text can kind of be transformed into video of up to about 20 seconds long, with, as I understand it, various kind of new interfaces that allow for easier prompting, easier kind of creative tools to be used and and also easier to share with the community. But as I've not really managed to get my hands on it and have a go with it, I can't really fully comment on it. Apparently, the reason it's not yet been released in Europe is, again, because of regulation, as I understand it. It's primarily to do with content generation of deep fakes, which a tool like this may be able to produce more easily, but I will nonetheless share a little video of what it's capable of doing, because I think it's a really interesting one. I think it's a real shame that these tools immediately fall foul of of laws that preclude any use, rather than a more creative use of of them before they even get going. So yeah, that's another, another one to have a little look at. And then I saw runways Act One, which is a tool through which you can create more expressive character performances. And that's a tool that's been integrated and is for use in their Gen three Alpha. I think it's from what I understand of it. It's a new way to generate, again, expressive character performances using a driving video and an image character, without any motion capture or rigging required. And again, I'll put a little promo link to that. But alongside that, I also saw another tool that was released. This one's using machine learning, again, rather than generative AI, as a strategy for creating the the animation. This one's called Face depth frame Mansa. And I think it's, it's, it's net effect is the same as Act One. This is basically a a $20 plug in for Unreal Engine five, meta human animator, and it works without needing an iPhone or a head mounted camera. And is, it's basically compatible with 5.55 think 5.4 as well, or or higher. And again, it lets you capture face animations using, you know, an Android or a webcam, or any kind of video source. And there's a really nice, I mean, it's a, it's a, you know, it's a, it's a download from a from a CO, fi.com, account, and there's a nice little video that illustrates what it can do, and it looks like it's really quite a nice tool for facial animation. Its creator is a guy called excellent Dev. I think what disappointed me about it, though, don't think it was released all that long ago, like a couple of weeks ago, but as at this moment in time, as as as of today, when we're recording, it's only sold 54 copies. And I think I'm a little surprised about that, because I think this kind of tool is really quite a useful add on, if you're into the Unreal Engine tool set. And then I wanted to highlight a couple of other things. Now I've been a little bit surprised about this one. This is Riot Games stating, and has announced on its on its website, that it's going to be issuing penalties for what it describes as off platform conduct related to contraventions of its EULA, even if you use only a background say into a streaming video that you are making, if you're acting up in any way against the game or doing something that they don't like, they will still penalize you for doing it, and That penalty is basically restricting your access to their games. Now, when you look at the detail of this, I think it's pretty evident that a lot of it is going to rely almost entirely, I think, on squealers reporting creators for rule violations. It's pretty intrigued to read their news updates. On it, they say

Tracy Harwood 10:03
that it intends to take reports and base its actions on cases of players who stream snipe its creators, or where the content encourages or teaches players how to break their rules, whether formally or casually. I thought was really kind of interesting terminology. I wonder if, by creators, it means basically don't bad mouth, Brandon Beck or mark Merrill. I'm not really too sure. I don't know whether this is going to lead to any kind of backlash. I guess we'll see in time, and that's because I don't think many folks like to be told what they can and can't say. And there are many, many different games out there that can be used by creators doing lots of interesting things. So I think it'll be really interesting to see what exactly this results in from Riot Games taking this particular stance across its whole suite of games and things that it's technically not, it's games at all, but where people are just simply using their games as a background. Slightly different tack, another point that I wanted to highlight and was very interested to see that epic have claimed to reach yet another milestone for Fortnite, this time with an audience of something like 14 million concurrent players participating in the Snoop Dogg and Eminem event that took place on the first of December. I don't think that's the biggest actually concurrent number of users that have been in Fortnite. I think I remember reading some time ago that there was one event that have something like 15 million players logging in. But I think why this is a record is because alongside those 14 million, it also had something like 3 million following it live streamed on online. So they're claiming it's an all time in game concert record. The last time I actually took note of one was in 2020 and that was a Travis Scott in game concert, and that was about 12 and a half million, I think, players. Anyway, there's a, there's quite an interesting remix video that I'll share with you. It's not really my sort of music. I'm not particularly interested in music, but I was particularly interested in the fact that so many people are interested in participating simultaneously in online social events such as this. Looks a pretty interesting you know, set of set of developments, I think, for epic, I just go from strength to strength with Fortnite. Then I've got another thing that I wanted to share. Now, this is not new by any, any means, but I I really enjoyed watching this. This is a little video I found that shows how Red Dead Redemption, two horses were mocapped for the game. Now, I mean, we've all seen those crazy, those crazy videos, those crazy machinima, so I was, I was quite intrigued to see what exactly they did that made those animals look like they were moving, you know, like, like real animals do. I mean, they're pretty compelling as as as animations, gotta say. And I'm glad to say it, there's no animals clearly injured in the making of this. But it's, it really is a good, good video. It's a great fun explainer of what they did and how they did it. So if you're interested, go and check that out. Like I said, it's a five year old video. But what the hell I

Damien Valentine 13:38
watched it, and I was surprised that they didn't get Andy Serkis to come in and play the horse. Because, yeah, given his long history of motion capturing various creatures,

Tracy Harwood 13:46
yeah, exactly, exactly. But it was cool. I really liked it. I'd love to, I'd love to rig my horse up with a bit of mocap, but God knows what we'd end up with. Probably be all flat on our backs with him, and he's a bit of a get anyway. Then, then, in reference to something else that I, I picked up and I have really enjoyed as well. JT music, who I often sit and sit and watch, so they're just so good at doing their raps. Have released a halo rap tribute, which I think is a really nice thing to have done. And you can, you can clearly see the homage to the Machinima community through this tribute, and also, particularly, of course, to Rooster Teeth red versus blue, which which they've included as sort of a snippet of probably one of the very earliest episodes in this film. And I think that's a really nice touch, so I'll put a link to that as well. And then to close my updates this month, I saw quite an intriguing blog post by James Wagner al on his new world notes about a new game release which just looks quite interesting, pretty gorgeous. I think it's an action adventure. Created on VR chat, which is not something you see an awful lot created on, although I know it's used in that way. This combines sort of combat and puzzles with sort of ein manipulation. It's been created by a solo developer called lacusa Over the last sort of three or four years, and it was released in November. It looks, I think, just watching the videos of it, it looks a little bit portal come Resident Evil, come cyberbunk Punish, but it's actually been inspired by the matrix, and it's called Bullet Time agent as a cracking trailer, I'll share the trailer. I do hope folks do more with this, and just sort of play it as a game, because I, I think this guy's got a real interest in how he can inspire the community to create. And specifically he makes reference in his interview with with with James on wanting to inspire people to create more worlds in such as VR chat, but I suspect he's also pushing people to do stuff like machinima with it as well. And I do have a quick look to see if I could find any machinima with it. And at the moment, all I can see is let's plays. And it's quite an interesting sort of set of Let's Plays that you can can see, because it's quite really, it appears to be quite a challenging game. But, yeah, I look forward to seeing what comes out about that one in due course. And that's it for this month. That's all I've picked up. Please let me know if you've picked anything else up. Be really interested to hear what your thoughts

Damien Valentine 16:42
are. I've got a couple of things. First, I was watching The Video Game Awards. I'd hope to see anything that might be more machinima related, but not really. I mean, there's some interesting games that were announced, but nothing that made me think, oh, that might be a useful game for machinima. And with the awards themselves, but most of the games I have not played, so I don't know if they deserved it or not, so I can't I'd hope to have more to talk about from the Video Game Awards, but sadly, not this time, but some actual machine use. The day after we recorded our last session, Reallusion released a big update for iClone. Well, they announced and released it at the same time. So it's a free update. It's iClone 8.52 and it's more about hand animation and making that more smooth. Well, there make the results look more smooth, you know. So you've got a character, you can the video that showed has a cat. They're doing different things, like their character jumping over a wall, and the leg kind of clips through the wall as they go past. But you can get to the frame, you move it up a bit, and it this update makes the transition between them work better, so the resulting movement looks more natural. I believe there's some AI assistance in there. There's some other tools that relate to this. So if you're doing motion capture, sometimes, well, most times, there's going to be some dizziness in the resulting data. So when you put in your character, they may twitch. And so a lot of time you spend removing that. This update has some extra features that should make that a little bit more painless, which is always welcome, because it can be quite frustrating when you've got a perfect movement, but maybe the leg twitches or hand suddenly does that, and that's just the nature of the motion capture technology that people have at home, although my understanding is even the big budget mercy captures suits, they have to go through all this as well, so

Phil Rice 18:48
clean their stuff too. Yeah.

Damien Valentine 18:51
So if you had the budget to spend, how, you know, half a million on motion capture gear, you're still going to get this. You're still gonna have to do the cleanup. So I haven't had a chance to try out these new updates yet, but I'm looking forward to doing it with Heir to the Empire. And the other update is, well, many months ago, we talked about a warhammer film called Astartes, oh yes. And recently, on prime, it was announced during the summer, but it was only released a few weeks ago from when we record that the secret level anthology series, which is each episode, is based on a different video game, and they tell a story in that world. I've only watched two episodes so far. I've really liked what I've seen. The production values are really stunning. It makes me want to watch the others. I just haven't had a chance to do that yet. But there's a warhammer one, Warhammer 40,000 it's called combat. It's made by the director of status. But I remember we when we discussed his video. He had been hired to do something official, so his content had disappeared, and we had to find other copies to watch. Well, now we know what he was working on. It's this. And I really wanted to mention that because, you know, we reviewed his film, and what he's done here blows that away. As far as the animation goes, I don't know Warhammer. We've discussed that before. None of us here know anything about Warhammer, so I have no idea what's going on. As far as the story is concerned, I'm sure someone who knows that world would know immediately what this situation is and who the characters are, but I don't, but I was still able to really enjoy what I watched. And the animation is stunning, and I would highly recommend it if you like Warhammer or if you just want to see some really good Lydia animation. This is obviously not machinima in any form. This is all pre rendered, a lot of time spent in whatever software they're using. It doesn't say, but, you know, it's still worth watching, because it was a machinima director that made this, even though he's not making machine right now. So I really want to bring that up and check out the other episodes as well, because I think they can be really good.

Tracy Harwood 21:04
Yeah, I'll put a link to the Astartes review that we did as well. Oh, yes, so you can get the background to that one as well, because that was a really interesting conversation we had about that.

Damien Valentine 21:16
Yeah, well, obviously you need a Prime Video account prime to watch this Warhammer film, but if you've got one, do check it out. I don't know if it's available to buy separately if you don't have it, because it's being advertised as a prime series. So that's all I can say about it, really. But yeah, it's really good. So I think that Phil's got anything to say. No,

Phil Rice 21:41
not really. I'm about halfway through fiddling around with the Steam game recording tech that we talked about in last month's News episode. I have played with it some, but I'm not, not quite finished yet, so I'll report back on that. And I've, I've only scratch the surface, fiddling around with the new icon update you talked about. It is kind of fascinating. What they've done, it's going to be really hard to describe in audio only and without demonstrating, but basically, you've had the ability to do what's called Edit the Motion layer of a character. So maybe they're in the middle of an animation, a keyframed animation of some kind, or a pre recorded one, or a motion captured one. And you can then go into edit the Motion layer, and each of the major joints in the body can then be selected to, you know, adjust the tilt to the head or rotate them, and same thing with the arms and things like that. But typically, if you were to grab, let's say, the wrist and move it, it's going to, you know, just move the wrist, and the rest of the body will kind of contort to try and make it work. But it's you then have to go and adjust other parts of the body to make the adjustment. And one of the features of acupose is that with that feature turned on, if you move the hand, it will move the rest of the body into some kind of a pose that makes sense. And in one of the demo videos of it, they show that it starts with this character that's just standing on their two feet, and they just grab the hand of that character and drag it down towards the ground. And the player, or the character, smoothly goes into a crouch position and then kneeling, and then ends up laying down on the ground as they drag the hand lower and lower. And it's using AI to make those decisions about which which pose it should interpolate to and it uses its pose to pose, just like Ricky was talking about when we discussed Source Filmmaker for Paul Marino's film earlier this month, he talked about that it's one pose and then another, and it interpolates smoothly between them. It's the same concept. It's just much more advanced, where it's on the fly. It's helping you make those decisions to to keep the human character looking like it's behaving in an intelligent way once, once that's mastered, it's got the potential to be just a gigantic time saver, because key framing those individual joints and all that stuff, and then getting that result to look good is is really challenging. It's probably, probably one of the harder things to do in that software. Now, the way that they've packaged it is that there's a certain set of their what they're calling like general or stock poses, that that AI tool will use, but then they have a much more advanced set of possible poses, probably for like, you know, Kung Fu and action stuff and all you know, specialty things that they offer. And there, there's, it's offered as a subscription with the presumption is that it's going to be continued, continue to be updated, adding. More, you know, if you've ever looked through real illusions, actor core library of motions. I mean, there's hundreds and hundreds of little motions in there that you can they're either poses or our actual movements for very specific things. So I feel like they're leveraging some of that along with bringing in new new new content and all that. But yeah, there is a optional subscription if you want more and more advanced library of animations to be referenced by that AI tool. But the AI tool itself, and a general set that covers most scenarios is included for people who already own iCloud. So I think that's a nice compromise, because it's not a it's not a disabled version of the tool. You get the full version of the tool. It's a matter of how intelligent is the AI going to be in terms of how big is its training set? Essentially, that's what you're paying for. Is a little bit more training set for most users, certainly for most amateur users, the one that's built in, that's already built in for free, in the software is going to be just fine. So I'm going to continue to do some more experimenting with that. I'm working on a piece right now that actually very specifically has some pose related animation that's going to be going on, so I'll get a chance to really toy with it and see what it can do in more detail. But yeah, my initial exploration of it and fiddling around with it and reading up on it, it's a nice move. I look forward

Damien Valentine 26:35
to going to try as well, because there are times where, when I do motion capture, I will work out a list of all the things I want to do, and I'll do a one long session, to an hour, an hour and a half, maybe two hours, of motion capture. So I do all them and go because it takes some time to put the suit on. I want to make sure it's worth it Sure. But you know, if I just need one small thing, either that's the motion capture suit on, full of that, or animate it by hand, or try and find some stock animation that closely matches. So this is,

27:06
yeah, this might, this might help, yeah. Or, you know, stunt work. I'm

Damien Valentine 27:10
not going to do anything, so I don't want to break the suit or myself, especially after Christmas, yeah. Or, you know, like you mentioned kung fu there, I don't know kung fu. So I could try and do a fight scene, but I have no idea what I'm doing. So anyone watching that say, well, he's an idiot, because that's not how you do it. So having those kind of movements, I think would be really useful. So yeah, like a proper fight scene? Well, what

Phil Rice 27:34
I'm wondering with it is, maybe where it could be particularly useful would be okay, so maybe guys like you and I can't do kung fu moves, but we might be able to, with a little bit of practice and coaching, pull off a kung fu pose, and then, you know, so basically a series of still poses, of where you want the animations to end up. And then, you know, I clone already has some interpolation possibilities, where you can blend poses, but then with this to then tweak it even further. Yeah, there's some interesting possibilities there, so I'm excited to see what you do with it, too.

Damien Valentine 28:10
Yeah, thank you. Well, I think that wraps up our News episode this week. So thank you to Phil and Tracy if you have any questions, comments, or like to tell us what we've got wrong with the news, please send us an email at talk@completemashima.com you can check our blog@completemashima.com with all the details and everything we've discussed, and we will see you all next week. Take care. Bye. Bye.