I want it. I want it bad.

Capture Session:

Character Import:

One of the biggest challenges in 3D animation is making your characters move as you want them to. From a machimima perspective, one is typically limited to the character movements that come within the engine or in the case of machinima toolsets, importing pre-defined motions for your characters (through .bvh files for example). However, rarely do you get exactly what you are looking for and so you work around the limitations of the movement through camera framing, editing, etc.

For example, in my recent Lively machinima, a character is sitting on the bed, moves his body to respond to an audio cue, then stands up and yawns. However, this movement does not exist and the sequence was pieced together from various movements and video edits. This quite a common technique, especially in game engines: make the most of what you got.

I remember looking at Animazoo as a system to capture my own motions but it is way out of reach in price for me ($50K at the time). However, OpiTrack makes my mouth water and, even though it is $5K, I am struck by how fast the price point of this technology is dropping.

If this trend continues and/or someone like Johnny Chung uses IR and creates a mocap system from a WII or something, the possibilities for machinima will be enormous.

Google’s 3D virtual world Lively came and went in only 6 months. This is an extremely short lifespan for any technology, especially from a software maker who has a tradition of letting things develop organically. Google Labs is full of experiments that have outlasted 6 months, even Gmail is still officially in beta. Perhaps we will see Google’s 3D avatar technology pop up in Google Earth - after all, what is a 3D world with 3D buildings (Google Warehouse) without 3D people?

Watch Captain Aqua in Animation  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

I was inspired by the Lively virtual environment which, to me, was that old fashioned machinima opportunity. By ‘old fashioned’ I mean pre-Anymation, or maybe even pre-pre-Anymation, when making films was guerrilla by necessity, full of happy accident and not the newer generation of tools which we complain about today. I was attracted to Lively’s really smooth camera pans and pulls, awesome frame rate and the improv comedy element of it all: here is a limited set of things to use, go.

I wrote a script in short order but my schedule prevented me from finishing shooting before Google shut-down Lively on Dec 31/08. The film is called The Adventures of Captain Aqua and is about a lazy, bored superhero: no one ever invades the sea.

I really did like the idea that people could easily visit the set and the look of it although there are a couple of Second Life shots in the opening sequence and of course CrazyTalk. iClone to the rescue as well for a character to fill in a green screen for this render. First time with Fraps and Sony Vegas too. For obvious reasons, I won’t go into the details of making a Lively machinima but may post some screen captures later for historical record.

The film is just rough dialogue/audio/video mix but a look at the look of what could have been. Jamie Levack is the voice of Captain Aqua, he did an awesome job on the part. I would still like to make this film and so look out in the future.

[EDIT]: maybe I can finish it in Lively - here is NewLively!