View this image '
It used to take millions of dollars to make a motion capture work. You needed a specially designed suit covered in reflective balls, or a network of LED markers. Now, all you need is two Kinects and the right software. As of this July, a lot of the software is free. The biggest change came with the release of Valve's Source Filmmaker, a free-to-download animation suite. It's built on top of the same Source graphics engine Valve used to buildPortal andHalf Life 2. It's also one of a handful of technologies that, in the course of just a few years, have turned 3D animation into something you can effectively do in your basement. At least onereal, we-have-a-producer-and-everything movie is already being made using Sourcepowered tools, and there are plenty of fans ready to follow suit. In the seven weeks the program's been available, they've already produced hundreds of videos, ranging from the promising to the bizarre. There'sa musical. There'sa single-shot slapstick comedy. Those are the ambitious ones. There's also a lot ofvideo overdubs and a lot of videosso weird as to defy description. It's roughly the same terrain you find on YouTube, the scattering of goofs and half-baked projects that comes with any powerful new tool that's available to just anyone. There's also precious little documentation, so most of the know-how comes from community members like Jimer Lins (a handle), who's been making'Tip of the Day' tutorials on Source for the past month. 'Right now I think it's still very much in the 'ooo shiny thing' phase,' he told me. 'But I can promise you that right now someone is working on something that will absolutely blow us all away.'
Video available at:http://youtube.com/watch?v=i_FZLSYxPWo.
Valve brought on Raitt to fix all that. Raitt had started his own animation company, BoxRocket, with a Pixar alum, but once he connected with Valve, he quickly joined the fold. On top of the mod tools, Raitt's team built a single workspace to handle keyframing, editing, lighting, color grading and rendering. Most professional setups separate these steps between different people and different programs. The animator uses Maya, the editor uses Final Cut, and the whole
1/2
project is sent to a separate cluster of computers for final rendering. It's a more powerful setup, but it's also expensive and unwieldy. When everything is on a single computer, it means you can animate from your basement, two hours at a time. Need to do your own motion-capture? Check outthis tutorial. All you need is a pair of Kinects and some software. Need help with the lighting tool? Take it tothe forums - or better yet,the subreddit. All it takes is time, effort and a little bit of art.
Video available at:http://youtube.com/watch?v=KZouYNu3Z6k.
'Just One More Hat' by burningfajitasalt
Source Filmmaker's gaming roots also cause a few problems. Valve has takena hard line on IP from the beginning: if you're going to make money off a movie, even from YouTube ad revenue, it can't have any Valve property in it, from the character models right down to the wall textures. The program's still free, but everything else is on loan. So far, none of the YouTube shorts stand on their own, but if one of them were popular enough, the creators would need to replace the offending 3D models before a wider release. Valve's staying mum about distribution (YouTube's good enough for now), but if they ever decided to start selling movies, Steam would be the perfect platform for it. The real test is still whether the community can produce something you'll want to see. Or they could stick to fan movies. It might be disappointing to cinephiles, but Valve would be perfectly happy to keep the service alive as an engine for fan films, and it's no coincidence that Valverecently expanded their video-sharing forum. For his part, Raitt isn't worried about the amateur-professional divide. 'Sometimes a creator is just a creator. It just depends on how much they want to participate.'
Read more:http://buzzfeed.com/tommywilhelm/how-valve-is-turning-gamers-into-filmmakers How Valve Is Turning Gamers Into Filmmakers
2/2 Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)