Ever since I moved away from game  based Machinima I always knew I’d have some serious issues. The biggest has always been content. Games provide more 3D models, textures, sounds, etc, than any one person can ever make (or even collect), and what’s more, they’re designed to work together, look like they are all part of the same universe.

Of all the gaming communities I’ve never envied any more than The Sims 2,  so this tutorial will show how to import Sims 2 models into Reallusion’s Iclone.

But first…
The people who make these models often put a lot of time and effort into them. Please respect their work and follow their rules. Most places ask that you not re-distribute the models/textures and that you give them credit. If in doubt it never hurts to send an email and ask (some sites even ask for a donation. I’ll leave that entirely up to you). On to business.

Tools

Iclone
3DXchange (the tutorial assumes you already have a basic working knowledge of this and Iclone )
SimPE (to export Sims content to something 3dexchange can read. Also, the program requires Microsoft .NET Framework Version 2.0 and Dirext X9c to work. Links are on the Simpe download page).

Once you have All these installed you’ll ofcourse need a Sims 2 object to import.
The nice folks at Parsimonious kinldy gave  permission for us to use one of their models for this tutorial. They are a collection of many artists so there are quite a few objects we could use. For the tutorial we’ll go for something practical like the loveseat seen here.

Download the k8-Surf_Point-Loveseat.zip file and make a folder to unzip the contents to it.  In the zip there should be a package file, “k8-surfpointloveseat-071309.package”. This contains the 3D mesh and it’s texture. Right now the file is meant to be read by The Sims 2.

Open up SimPE and we’ll extract the mesh and texture.
Go to the File Menu and then Open. Navigate to the location of the “k8-surfpointloveseat-071309.package” and click open.

The top left box shows the Resource Tree and this should now be filled with lots of branches. Thankfully we will only need to concern ourselves with two of them for this tutorial.

Click on the Geometric Data Container. As you might have guessed this has the mesh. To the right of the Geometric Data Container is the Resource List window which will  show what is in the branch you select. In this case the package only has one model so only one entry.
Select “k8-surfpointloveseat-071309_gmdc” from the resource list..  Underneath the resource list should be the Plugin View. This is important because this is were you can preview the model and more importantly, where you will export it from.

In the plugin view, the Content -> cGeometryDataContainer tab should already be selected and it will contain a list of the meshes that make up the object.  In this case the model is only made of one piece and it’s box should already be ticked. Now hit the Preview button to see exactly what you will be exporting. If the texture is located in the same package (which it is) you will get a textured preview like this:

Click Export and the save it as an “obj” file. For simplicity it’s best to save it in the same folder you extracted the package to. Now we’ll export the texture.

In the Resource Tree select the Texture Image branch at the bottom. Again the resource list will only show one object (because this mesh only has one texture). Select that and the plugin view will show the TXTR Editor. Here you will see a list of textures. They are all the same, just different sizes. You will always want the biggest one so in this case select the 256×512 image. Right click on the texture preview, select export and save it.

It will save as a png by default, which is fine, iClone accepts that but if you do change the format to something like jpg you’ll need to change the extension in the file name yourself. Otherwise it will remain “png”. That’s the export process complete. It can be more complicated depending on the model but with a little practice it really takes no time at all. Now it’s time to move on to iClone 3D Exchange.

In 3D Exchange open the obj that we exported. The program will give you a warning that the model is too small and that it will be resized. Go ahead and click OK as this isn’t a problem. Click the Align to GND button to get the seat positioned nicely on the floor. The reference figure should be on and you will notice that the seat is way too small in comparison. In the scene transform section make sure the Lock XYZ box is checked and scale the seat up to 8500. This number works pretty well when importing any Sims 2 objects although you may often need to tweak the scale again once in Iclone, depending on the object.

In the Scene Tree select “Fabric” (make sure it’s box is ticked) and then in the Node Attribute section, set the autosmooth value to 45 (the value needed will vary from model to model. Feel free to try others). Hitting the Auto Smooth button will get the corners nice and smoothed out. Now export this as a prop and set the max texture size to 512×512.

Now it’s time to import to Iclone. Open Iclone and under Set -> Props either select the model from the Content Manager (if thats where you exported to), or use the Modify panel to import it from where you saved it to.
Again, under the Modify panel, scroll down to Material & Texture Settings. Double click on the Diffuse texture icon and select the texture you exported from SimPE.

There are a great many places online where Sims 2 custom content can be found. Enjoy and again, please do remember to behave.
Thanks once more to Parsimonious.org and to Reallusion for their help.

-Doc

Well, I’m quite happy with how the JLA/Avengers test vid looked, and of course I think the cast went great together (both the hero roster and the actors/ actresses) but Freedom Force (and it’s sequel) are relatively old games now. Truth be told, I’m a little bit of a sucker for the old blocky look of certain games, especially once the games themselves have found a place among my favorites. However that kinda bias can be one of the things that leads to people making crap Machinima… and loving it. For example a Halo fan seeing a shit Halo Machinima but thinking it’s God’s very own message simply because he’s so hopelessly besotted by the game itself.

So with that in mind I wanna make something that looks decent, but still has that oldish charm that I love from the game. So I went in to do some smoothing on the meshes.

The cape and shoulders were the parts that needed it the most.

At first I intended to do their whole bodies except the heads.  I liked those remaining angular cause I always thought that gave the characters a Timmverse-esque appearance. Honestly once I smoothed the bodies I quite liked the look, but it caused problems that were too time intensive to fix. In the end I left them almost entirely as they were. I just identified problem areas in the models and worked specifically on those. In the end it kept the polycount down, and simplified things somewhat.

Spidey's biggest problem was his pointy shoulders. Visible from miles away .

It’s a tiny difference on each character, but hopefully adds up to a big benefit. I’m still nailing down story points (its really hard to tell the kinda story I want while keeping it simple enough to do in my spare hours) so it might take me a wee while longer, but I think it’s getting there.

-Doc

Actually, that’s not 100% accurate, but I didn’t really know what else to call the test vid for the Marvel/DC short that I’m working on. Digital Memory is a lot of fun, but it’s very demanding and if I only ever work on that I’m not likely to make a release in the next 3 years, so I put out a casting call and found a crack team of voice actors for something I’ve always wanted to do. A Marvel/DC crossover.

Those who have seen the Marvel Civil War  short I did may know I’m a Freedom Force fan and have long been experimenting with mixing assets from different games to make Machinima. Freedom force is great for outdoor scenes but has few interiors. If I mix in some Sims 2 stuff, animate characters in Motionbuilder, and shot a bunch of stuff within Freedom Force I might just be able to pull off something interesting. Anyway, here’s the test vid, which I REALLY went overboard with. It’s very similar in style. to the Meet the Heavy test vid I did a while back,  I animated the characters more than I wanted to and even threw in music so it almost serves as a teaser now.

As always, none of the Binary Picture Show stuff would be what it is without the good help of Crazy Talk (and I really look forwward to version 6!) .  Anyway, enjoy. And check back for progress! Now that the cast is sorted it’s time to write this thing.

Well not me, cause I’m a long time user of CrazyTalk now, but I’ve come out of my hole to tell the remaining few who are still unaware, that theres still some time to catch the Crazytalk sale at Daz.com

In a field were facial animation can be so hard to come by, and so hard to do, (if even possible sometimes) I think I can say CrazyTalk has probably done the most for Machinima. How alive can a character really be without facial animation? For those of us who don’t have character after character wearing helmets, CT continues to be a great tool and although I haven’t released anything to show in a while, it’s probably the tool I play with the most.

The sale ends on April the 17th, so thats enough time to try the demo and see what it can do for you.

In other news I’ve recently took advantage of a few OTHER bargains myself and bought some character models from aXYZ Design for my Sci Fi film, Digital Memory. After a lot of thought I’ve limited the amount of Daz3dness that I’m using in the film, simply because of the amount of time it’s been taking to get the models prepared. Needless to say I have less time on my hands now than I used to, but every weekend I make a tiny bit more progress. Really I just want to make enough progress to be able to release some pictures, but progress is slow when theres this much technical experimentation going on.

Well, it’s been a while since the last update (starting to become the norm for me) and theres been some good news and bad. The Good is, as some of you know Beast won an award at the recent Machinima Expo held in Second Life. I’m pleased about that, but I couldn’t attend, which leads me on to the bad news.

My computer is at the end of it’s journey, its broke and I need a whole new one.  Considering all the things I’ve had to spend money on moving to a new contry, I won’t be doing that for a little while.

It’s not all bad though. The harddrive is intact so all my hard work is just in stasis, AND I’ve managed to install my Motionbuilder on the 2 and a half month old netbook thats been keeping me sane so far, and it runs!!

Yeah, it works on my Eee 1000H

I obviously can’t rock the same polycount on here than I could on the PC, and if it was the latest version of the tool it might not run as well, but atleast I can do bits. I just need to get Milkshape 3D on here and I can get some content in there. Sets, props characters, etc. I can’t actually make Digital Memory on here. I can either do the simpler parts (design the Robot’s somewhat intricate HUD for example) or I can start on something new until the new comp works it’s way into existance. If I take that route, the film prolly wouldn’t be pretty, but maybe that would be an added chance to focus on creativity, who knows.

This week I’ve somewhat bombarded my brain with the details of many potential new Machinima engines/environments that Binary Picture Show could be using in the future.
This weekend I decided to chill out, but I’ve taken a short break from downloading porn to write something I’ve been meaning to write for almost three years now.
No, I’m not listing all the people I would like to kill with my bare hands, thats for another day. I’m talking about a certain great potential that Machinima has always had, but has never really been explored; 3D.

I see some of you scratching your heads with an imaginary finger, but yes, I said 3D.
Not exactly the kind of 3D that comes to mind when you think “First Person Shooter” but TRUE 3D.

The Science/History:
Indeed as many of you smart people should already know, while most modern computer games are played in a virtual 3 dimensional space, we the audience still see a 2D representation of these 3D worlds via our monitors. For an example of what I mean compare your experience in a traditional cinema or watching TV , with an experience in an IMAX cinema (when you wear the goofy glasses). Naturally we view the world from two slightly different positions since most of us have two eyes which sit next to each other. Our brain composites the two flat images into one 3D image with which we can better judge depth: how far or near one object is behind or infront of another. This is important because when you normally watch TV, or play a 3D game, you are seeing an image that literally came from just one ‘eye’.

For donkey’s years now, people have been able to experience true 3D from the comfort of their own homes. I don’t think theres anyone in the modern world who doesn’t know of anaglyph 3D glasses, the red and green suckas that were popular in the 60’s (actually I read that the ‘two colour’ 3D technique is over 140 years old :-0).
In the real world, when you want to make a film for true 3D viewing you need to film each shot with TWO cameras, placed next to eachother somewhat similar to a pair of eyes. As you can imagine this is not always practical in terms of finance and logistics so the normal way of shooting films is using one camera per shot. It’s also sometimes possible to fake it, and use various tricks to split a 2D picture and make it look 3D, though the results are often not very good. Now if you have anaglyph glasses at home heres the part where you get to join in!

In this picture the sense of depth can only come from the fact that Mona is sitting infront of the landscape, occluding it from our vision, and of course shadow and highlight help suggest perspective. But if you view the picture with anaglyph glasses you will see that there now appears to be a litteral ’space’ between her and the landscape in the background, a space that couldn’t be seen previously. This can also be seen in the ‘tea party’ picture. Try and look at the layers of people and it feels like you are much more aware of all the space between them (more images available here).

Of course this way of looking at 3D is crap. It’s tedious, and everything is in a wierd red-blue/green colour. Surely I’m not suggesting that we all get our anaglyph glasses out so we can take this supposedly deeper look at Machinima! You’re right. For some time now there have been techniques to view 3D images in colour, like in the IMAX but not everyone knows that 3D images can be seen in colour using devives such as e-dimensional’s 3d shutter glasses made for the PC and TV. With these you can view 3D images in colour (not anaglyph images, thats a different technique) and it looks amazing. Now, How does this apply to Machinima, dammit? You should atleast have some idea of that already.

This is important in Machinima You say?

Hell yes! In the real world to make a genuine 3D image you need to film in stereo, with two cameras placed next to eachother like I stated eariler, or with a special stereo camera. If you know anyone who has this I think you’re in the minority, but of course in Machinima the cameras are virtual.

One of the biggest uses of these shutter glasses is to play 3D games since all the information needed to make the composite 3D image is available. Typically what you do is download stereo drivers for your graphics card (they work alongside the card’s normal drivers so are usually provided in your card manufacturer’s driver downloads section). Then when activated the fun begins. The players perspective now has information from two ‘eyes’. This is flickered onto the monitor and the glasses help your brain combine it into a picture that makes genuine 3D sense, and like the Matrix you really can’t be told about it. You have to see it for yourself.

Of course without the glasses you just see two overlapped perspectives, like this:
(link to the image’s source)

I first bought my glasses on ebay for £30 almost three years ago. Certain games where simply breathtaking. Being the big fan of Startopia that I am, it was too good to be true, and probably as close to standing on the deck of my space station as I’ll ever get. Meanwhile in Battlefield 1942 I kept getting the living hell blown out of me cause I was too busy gazing at the beautiful trees instead of looking out for those pesky Nazis… and then of course it hit me…
what of Machinima in true 3D?

E-dimensional sells 3D films from their site that are used in conjunction with the glasses to give a sort of IMAX experience at home. However these films don’t generally seem very good, are few and far bewtween, and of course they aren’t free. Moreover, the average Joe has either a very limited, or no real means of making a true 3D film of his own – however in Machinima it’s as simple as the click of a mouse. Games can easily be put into stereo mode during capture, or if your film is captured from a demo format, you could even easily have 2 versions of the film: monovision (normal) for those without glasses, and a stereo version for those with.

With the Nvidia stero drivers it’s supposedly even possible to play 3D games in anaglyph mode (I’ve never tried this) so the power of true 3D Machinima is available even to those who don’t want to shell out the £££.

A few questions run through my mind.

1. How many people have already thought of, or are thinking along these lines?

2. As the technology in the glasses becomes cheaper and more available could this sort of Machinima become a future reality?

3. With digital cinema projection becoming more common it’s no longer as expensive to screen 3D films since the old, costly celluloid is going out the window. Could Machinima perhaps become an even cheaper way of producing 3D cinema and 3D home entertainment?

4. Could true 3D Machinima infact bring something entirely new to the whole medium of Machinima? could it perhaps make us think in new and unique ways about cinematography?

5. Could 3D Machinima, with its simple creation process even end up being the boost that the technology (the glasses) needs to become more popular and more common?

As you can see there’s potential for quite a bit. A lot of people have often said Machinima is still young, but honestly I expected this sort of thing to have come about a long time ago. I even had plans to experiment with it myself, but frequent readers of this blog will know why that never happens.

Perhaps the title of this post is harsh, and 3D Machinima isn’t the missing, but the unborn child, and is still to come. Perhaps not. But you gotta see the “What if?” value.

Something to think about when you’re gone,
the tagline at Machinima.com is “Making Movies in Virtual Reality”.