This and that and stuff and things

Moved my blog onto http://satscape.blogspot.com

Yay! Fixed my PC. The CPU fan had rattled slightly loose causing the CPU temp to rise to a toasty 85ºC, which caused the CPU to slow its processing down. Now idling at a more confortable temp of 30ºC.

Shame I missed the Machiniplex Forum in Second life, I was looking forward to it.

I Love the news media : “EUROPES KILLER STORM” http://tinyurl.com/ya4fbu6 - Erm, its a bit windy in France, and no, there isn’t a ‘FOOD ALERT IN THE UK’ as far as I know, but there may be a shortage of Cornish pasties at my local grocery store, other than that, we’re ok thanks… If the US government wants to send food parcels over to europe, could they send Pizza parcels over Derbyshire, please. I’ve been without Pizza for several days now, not sure I can go on, may have to defrost the Lobsters in my freezer.

The latest Duleks episode (4) seems to have gone down well, 260 views on youtube after 2 days and quite a few more comments than I usually get, most of my videos get 260 views after several months!

Not sure why, but it seems “The Duleks” is more popular with my non-machinima friends/followers than it is with Machinima friends/followers. Now obviously the Moviestorm community isn’t going to be huge fans of the show, as its made entirely in iClone.

Anyway, Episode 5 is written, cast and ready to start making, but I’m putting it to one side and going to do a ‘serious’ project next - not going into details yet, but it will hopefully be another “lovely” short video that might even make you cry. Also for this project, I’m going to try out a technique I’ve been playing with which will blend iClone and Moviestorm seamlessly, no, not just regular green-screening, a little more advanced, I want to have the best of both worlds, the ease of animating characters in moviestorm combined with the soft-shadow-photo-realistic loveliness of iClone.

If you haven’t seen the new episode yet, here’s episode 4 of “The Duleks” - enjoy. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWIR1sYohbw Oh and BTW, I’ve switched off Google Buzz, its ok, but Tumblr currently does it better, maybe once google work on it a bit more things will change, but for now, it goes on the wait-and-see pile along with Google Wave. :-)

Remember the ‘tea bag incident’ several days back?

“Cant believe what Ive just done, a tea-bag bust, rather than make a fresh cup I used kitchen towel to filter it into another cup.”

Well, just had another busted tea bag, this time I used a clothes peg to hold the hole closed while mashing!

1. I have way too much spare time
2. Every tea bag is sacred, Every tea bag is great, if a tea bag is wasted, god gets quite irate.
3. If I were in ‘The Sims’ several +skill symbols would be above my head for my tea bag engineering abilities.

My sister was supposed to be on the BBC show “Crimewatch” tonight… no, not as a criminal !! She was going to be “woman pretending to type” in some b-roll footage of a police station, but it looks like she was cut out of that particular segment of the show.

I never realised how funny Crimewatch is, I didn’t think it was a comedy. The reconstruction videos are hilarious. I must parody it one day :-) and of course the lovely Kirsty Young co-hosting the show with “token asian-bloke”, she did a brilliant performance with ‘some chief inspector’. Very convincing, it’s as if she was about to cry at one point. Brilliant! oscar-winning!

Hang on, that photo-fit looks just like me…maybe I should hand myself in?

EDIT / CORRECTION : She was in it after all, 3 frames of out of focus, ‘depth of field’ footage, basically she’s a pink blur….Yay!

Finished set construction for the new Duleks episode. Drawn on my own experience when working in a call centre back in 1999 for this episode! It’s set in Malcolm Dulek’s workplace, a technical call centre. Also just created a new character in iClone using “Dummy helpers” - FANTASTIC FEATURE! - ‘Tony the talking toilet’ will make his debut in this episode…. ok, so I’ve moved on from the fart joke in episode 2, now we have toilet humour :-)

I -MAY- be making “One giant leap: chapter 2” in February (no promises) - so long as Moviestorm behaves and doesn’t use 100% CPU all the time or crashes to desktop. iClone doesn’t do that, you can do it too! I have faith… come on! *prays to Java god*

This chapter answers questions raised in chapter 1, so basically you know what the heck is going on. Don’t worry, there IS an overall plot, and chapters 2 & 3 is where it all kicks off.

I’ve decided to put my Sci-fi/Thriller “One Giant Leap” on hold. Not sure how long for, several reasons; Chapters 2-6 are more or less written and ready to make, but I’ve lost the enthusiasm I once had for this mini-series. The story is pretty basic, no ground-breaking moments, but when I think about making it…its like….bleh….maybe tomorrow.

I make machinima for the fun of creating stuff, it doesn’t have to be a comedy, had lots of fun making chapter 1 especially working with talented voice actors (act3scene24, goofParade, Norrie Sinclair and Azure)…but towards the end, rendering it out of Moviestorm, had a very shit time. Had to load one scene in at a time, save, exit, reload and render for EVERY scene. Tried 2 scenes and it either crashed to desktop or Blue-screen-of-death. Even then had to re-render a couple scenes where the lip-sync just plain stopped working, or a character’s head would flail around like that scene in poltergeist. Shame I wasn’t doing a horror flick. :-)

So my enthusiasm for using Moviestorm as dwindled too while making it. During this time, I also re-discovered iClone 4. I had played with the demo of iClone 2 a while back and found it very hard to use. iClone 4 is harder to use than Moviestorm at first, but once you get used to it, the process is very similar, and the render quality, shadows, animation and overall experience is just mind-blowing.

I would still highly recommend Moviestorm to beginners, but iClone sits neatly between high-end rendering packages like 3DS-Max and easy machinima tools like Moviestorm, which is what appeals to me hugely.

Moviestorm is better than iClone for some things. in “The Duleks Episode 1” (made using iClone) I used Moviestorm to make a TV commercial to display on the Dulek’s TV screen. I did attempt it in iClone, but I’ve just not got the animation skills to pull it off right now, so jumped on Moviestorm and made it in 20 minutes. easy!

So, they both have pros and cons, maybe that will change in 2010 and one will become the clear leader in machinima creation, until then I will use both.

As you’ve probably seen, I’ve currently made two episodes of “The Duleks” using iClone and I have a whole season planned for the rest of 2010, so that should keep me busy. If my enthusiasm for “One giant leap” returns…do I make it in MS or iClone?