Machinima Possibilities - Can GS do this?

ulillillia - thank you very much for taking the time to respond, much appreciated

The ability to use or not use tweening is perfect Does this apply to the animation also? As in, if I have say a character walking along without tweening applied to his movement - can I do the same for his animation also?

Thanks again ulillillia

While I think of it. My plan is to "act" out a scene with others, recording the actions as we go along (not screenshots at this stage). Then play back what we have done - and if it is ok, then get it to playback and record screenshots - this possible?

Not directly by you acting it out. You could write DLLs to make use of those sensor equipment pieces to check for positioning of the actors and place the models into the scene, but that's the best you can do if you, yourself, want to act it out.

You can animate models you create with 3DGS as well, and position them as needed. If you're making a movie to later become, say an AVI file, you can throw in a lot of details (even though the engine may render 5 fps, just setting the positions directly and taking screenshots from that, you can easily get 60 fps or more. I made a sample of such a case from my old, abandoned project, but the file size is extremely large. I have another one, only 300,000 bytes or so that's much more worth it (download size though).

Thanks for your reply ulillillia. What I meant was say my character has an animation sequence, I'm moving him not using tweening, but I also want the characters animation frames only to be updated when I choose - again, rather than time based.

Yep, you can update the animation frames. Just use something like my.frame = run4; in the script for the 4th frame of the run animation. I'm not familiar with character animation, but the manual (and the community) will help you with that.

If there's one way to do it, there's always another.

Why not just try downloading the free 30-day trial version and see how it is. Then you can, if you like 3DGS, buy it. You don't have to have Pro edition right away. You can use Commercial, Extra, or even Standard edition for that. I'd recommend at least Extra (otherwise you'd get the A6 appearing in the corner from standard). Commercial has the most features for the money and the best buy.

Thanks ulillillia - I'll take your advice and test drive it

Thanks again for your help and advice

If you ever need help, the manual and this community will help you as needed. Anyway, good luck.

I forgot to mention though, if you do decide to buy, you can later upgrade when the budget is more worth it. That is, if you buy Extra edition, you can then upgrade to Commercial or Pro for a discount.

i did some machinimas with 3dgs. it's a nice tool for that but you will certainly have to script a lot (your own tools for recording your player movements, playback, writing out screenshots,...).

changing the aspect ratio of the camera is no problem. getting right timing while writing out numbered screenshots isn't either.

I recommend 3d Gamestudio, Virtual Dub, Photoshop and either fraps or taksi+audacity. 3d Gamestudio is an excellent tool for machinima, the other tools are excellent for recording the scenes and stitching together. You also can have complete control of the camera and you can choose the speed of the scene, ie bullet time to complete stop to ultra fast with an easy command

Hi,
I also have been down the path of trying to do machinima with GS. Heres an idea:
If you're familiar with Quake, then you probably know about quake demos, *.dem
files, where the gameplay is recorded, then when you start Quake, you see the demo running on screen in the background behind the menu. The demo isnt actually recorded, like screenshots or video, rather, the entire state of the game at each interval is recorded in terms of variables, object's positions etc.
This would be ideal for make machinima in GS, coming up with the actual file/ method may be more complex. The method I advise is actually pretty straight forward, but would still require taking screenshots by hand. My method would involve a "transparent layer" of controls, that run during the game in real time, the controls could pause the game, and have a track bar that could move forward or backward in time, and have a button-click or keyboard shortcut to take each picture, and name them sequentialy in the save folder.
There is on the otherhand, a program out there somewhere that converts *.dem files directly into AVI's, so if you could look into the dem format, you may be able to write a similar format, and figure out a way to convert it then to AVI, avoiding all the taking screenshots and putting them together later.
Hope this helps you somewhat, sorry I dont have more to offer.
However, if you and others would find it useful, I will write the scripts for the just described in-game recording controls.--Yung

i just came across "stolen life", a 3dgs machinima from nanoflix (previously they did "killer robot" and "rendezvous" with 3dgs).

http://www.zipworld.com.au/~raz/nima/SL_Tumb/sl_ss.html

they even have stars as voice actors! claudia black from farscape, stargate sg1, pitch black,... and chris jones from "under a killing moon" and its sequels.



@yung: you don't have to take screenshots manually. you could automate that with a script.