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[Thundercraft]

Recently I found out about the Boatmurdered - The Animation topic and it got me thinking about DF and machinima. Specifically, I wondered if I was the only one who considered combining the two in order to produce DF stories in animation?

Sadly, I think a lot of people have misconceptions about machinima. For one thing, I believe it is more accessible than most realize.

While Red vs. Blue is quite entertaining, there's much more to it than this. Many still think of machinima as little more than a novelty - a frivolous way to use a game for those with too much time on their hands. Admittedly, a great deal of machinima is of low quality. And the flood of music videos and 3 minute test videos on YouTube doesn't help any. But occasionally one does find amazing videos or series produced by those who've learned the ropes and put enthusiasm, effort and talent into it.

Personally, I think machinima will only truly shine when more people turn away from creating machinima in game engines in favor of dedicated machinima programs. The latter has a good deal more to offer including ease of use, flexibility, highly customizable characters, a large prop database and the ability to easily import and customize new content.

The two most popular dedicated machinima software packages right now seems to be iClone and Moviestorm.

Judging by the similarity of features offered, they seem to be competitive and fairly comparable. They both have utilities to import content from Google's 3D Warehouse and modeling programs. Although, Moviestorm does lack several of the newer and nicer features of iClone (including HDR and IBL lighting effects). And, to be fair, I've heard it said more than once that Moviestorm is a bit easier to learn. Of course, a deciding factor for many is that Moviestorm is free, while iClone is somewhat expensive.

To give you an idea of what can be done with machinima, consider these video examples:

The Nobbit, Part 1
Produced in iClone; This is a hilarious parody of The Hobbit.

Stowaways s01e01 - "No Turning Back"
Produced in iClone; An original sci-fi series with an interesting story, excellent voice work, and pretty good production values.

I'm more familiar with iClone than Moviestorm. But some entertaining Moviestorm movies can be found in their Moviestorm Movies section.

There are some nice examples of machinima done on other software, too. For instance:

UT3 vs Halo Made with Truebones Motions
Produced in Unreal Tournament 3 (with help from 3DS Max); Awesome music video with animation so real you'll swear it was shipped with the game!

And I do enjoy Phaylen's DiVAS series (produced in Second Life). In particular:
DiVAS: The Season 1 Finale - Part 1 & 2
DiVAS: the Halloween Special - Part 2

What's my point?

I believe practically anyone could produce decent quality machinima with enough patience and motivation to learn. Further, I think it could be easier to do, with much faster turnaround compared with other animation techniques such as drawing by hand, 3D ray-traced rendering apps (like Blender), or even flash animation.

Consider that both iClone and Movie Storm provide automatic lip sync for voice recordings, and offer libraries of character animation and props, fast (in realtime even) rendering time and other things to speed the process along. Consider, too, that there are several websites where machinima fans and hopeful voice actors offer to provide free voice acting. (And some sites include voice samples for prospective machinima producers to hear their work.)

Finally, I'm excited about cutting edge video techniques being incorporated, such as iClone's dedicated Stereo 3D video output supporting the full range of cinematic 3D formats. (I can only imagine watching a DF-inspired machinima video with 3D glasses as a megabeast attacks a fortress!) There are even rumors that the next iClone will include support for cell-shading.

So, why am I here discussing it instead of doing it? Several reasons, actually. (The biggest being that I'm trying to save up to buy iClone + extras. That, and distractions such as DF...) But machinima is something I'm interested in.

[SalmonGod]

I'd love to see what can be done with it.  I remember the very first machinimas (Rangers!) on Quake, but haven't really followed the scene much since then besides a small clip here and there.

Personally, I really want to see more illustrated stories/comics.  These could also be done pretty easily in 3d.  Model a basic dwarf along with varieties of hairstyles, equipments, props, etc.  Fortresses can be exported from overseer or something and then detailed in a 3d app.  After you've got these basic building blocks it's just a matter of place, pose, render, and compile.  Taking screenshots from one of those machinima apps would be a really easy way to do it.

I've been thinking for a while about doing something similar to my capstone project for a DF story, but time is not on my side.

[Terrahex]

I love this idea. anything movie related to dwarf fortress other than the actual in-game recordings would be awesome, even a movie made by a bunch of bored friends with bad acting and graphics would be fun to watch (though I'd like the higher quality ones better obviously)