How to make machinima?

[Roto]

For the longest time now I wanted to learnhow to make machinima. Now, I know very litttle about animating in a game engine, so if anyone would point me to a website or a book or anything that would help me learn anything cause im a total noob when it comes to this.

[CooL]

https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Main_Page

For if you want to take the same route Ross is taking. Or you could take the easy way out, and do it in gmod.

[Kirkreng]

I wouldn't necessarily call GMOD the easy way out. It is certainly easy to make a crappy Machinima using GMOD, however making a good one doesn't seem to be the easiest thing.

[CTN]

For the longest time now I wanted to learnhow to make machinima. Now, I know very litttle about animating in a game engine, so if anyone would point me to a website or a book or anything that would help me learn anything cause im a total noob when it comes to this.

 

There is another thread on the same page, with the same name, where I explained the bare mininum to get you started on a series like Freeman's Mind or a series that requires only capturing game footage. For more complex machinima, where you have to animate the characters and other objects to perform specific tasks, you will need to learn how to use Hammer and Faceposer which are apart of the Source SDK, available for free. The machinima videos in my signature are examples of working with Hammer and Faceposer.

 

I wouldn't necessarily call GMOD the easy way out. It is certainly easy to make a crappy Machinima using GMOD, however making a good one doesn't seem to be the easiest thing.

 

Sometimes Gmod isn't only the easy way out, is the only way out. For example, in Little Freemans - Episode 2, all the shots with the Ford Mustang moving had to be shot in Gmod because I couldn't import the model into Hammer. It was also a lot easier to shoot it live in Gmod than painstakingly animating it in Hammer. So, I would say Gmod is a must for any Source machinima director, often times being the only alternative. JUST DON'T DO STOP MOTION MACHINIMA WITH IT!!!

[Roto]

I found some dvds from noesis that ross himself made so im gonna start with that.

[101Phase]

It really depends on the type of machinima you want to make and what resources you already have. If you're going for a mind series, then all you literally need is a screen capture software e.g. fraps, a decent mic and audio software and a decent video editing software.