CTN

Probably they offer all the benefits to their enterprise customers, the average people are just good for milking.

I live right next to Los Angeles, California and we're paying 55 a month for basically 6 mbps. :S That's literally the best we can get without having a data cap I couldn't use up in a day. Even then a good download speed in my house is 600 kbps at best. That's absolutely horrible! And data caps? WTF is up with that? Sounds to me like your ISPs are some greedy bastards trying to cram together as many people as possible using their limited resources. Why sell gigabit internet to one guy when you can split that for 200 people and get more money? My current plan includes 100Mbps DL/100 Mbps UL and a free usb stick modem with 3,6Mbps speed, I think. I get this for the equivalent of 10$. Speed tests reveal about 95Mbps real speed, matching my HDD speed, I think. They are willing to upgrade this plan to 300Mbps for free if I sign for 12 more months with them but that means I have to buy a new router and an SSD. I actually wonder what private individual needs gigabit internet...

15$ for 20 megs of internets???? Move to Romania, we have gigabit internet for that money...

A welcomed initiative! I listed my machinimas in the suggestion thread. Is that all I have to do?

And how does this fit into the "I can't release anything until I sign a new contract" grand scheme of things?

Of course that can happen. The purpose here is to diminish the scammers' activity. It would be unrealistic to believe that you can just stop them. The realistic course of action is to monitor them, devise some countermeasures, wait until they adapt, then devise more countermeasures, and so on, hoping that, at the end of the day, the ratio between warned people and scammed people is in your favor. You cannot stop crime, you can just slow it down.

A simple solution would be to add a warning after the intro title of your videos. It should be concise, for example: "watch only on channel x, donate only on website y, report scammers", you get the idea. I assume a lot of the dopplegangers won't take the time to edit out the warning and thus they will lose some audience. I'm curious about what you were able to accomplish with SFM. I've been hoping to contradict you on some of the things you said about it but I'm still not done with the SDK and won't be able to express a competent opinion until next year.

After watching the tutorials I'm confident that SFM will allow me to achieve the professional results I was striving for when I picked up and greatly overestimated the Source SDK. I still have some unanswered questions but it's a big step forward from current tools. Hopefully, the machinima I'm working on now or the next one will be the last made with the SDK. Then I plan to test the limits of creative potential and freedom the SFM has to offer. Interesting times to be a no budget filmmaker!

It was about damn time!

I tried it but even stacking two animations crashes the game after compile. Anyway I had to give up my initial plan, as always, and break the shot into 4 other shots so I could get a working solution. It seems strange now thinking back one year ago when I was working at Little Freemans - Episode 2 and I just can't figure out how I managed to pull it off. I guess I never knew what I was getting myself into. There were so many incredible stunts that I had to pull off with no help other than asking the forums, it seems impossible now. I guess that's why I decided I'd do something simpler in the future. Problem is, there's nothing simple about Source.

My main theory about this movie is that they intend to pay a great deal of money for marketing purposes at the expense of quality. Either that or Gabe made them pay through their noses for licensing. The trailer also hints that the movie will be turned into a game and the articles suggest that it might be released on Steam. Upon further thinking it would seem that the movie itself is a marketing ploy by Valve. That would explain a few things about it... Thank God for fan created content! I'm starting to rely quite a bit on in for my series otherwise it would be even more frustrating. My machinima workflow: write the script with Source limitations in mind, fail to animate a certain scene, get pissed off, fail again with a simpler solution that is further away from my initial intention, get more pissed off, make the characters stand and reframe. Then the next scene... Iron Sky was released in april. I recommend you watch it to get a grasp on how resourceful people can be on a small budget. It has its flaws but the satire and CGI make up for the inconveniences. I'm ashamed to say CGI makes up for anything in a movie but, in this case, it's an indie breakthrough.

Probably on modellers, animators, higher end motion capture, and marketing. This also kind of shows the divide between costs of an animated movie. They're operating at 18 million, which is considered economical in Hollywood terms. So far I think the donations page has raised over $1,800, most of which will go towards the movie project. While that's more money then I've ever had to put in a project in my whole life, that's still 0.0001% of the budget for what's considered "economical" for normal computer graphics movies. Guess we'll see who gets done first! I was obvious they would be spending the money on that. To be more precise, I should have asked "how are they going to spend all that money and make it seem like they aren't throwing it away?" Because judging from the trailer, they are doing exactly that. The models, sets, animation, physics are outdated. I don't know how much animation, VFX and post houses charge in the US but in Europe you could do wonders with this kind of money. Maybe this is a minimum amount required for this project in the US but it sure seems a lot of money to spend just for this movie. Have you seen http://www.ironsky.net? It's a finnish indie movie produced for just 7 million euros which features almost 900 CGI shots that are very high quality. Not to mention it's a very enjoyable dark comedy. Now that's money well spent!

The story has potential and it couldn't have been produced as live action for this budget so animation was the only alternative. But while the budget is too small for a live action and high end animation, it feels too much for machinima. I'm really curious on how they are going to spend all that money. I hope Valve will show some support for us independent machinima makers. You can barely make something decent with current tools.

If you do this, be sure to have some cameramen. And I mean real cameramen not "oh, I'll just have my cousin Billy grab a few shots with his new smart phone. He shot a squirrel chasing a dog once and I liked it...". You should get two although three would be more efficient. One should only shoot Ross, the second would go after wider shots and the third would run for coverage (nice puns wouldn't you say?). I'd shoot everybody but I'm too far away even though Rammstein says we're all living in America. Also, my camera is out of bullets... Afterwards you can have the footage edited and come up with a nice video for all to see. You can upload it to machinima and probably earn more celebrity and cash. Dammit Ross, how can you exploit your fans like this, you slave driver?

Thanks, but I've already been there.

A month later and still needing help...

I've been avoiding walking animations in FP so far by using scripted_sequences or path_corners. Looks like now I really have to do it in FP to get the desired result. The problem is that all the walking animations last only for a second or so and I don't know how to loop them. I tried checking the "Sync Exit Tag to next Gesture's Entry Tag" and ovelapping the animations over a longer period of time. It works in FP when I playback the scene but after I compile the map the game crashes immediately. I've also been fiddling with timing tags but I haven't even gotten close to a solution. Anyway I can get this to work? Even so, I'm living under the impression that if I succeed, the animation will play in game but the models will not move. Maybe someone can confirm this. Thanks!

I started the recording and redone everything the same way as before only this time it worked... I'm guessing they either fixed it or Fraps fixed it. With Valve, I'm not susprised anymore... The white line running from the origin of the map to the info_player_start entity is still there but it's harmless now. Let's hope it will not rise to power again...

That's the workflow I'm using so I'm not doing anything wrong. I'm able to create my custom path, represented by two green cubes connected by a green line. The other path is also present as a white line running from the origin of the map to the info_player_start entity. The curious thing is, when I process the splines, it is the weird path that get's processed and not the one I created. Maybe that makes some sense to you. It's a good thing I can work on other things in the mean time. I only hope that by the time I finish phoneme extraction, flexes, map editing, lighting and shooting static shots, Valve will have already fixed the Demo Smoother and broken something else instead. Otherwise, I'll just be forces to find some unothodox solution to camera tracking.

I was ready to start shooting Little Freemans - Episode 3 when, surprise, surprise, the Demo Smoother decided piss me off from shot 1. I've been trying to record a camera path I created with the Smoother but it recorded a weird path running from the origin of the map to the info_player_start entity. It ignored my custom path completely and jumped around the other path. And, of course, I was standing still while recording the demo, shame on you for even thinking I wasn't. Anyone knows what's going on? I'm using Source 2009, HL Episode One and also tested on Episode Two with the same results. If no one has encountered this problem so far, could someone run a quick Smoother test and let me know if they have the same problem? Thanks!

I'm also interested in switching the engine and porting assets for my own series. Time doesn't allow me to make the switch in the near future but if you reach a viable solution perhaps you'll share the technical details with anyone interested. As l gather more experience with the Source engine I find myself more and more limited. I always write my scripts with limitations in mind, which is not unusual in screenwriting, but in this particular case I have to consider even the most commonly tasks. I'm cheating my way through shooting and editing but there are some ordinary things that just don't work. Unless you're animating a talk show, you're bound to get in trouble at some point.

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. 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!!!

Finally, episode 2 is out after another few months of work. In this episode, Gordon gets bullied by the customs cops and meets up with Barney. -_AFSfCf19Y Hope you'll also enjoy this episode, it has more interaction and not just Gordon walking around speaking to himself. As I said in the Little Freemans thread, I'm not going to continue posting new episodes on Ross' forums since I don't feel I should advertise this way. It was necessary for receiving feedback and seeing if people were interested in my work but it's time to have my own website. Until machinima.ro is up and running you can visit my YouTube channel http://www.youtube.com/user/rochinima?feature=mhee where I will post updates on my work. I will still answer any comments here also. Enjoy!

I only browsed a little through the first ep and I can say that you need to work on both technical and artistic levels but nevermind about that. What I really want to congratulate you about is coming up with an original name for the series (well, besides the thread title). This establishes you as a person who created a series which belongs to this machinima particular genre, made popular by Ross, and not just a guy doing another mind series. And this is how the tiniest details make the biggest difference.

But it has subtitles. You yourself said so earlier. I even added a Portuguese sub, credits to Daniel Abreu.