Monthly Archives: January 2023

S3 E60 Film Review: Team Fortress 2 – Law Abiding Engineer by TrueOneMoreUser (Jan 2023)

Tracy Harwood Podcast Episodes January 12, 2023 Leave a reply

This week’s film is Ricky’s pick, a Team Fortress 2 composited trailer of Law Abiding Citizen (film) made using Source tools. We discuss the throwback to the mid 2000s and how well the film has stood up to the test of time, the Saxxy Awards and another TF2 film which we also really enjoyed, Demoman (Pure Pwnage ep 15 Intro) by GiigoPwNs.



YouTube Version of this Episode

Show Notes and Links

Team Fortress 2 – Law Abiding Engineer, released 1 April 2010 by TrueOneMoreUser

Side by side comparison between Law Abiding Engineer and Law Abiding Citizen

TF2 – Demoman (Pure Pwnage ep 15 Intro), released 25 Nov 2007, by GriigoPwNs

The Saxxy Awards, Team Fortress 2 website

Source Filmmaker on Steam

Throwback: Faceposer, on Valve’s Developer Community site

Find out more about compositing techniques here (Filmlifestyle.com)

Tech Update 1: AI Generators (Jan 2023)

Tracy Harwood Blog January 8, 2023 Leave a reply

A month is apparently a VERY long time in the world of artificial intelligence… since our last post on this topic, released at the beginning of December, we’ve seen even more amazing techs launch.

ChatGPT

This is another creative AI from the OpenAI stable (also creator of DALL-E 2) that produces text in a conversational way. ChatGPT is capable of answering pretty much any question or request you care to throw at it, and the answers are actually quite robust if a little fuzzy around the edges at times (don’t rely on it for anything critical, in the words of Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO). Here’s an example I asked it for this post, using the prompt: ‘In the style of H P Lovecraft, write a description of a character for someone who hunts the Chluthu’

Response:

Professor Alistair Dunsmore was a man obsessed. For years, he had devoted his life to studying the mysteries of the cosmos, and in particular, the myth of the Chluthu.

A brilliant but troubled man, Dunsmore was driven by a need to uncover the truth about the terrifying creature that lurked beyond the veil of our known universe. He had spent years pouring over ancient texts and forbidden tomes, piecing together the scattered clues that hinted at the Chluthu’s existence.

And then, one fateful day, he discovered something that would change his life forever. A fragment of an ancient artifact, imbued with otherworldly powers, that seemed to hold the key to finding the Chluthu.

Dunsmore knew that he had to have it, no matter the cost. And so he set out on a quest to track down the artifact and unlock its secrets. He traveled to the far corners of the earth, braving dangers and braving the unknown, all in the pursuit of his ultimate goal.

Some say that Dunsmore was mad, driven to the brink by his obsession. But to those who knew him, he was a hero, a brave and brilliant man who dared to stare into the darkness and face the horrors that lay within.

That’s impressive – and it took just seconds to generate. It has great potential to be a useful tool for scriptwriting for stories and character development that can be used in machinima and virtual productions, and also marketing assets you might use to promote your creative works too!

And as if that isn’t useful enough, some bright folks have already used it to write a game and even create a virtual world. Note the detail in the prompts being used – this one from Jon Radoff’s article (4 Dec 2022) for an adventure game concept: ‘I want you to act as if you are a classic text adventure game and we are playing. I don’t want you to ever break out of your character, and you must not refer to yourself in any way. If I want to give you instructions outside the context of the game, I will use curly brackets {like this} but otherwise you are to stick to being the text adventure program. In this game, the setting is a fantasy adventure world. Each room should have at least 3 sentence descriptions. Start by displaying the first room at the beginning of the game, and wait for my to give you my first command’.

The detail is obviously the key and no doubt we’ll all get better at writing prompts as we learn how the tools respond to our requests. It is interesting that some are also suggesting there may be a new role on the horizon… a ‘prompt engineer’ (check out this article in the UK’s Financial Times). Yup, that and a ‘script prompter’, or any other possible prompter-writer role you can think of… but can it tell jokes too?

Give it a go – we’d love to hear your thoughts on the ideas it generates. Of course, those of you with even more flAIre can then use the scripts to generate images, characters, videos, music and soundscapes. There’s no excuse for not giving these new tools for producing machine cinema a go, surely.

Link requires registration to use (it is currently free) and note the tool now also keeps all of your previous chats which enables you to build on themes as you go: ChatGPT

Image Generators

Building on ChatGPT, D-ID enables you to create photorealistic speaking avatars from text. You can even upload your own image to create a speaking avatar, which of course raises a few IP issues, as we’ve just seen from the LENSA debacle (see this article on FastCompany’s website), but JSFILMZ has highlighted some of the potentials of the tech for machinima and virtual production creators here –

An AI we’ve mentioned previously, Stable Diffusion version 2.1 released on 7 December 2022. This is an image generating AI, its creative tool is called Dream Studio (and the Pro version will create video). In this latest version of the algorithm, developers have improved the filter which removes adult content yet enables beautiful and realistic looking images of characters to be created (now with better defined anatomy and hands), as well as stunning architectural concepts, natural scenery, etc. in a wider range of aesthetic styles than previous versions. It also enables you to produce images with non standard aspect ratios such as panoramics. As with ChatGPT, a lot depends on the prompt written in generating a quality image. This image and prompt example is taken from the Stability.ai website –

source: Stability.ai

So, just to show you how useful this can be, I took some text from the ChatGPT narrative for our imaginary character, Professor Alistair Dunsmore, and used a prompt to generate images of what he might look like and where he might be doing his research. The feature images for this post are some of the images it generated – and I guess I shouldn’t have been so surprised that the character looks vaguely reminiscent of Lovecraft himself. The prompt also produced some other images (below) and all you need to do is select the image you like best. Again, these are impressive outputs from a couple of minutes of playing around with the prompt.

images of Professor Alistair Dunsmore, in his study, searching for the Chluthu, by Tracy & Stable Diffusion

For next month, we might even see if we can create a video for you, but in the meantime, here’s an explainer of a similar approach that Martin Nebelong has taken, using MidJourney instead to retell some classic stories –

Supporting the great potential for creative endeavour, ArtStation has taken a stance in favour of the use of AI in generating images with its portfolio website (which btw was bought by Epic Games in 2021). This is in spite of thousands of its users demanding that it remove AI generated work and prevent content being scraped. This request is predicated on the lack of transparency used by AI developers in training and generating datasets. Instead, ArtStation has removed those using the Ghostbuster-like logo on their portfolios (‘no to AI generated images’) from its homepage and issued a statement about how creatives using the platform can protect their work. The text of an email received on 16 December 2022 stated:

Our goal at ArtStation is to empower artists with tools to showcase their work. We have updated our Terms of Service to reflect new features added to ArtStation as it relates to the use of AI software in the creation of artwork posted on the platform.

First, we have introduced a “NoAI” tag. When you tag your projects using the “NoAI” tag, the project will automatically be assigned an HTML “NoAI” meta tag. This will mark the project so that AI systems know you explicitly disallow the use of the project and its contained content by AI systems.

We have also updated the Terms of Service to reflect that it is prohibited to collect, aggregate, mine, scrape, or otherwise use any content uploaded to ArtStation for the purposes of testing, inputting, or integrating such content with AI or other algorithmic methods where any content has been tagged, labeled, or otherwise marked “NoAI”.

For more information, visit our Help Center FAQ and check out the updated Terms of Service.

You can also read an interesting article following the debate on The Verge’s website here, published 23 December 2022.

example of a logo used by creators on ArtStation portfolios

We’ve said it before, but AI is one of the tools that the digital arts community has commented on FOR YEARS. Its best use is as a means to support creatives to develop new pathways in their work. It does cut corners but it pushes people to think differently. I direct the UK’s Art AI Festival and the festival YouTube channel contains a number videos of live streamed discussions we’ve had with numerous international artists, such as Ernest Edmonds, a founder of the digital arts movement in the 1960s; Victoria and Albert Museum (London) digital arts curator Melanie Lenz; the first creative AI Lumen Prize winner, Cecilie Waagner Falkenstrom; and Eva Jäger, artist, researcher and assistant curator at Serpentine Galleries (London), among others. All discuss the role of AI in the development of their creative and curatorial practice, and AI is often described as a contemporary form of a paintbrush and canvas. As I’ve illustrated above with the H P Lovecraft character development process, its a means to generate some ideas through which it is possible to select and explore new directions that might otherwise take weeks to do. It is unfortunate that some have narrowed their view of its use rather than more actively engaged in discussion on how it might add to the creative processes employed by artists, but we also understand the concerns some have on the blatant exploitation of copyrighted material used without any real form of attribution. Surely AI can be part of the solution for that problem too although I have to admit so far I’ve seen very little effort being put into this part of the challenge – maybe you have?

In other developments, a new ‘globe’ plug-in for Unreal Engine has been developed by Blackshark. This is a fascinating world view, giving users access to synthetic 3D (#SYNTH3D) terrain data, including ground textures, buildings, infrastructure and vegetation of the entire Earth, based on satellite data. It contains some stunning sample sets and, according to Blackshark’s CEO Michael Putz, is the beginning of a new era of visualizing large scale models combined with georeferenced data. I’m sure we can all think of a few good stories that this one will be useful for too. Check out the video explainer here –

And Next…?

Who knows, but we’re looking forward to seeing how this fast action tech set evolves and we’ll be aiming to bring you more updates next month.

Don’t forget to drop us a line or add comments to continue the conversation with us on this.

S3 E59 Film Review: The Voice in the Hollow by Half M.T Studios (Jan 2023)

Tracy Harwood Podcast Episodes January 5, 2023 Leave a reply

Welcome to a brand new year, 2023! We start the year off with Tracy’s pick of the month, a sublime short by Half M.T Studios, called The Voice in the Hollow, made using Unreal Engine. We were blown away by quality of the virtual production in this short, although Ricky highlights a couple of pointers from a storytelling perspective. It is a very dark little tale, a la Cain and Abel, but there’s an even deeper back story to this one which Tracy explains.

The film provokes a discussion about the differences and similarities between virtual production and machinima – asking just how much fun is there now with making these productions? Spoiler alert: lots of course!

We’d love your feedback on this too, so do get in touch – contact info on our website, or drop in your thoughts below on the chat.



YouTube Version of this Episode

Show Notes and Links

Film –

Miguel Ortega on ArtStation

Tran Ma on ArtStation

Making of the film on Gnomon’s website here (90 hours of content)

Projects Update (Jan 2023)

Tracy Harwood Blog January 2, 2023 Leave a reply

To kick start 2023 with a virtual BANG, we are highlighting some projects we’ve seen that are great examples of machinima and virtual production, demonstrating a breadth of techniques, a range of technologies, and comprise good ole’ short-form storytelling. We also really enjoyed Steve Cutts tale of man… let’s hope for a peaceful and happy year. Enjoy!

Force of Unreal

We were massively impressed throughout last year with the scope of creative work being produced in Unreal Engine. So, we have a few more to tell you about!

RIFT by HaZimation is a Sci-Fi Anime style film with characters created in Reallusion’s Character Creator. The film debuted at the Spark Computer Graphics Society’s Spark Animation Festival last October. We love the stylized effects that have been used here, which Haz Dulull, director/producer, describes as a combination of 2D and 3D in this article (scroll to below half way). We are also impressed that those same 3D assets and environment used in the film making process have also been integrated into a FPS game. The game is currently available free on Steam in early access here. This is another great example of creators using virtual assets in multiple ways – and builds very much on the model that Epic envisaged when they first released the City sample last year, hot on the heals of the release of The Matrix Resurrections film and The Matrix Awakens: UE5 Expeirence for which the city was created. We also love HaZimation’s strategy of co-creation for the new RIFT game experience with players – “We at HaZimation believe that a great game is only possible with direct feedback from the audience as early as possible” (Steam). We fully expect to see more creative works using the RIFT content in future too. Congrats to everyone involved.

As any of you that have been following the podcast will have gathered, we love a good alien film too, and we have found another made in UE5 that we really enjoyed. This one is called The Lab, by Haylox (released 14 Sept 2022). The director/producer builds the suspense well in this although, of course, its the same Alien trope we’ve seen many times over. Nonetheless, this has nice effects and well balanced soundscape.

We also love a good music video. The next project is a dance video made by Guru Pradeep using the music ‘Urvashi’ – Kaadhalan (A R Rahman), released 2 Aug 2022. Its a little rough around the edges, having seemingly been cobbled together with Megascans, Sketchfab and items grabbed the UE Marketplace, but the mocap is done particularly well, although we don’t know what was used, as is the editing. We look forward to seeing more from this creator in future.

Aspiring Assets

We want to highlight the amazing content that’s being developed for use in UE with Reality Capture. In this video, which is not a film but a ‘show and tell’ more than a tut, William Faucher reveals how he created a Lofoten-inspired cabin environment from the 1800s. Its impressive stuff if you have an eye of photogrammetry as well as some of the challenges for asset creation and there are lots of tips and hints in here with more detailed tutorials on his channel.

We have also been impressed with the range of fabulous assets that are being created and used in the Kitbash 3D Mission to Minerva challenge (closed 2 Dec 2022) the outcome of which will be a new galaxy of the combined concept artworks and in-motion content being submitted. There are some really nice videos which you can find using #kb3dchallenge on YouTube that are definitely worth a looksee. We liked this one, which has a nice touch of a disaster about it, by Mike Seto.

With an impressive field of judges that included talent acquisition representatives from NASA Concept Labs, Netflix, Riot Games and ILM, winners were announced on 20 Dec.

And Finally?

Let’s hope for a more progressive year in 2023 than the hate-filled traps that befell so many across a whole plethora of virtual platforms and IRL… and maybe reflect on the message contained within this great fun short, created in Clip Studio Paint with Cinema 4D and After Effects. The film is by Steve Cutts, called A Brief Disagreement, released 30 Sept 2022. Steve is not a nOOb in the world of machinima (and the earlier days of Reallusion’s CrazyTalk) – his classic comedy about the fate of Roger and Jessica Rabbit, as well as every other iconic cartoon character you can think of, even 8 years after its release is still a good laugh for those of a certain age (and its the featured image for this article in case you were wondering)!