Second Life promo machinima by ILL Clan!

There was a tweet today @SecondLife about a new promo video made by ILL Clan Animation Studio for Linden Lab - and, oh wow, it rocks! Just see for yourself (double-click the movie to watch a bigger version on YouTube):



Then I noticed there were other videos I haven't seen, also by ILL Clan, so I'm embedding them here, cause it's totally worth to watch them. Awesome!

New shoes

I came across this fun machinima by Tommylee Nightfire and I just had to share it. Colorful, hilarious and cute. Also, nice and creative idea for the ending part of the clip :)

Goodbye, Polish Republic...

Yesterday we said goodbye to the Polish Republic sim (Polska Republika). It was great to be a part of this amazing project and to manage it together with friends. You guys are all beautiful freaks :) We're moving on but I'm sure sooner or later we'll come up with a fresh new project.

To say goodbye properly, we decided to blow up the buildings surrounding the sim's town square. Even though it was a bit sad to remove 8 months of our work, the event was kind of fun :) The video below is a collection of some great memories of Polish Republic, and ends up with yesterday's explosions. Bye, bye, dear Polish Republic.

World Builder

This movie by Bruce Branit was awarded Best Narrative Short Film at 2007 KC Filmmakers Jubilee (but rejected by other film festivals for some reason). It was shot in a single day but the post production took about 2 years. See if you can notice anything familiar ;)



I didn't like the ending. Too sad. Hope she wakes up.

PS. It would be cool if SL had those sliders for mirror and shiny effects ;) Also, the plants tool and the texture browser :P

Flexi sculpties!

I first learned about flexi sculpties over at Ana's blog a few months ago. I was very enthusiastic about them and was waiting for their introduction since then (there is a patch on JIRA that is being worked on). A few days ago Sql told me he found a viewer that already supports flexi sculpties, so, of course, we went playing with them right away. What we noticed is that they often act weird and not as you would expect, and it seems there is still a lot of work to do before they are introduced in the regular viewer (currently they look like flexi cylinders if you are logged in with regular viewer). Nonetheless, they are fun to play with. I made a little movie out of my experiments - please excuse the rough shapes and textures of the sculpties I present here, as they were only made for testing purposes and I didn't feel like spending too much time on them ;)



So what do you think? Once flexi sculpties are introduced, we're going to have swaying plants and flowers, sculpted trees moving like the Linden trees, flexi fish' fins and birds' wings, skirts (and other clothing elements) blowing in the wind, blankets, table-cloths, curtains, hair flowing in the wind, and all the other creative things people will surely make. Imagine combining flexi sculpties together with dynamic shadows. Aah, SL is getting even more beautiful!

Fall

I'm impressed by SL machinima yet again. Very romantic, delicate and warm. Lainy Voom, ladies and gentlemen:

Mistletoe and wine

I know it's not the time for Christmas yet but I just couldn't wait with these news :) My friend, Cytryna Matova, together with her artistic group Mechaniczna Cytryna, has recorded a cover of Cliff Richard's Christmas song - 'Mistletoe and wine'. She decided to make a videoclip to the song in Second Life with a plan to air it in Polish national TV during Christmas time. The idea of the video was to show Polish SL community, things we do, things we like, all in Christmas spirit. The project involved a lot of Polish avatars, and several days of recording and post production. My avatar appears in a few scenes, and that is the wedding scene (as the maid of honour - in teal dress), the carousel scene (in red jacket and yellow scarf) and together with Sql in a scene where we go up the mountain on a skilift and then slide down on sled. I think the video turned out very nice, so here it is for you to enjoy:

Tiny Nation

They're cute. They're small. They're trying to take over the world.

Amazing machinima by Ill Clan, shot in Second Life. You should go watch the movie on their website since it's bigger there. I had to scale it down so that it fits my blog size. But in case you're too lazy:



I'm impressed.

Oh hai, I has shadows!

[UPDATE: July 27, 2009] Please note the dynamic shadows are now included in the official Release Candidate viewer. To enable them, make sure you have atmospheric shaders on, then go to Advanced menu Debug Settings, make sure RenderDeferred is set to False, set RenderUseFBO to True, and then set RenderDeferred to True.

Dynamic shadows in Second Life! Woohoo! :) When Torley posted his movies showing the experimental shadows feature, I instantly wanted to test them out as well. The feature is for NVIDIA GeForce 8 series graphics card (or better) and is not yet available as an official viewer, but it's not too hard to find the patch - either one to compile yourself, or compiled by one of Second Life residents.

I absolutely love this feature. It adds to the atmosphere so much! I decided to go on a little vacation on Bahia island and recorded some footage to share with you:



Isn't it sweet?

SL'ang Life video ad :) [UPDATE]

[UPDATE: March 29, 2010] I removed all SL'ang Life links - they don't lead to SL'ang Life website anymore (since it doesn't exist), but to one you wouldn't want to go to ;)

I've just finished creating SL'ang Life video ad, check it out:



You can also watch it on Koinup if you prefer. Tell me if you like it! Send the link around the grid! :D And of course if you haven't done so yet, visit our website and subscribe, it's free :)

PS. In the ad you can notice a prototype of my speaking simulator for avatars I talked about some time ago. Let me know what you think about it :)

Virtually speaking

I've been looking into machinima making recently and I think one of the biggest SL limitations in this field is lack of avatar lips movement while speaking. So far I knew about CrazyTalk (as of programs improving this disadvantage), but just recently I came across this movie:



Does anyone know what program was used to create lips movement in this movie? It seems like the best choice at the moment.

I've been wondering about various alternatives for external programs too, and what I came up with is an idea of a typing overrider (or maybe just some kind of device), that would use built-in avatar face expressions to simulate speaking. This means no lip-sync, just lips movement, but it also means it would be widely available for other SL users, be inexpensive and would make the post-editing less time consuming (most likely). While simple lips movement might not be good enough for some people, I think it would still be more natural than no movement at all. I actually saw a movie that seems to use this technique and it looks pretty good (the movie itself is a pilot of a new promising Second Life TV show "NooB"):



I'm going to play a bit with the idea and see what I can achieve (seems like an interesting challenge). In the meanwhile, feel free to give any comments and suggestions.