Here Come The Girls!

You wanted a version of the crowd scene with the ladies? Here you go.

The sweet thing about machinima is that this only took a couple of hours to put together. All I did was start up my movie, save it as a new movie, and go through the cast list one by one, converting each of the 60-odd characters into their nearest female equivalent. Then, just for the hell of it, I made some small changes to the set and the lighting, adjusted the colour of the intro text, and hit render. Lovely.

I also did some quick calculations as to how long it would take me to get those shots in real life. Say, a few hours booking the hall, and sorting out the people to do the shoot, making sure they knew when to arrive. Another hour or so making sure the more outlandish costumes were ready. A crew of three or four would spend a couple of hours putting out chairs and getting the room ready before the cast arrive. That's about 13 or 14 man-hours already. Then the cast arrive, we get them changed, run them through what's needed, and shoot it a few times. Say, if we're really lucky, an hour each for the male and female versions. That's another 125 man-hours for the cast, and another 10 or so for the crew. All in all, about 140 man-hours to get those two shots filmed, then we take the footage home and edit it. I'd have to put in, say, about 16 hours.

And that, of course, assumes everything went swimmingly. I didn't even think about insurance costs, actor releases or other legal stuff. And what's the likelihood of getting 60 people to perform flawlessly in an hour, even if all they have to do is walk onto a stage?

Doing it in machinima took me about 12 hours for the first one, and another 2 for the second one. That's about the same effort on my side as doing it for real, but only 10% of the total number of man-hours and a fraction of the hassle.

C'mon, everybody!

We've gone on and on about the performance improvements in Moviestorm 1.1.7 for the last few months, and we've quoted all sorts of numbers to show you how clever we are. What you really want to know, though, is what this means in terms of the movies you can make and how easy it is to use Moviestorm. So, in my usual destructive manner, I decided to push Moviestorm to its limits and see what it could do. It was a simple test plan. Put as many characters as possible on the set, all different (in order to maximise the number of textures being used), animate them all at once, and see how big a crowd I could create before Moviestorm exploded. For reference, in the previous version, I had difficulty with more than ten characters, and twenty was out of the question.

Try this, then...

And, just for extra sweetness, that movie loads from the desktop into the Director's View in about 35 seconds.

To be fair, some disclaimers. It wasn't all fun'n'games. I did have to save frequently with this number of characters on set. Once I had over 50 characters in there, it ran out of memory after about 10-15 minutes of work, especially if it involved scrubbing around in Director's View, changing the duration of animations, or dragging things on the timeline. After 60, it did get quite painful, and was certainly more work than fun - though maybe that was just because I'd been repeatedly adding a character, choreographing them, and rendering the result for more hours than I could count. I also did resort to the trick of switching shaders off while I worked, and then back on again for rendering. I could probably have put a few more on, but by this point, I decided I'd reached Moviestorm's practical limitations.

However, dealing with ten or twenty characters at a time now seems trivial. I don't have to worry about whether putting an extra character or two in the background will cause Moviestorm to choke on its breakfast. I can do a small crowd if I need to - maybe not an entire stadium, but certainly a pub crowd.

It also came as quite a revelation to see just how many costumes we have now. There are over 60 unique outfits on the screen, and that wasn't all of them. Many of them are customisable, which means there are even more possibilities than you can see on screen. And that's just the guys!

It'll certainly be interesting to see what possibilities 1.1.7 opens up for you - we're looking forward to seeing your next crop of movies!