Dreaming Methods releases source-code

Whoah! I never thought I’d see this happen. Dreaming Methods has released Flash source-code, including what I consider to be one of his best stories…

“Featuring the Flash source code of Capped, The Rut and Floppy, this digital download pack reveals how Dreaming Methods projects are assembled and contains a 9 page hints and tips document ‘Dream Building’ – highly useful for anyone wanting to produce similarly atmospheric and complex digital fiction.”

The pack includes the Capped .fla which uses “home-grown pseudo-3D code”, a short PDF guide to the software packages (no step-by-step tutorials), plus extra files such as environment.fla which is a core mouse-interactive constrained parallax effect with cut-out foreground elements…

It’s not free, at $29/£19. But it’s valuable stuff if you’re interested in the fine-art side of point-and-click storytelling — and can use Flash CS3 or CS4 [the files won’t open in Flash 8] and know where to find and tinker with the ActionScript 2. I couldn’t resist the pack and grabbed it quick, in case he changes his mind. PayPal payment takes you immediately to a 102Mb .zip download link for the pack. The server seems a bit unreliable. My first attempt to download stopped at 87Mb, then saved itself as an unopenable .zip file. I had to re-download again — so make sure you bookmark the download link.

Those into giant robot invasions should definitely investigate Dreaming Method’s very subtle and rather British ‘digital storytelling’ take on the story-type, in Capped. Stay to the end to get the full effect of the storyline.

Oh, and the pack is royalty-free…

“The graphics, material and source code in the Pack can be freely used or adapted for use in your own creations.”

Auto-build a 3D model of any space

How to make a 3D mesh of any real-life scene with Microsoft’s Photosynth software…

The web links given in the video: www.photosynth.net | binarymillenium.com/2008/08/photosynth-export-process-tutorial.html | antiverse.isa-geek.net/bintopoly/

Taking enough photos of the site to fill your memory card probably isn’t that complicated for someone with a steady camera-hand, although you might want to have someone watching you closely while you do it to double-check you’re getting everything. But then the uploading of gigabytes of images, and the rest of the process, could all be somewhat tiresome. If I only needed to do it once for one particular site (e.g.: if I was using iClone to create ‘the story of the site’ video for an archaeological visitor-centre) I might be inclined to pay a freelancer Python techie to take it through all the steps and deliver me a final 3D mesh. Ideally Microsoft will eventually release a consumer-level standalone version of Photosynth with “point-cloud to 3D mesh” output as standard. The makers of 3D Studio Max have something similar, but apparently it’s only available to high-end suite purchasers.

Of course, if the site didn’t have any of the random scattering of complex elements that you see in the video, I might get away with taking an electronic tape-measure and a sketchpad to the site, making measurements — then build an informed approximation of the space in Sketchup to bring into iClone.

Assuming you had made such a white-walled room, and then needed full photos of actual walls, I can recommend the excellent PTGui photo-stitching software. It consistently works extremely well at auto-stitching a series of hand-held digicam mega-pixel photos together into one giga-pixel image. PTGui is what I’d use if needed a single head-on shot of a real-life wall, to apply it as a ‘billboard’ texture on a wall of a 3D model (or just as a scene’s 2D background). Faced with a wall like this…

(Creative Commons picture by Simon Mason)

…you could find it tricky to get a single shot. Either you can’t get back far enough, and/or there’s furniture and clutter in the way. I’d try to find a suitable point between the wall and any heavy furniture, from which I could take a series of head-on shots of each and every wall segment, until I’d captured a mosaic of the wall as far up as I could steadily hold the camera. I’d then take some extra shots of the upper part of the wall from much further back, then I’d use those images later in Photoshop to fill out the top of the final PTGui-stitched shot.

All this is probably overkill if all that’s on the wall is a uniform colour paint, and a few generic items that can be quickly re-made in iClone. But for more complex walls (e.g.: wooden panelling, bookcases and books, stuffed animal heads, coats on hooks) it’s the way I’d go.

Ideas for the sci-fi competition categories

I was wondering what the categories for the forthcoming iClone 4 sci-fi competition (coming in April, according to Dulcie) might be. Could be nice to see categories, in addition to the expected ones, such as:—

* Best ‘all royalty-free content’ movie.

* Best spoof or parody.

* Best ‘comedy alien’.

* Most alien alien.

* Most convincing and realistic presentation of the outer space environment.

* Most impressive cinematic trailer for an epic space-opera that doesn’t (yet) exist. (No videogame footage allowed)

* Best incorporation of actual hard science in a sci-fi movie.

* Coolest robot(s).

* Best planetfall (i.e.: a single seamless shot of a craft descending from orbit until it finally lands on the planet’s surface).

* The “freshest” movie script (i.e.: one that strives to avoid sci-fi cliches as much as possible, but still remains sci-fi).

* Best 6-page comic-book story made using iClone stills.

* Best treatment of a published out-of-copyright (‘public domain’) sci-fi story or novel.

* Best iClone realisation of an Old Time Radio sci-fi story from the 1950s. (These are in the public domain. Radio shows broadcast prior to 15th February 1972 in the USA were not covered under Federal copyright law.)

* Best first-contact video (i.e.: aliens send a greetings video to Earth – what would it look like?)

* Best documentary-style visualisation of the Google Lunar X-Prize space challenge ($30 million prize for the first privately-funded team to send a robot to the moon).

* Best documentary-style visualisation of the first human colony on Mars.

* Best documentary ‘info-graphic’ video of any currently-in-space NASA mission…

NASA Mars Discovery Rover, currently on Mars.

Contains pony death

Wolf has got his hands on the new popVideo Converter 2.0 (does really easy green-screen conversions for iClone) and has used it to pop his daughters into an iClone test-video. Warning: contains pony death…

While looking at the ‘new on YouTube’ crop today I also enjoyed this noisy little iClone 4 ditty from Norte 43, which has nicely restrained use of lighting and a suitably dramatic ending…

Norte 43 has some strong sci-fi work on his YouTube channel. Definitely a contender for winning the upcoming iClone sci-fi competition, I’d say, if he can steer clear of using Star Wars models.