Free Steam Owl for iClone

An iClone 4.0 project file containing an assembled and parented Steam Owl (5Mb, .7z zip file). 68,000 polys total. Free for non-commercial use. I’ve also included the separate .vns parts.

It was a pain to convert from the very strange .3ds file (a flat-as-a-pancake model!), but I managed it by running it through several other weighty applications first. I’ve set up the owl as a parented set of individual .vns props — so if you’re clever enough to attach pivot points (I’m not, yet) then wings can flap/fold back, the eyes can have a slight “spinning plate” movement to add life, the legs can walk, the talons can tilt, the propeller can spin and so on). Feel free to fix it up, combine, add animations, and save as a full-blown free giveaway character. Original textures are included if you also want to work on the texturing.

The right-hand wing is meant to be like that (flipped), I think — I imagine the idea is that the audience sympathises because he was “made wrong” and hence needs the propeller to get around. The original model also has a glass “steam/rocket exhaust” tube at the back, which you could easily add with an iClone primitive.

Original model by Mille (Carl-Mikael Lagnecrantz – Sweden), free and licensed for free non-commercial use. Background Creative Commons image is of the library at the University of Cambridge, by Ben Gallagher.

Official PopVideo Converter 2.0 video tutorial

Just posted on YouTube, a new official 10-minute tutorial. It shows how to use the newly-arrived PopVideo Converter 2.0 to easily transfer greenscreen video into iClone…

If you want some free practice videos, Hollywood Camera Work has a professional selection.

The 2009 DIY book Greenscreen Made Easy: Keying and Compositing Techniques for Indie Filmmakers looks like it might be useful for those who are going to do a lot of work with green screening. It’s currently very affordable on Amazon, although there are no reviews (always an ominous sign).

Fish of the World pack for iClone

A free pack of 66 authentic fish 3D models (8Mb, .7z file) — converted for iClone 4.0 users from the low-poly (but beautifully textured) library of models made freely available for non-profit use by the Toucan Museum in Japan. They’re in .vns prop format, and most models are about 6,000 to 8,000 polys. Pack also includes a visual species-identification sheet. Freshwater fish are included.

Click the image for a larger version.

Since they can’t move they’re really only useful for stills work (I think we need a single-bone loop-able “wiggle bone” in iClone?) and educational use. However, the Toucan library has fully segmented 3DS files — if you wanted to break apart a body from a tail, so as to animate a moving tail. Or you could put a big tail on a flexible billboard, and have it move like a waving flag?

Politician-powered transport

A free iClone project of two hot air balloons (2.5Mb, .7z file), featuring a new ‘free for any use’ hot-air balloon 3D model by Ioko Chon. 9,000 polys, individual .vns and textures also included. Better than anything currently on 3D Warehouse, in my opinion.

Click on the image for a larger version.

50 free tiling textures

50 free “outdoors” Creative Commons textures (20Mb, .7z zip file). 1024 x 1024 pixels, tiling. Attribution, sharealike.

New version of Poser released

I hadn’t realised that there’s a new version of Poser out, Poser Pro 2010, which apparently shipped on 9th March 2010. It’s $500 on a “sold-out” Amazon, but currently $250 direct from the makers, with upgrades at $200.

Poser has had several owners and a consequently chequered history, so I’m always a little wary of assuming the latest upgrade will be the best version to use. I can’t immediately see any must-have features, other than an enhanced user interface and library manager. Oooh, but what’s this…

“Photoshop PSD layer rendering”

This seems to mean, according to the forums…

“There are some options in the Render Settings dialog that allow you to render different properties, and output them into a layered PSD file.” “I open the exported [PSD] file with a blank background in Photoshop, the file has a layer mask attached that masks out all the blank areas, thus creating the transparency.”

Sound like it might be a useful feature for creating billboard cut-outs for iClone, when you only want a few static elements from an otherwise complex Poser scene (as opposed to a simple model + greenscreen background).

Wants moar

I’ve been working my way back through The Wolf and Dulci Hour on download (I’m back to June 2009 so far, yay!). Then I though I should catch up with the last two weeks on download… but found that the last archived show is 3rd March on iTunes and Podcast Alley and the official Blogspot blog. On the TMOA Radio archive the last show is 22nd Feb 2010. Where did the download go?

Update 19th March: the new download is now online.

Free sci-fi jumpgate for iClone

A huge useful-looking free set of over 100 low-poly sci-fi space game models by SolCommand. He makes original sci-fi models — apart from the occasional easily-recognised Dalek and X-Wing Fighter — meaning that you can safely use almost all of his models in your films. The models are original because he’s building them for his own deep-space PC game, Miner Wars (in beta soon). He’s also available to create custom space models as a paid freelance. His terms for use of the free models are pretty open…

“You are welcome to download all these models for your personal use … You can use my stuff for ANY project you want.”

I tried six desirable .obj and .3ds models and found that some don’t translate well via 3DXchange. On those that do convert, the textures are off and there’s weird opacity — I’m thinking he might make well some cash by translating all these models correctly for iClone, perhaps in combination with an iClone texture artist (many models lack textures or only have basic textures).

But in the meanwhile, I’ve converted two of his models to iClone format (“sunslayer” and the “wormhole-generator”). I joined them together, added some translucent blocks, put a NASA photo behind it, and lit it — to make a free iClone jumpgate project (4Mb) of 16,000 faces…

Click the picture for the full-size version.

Green city

For those without a copy of Adobe Illustrator to open and tweak with, here’s a 2D widescreen animation background — simplified and adapted from a Creative Commons flyer design by Dreamstime. One of these is blurred and one isn’t. 1280 x 720 pixels widescreen, .jpg, just click on an image to get the full-size version…

Mars

Mars looks kind of interesting, if only for the “filtered animation” live-action effect. Very low budget by the look of it, but it might be fun. Trailer…

Those interested in a “hand-drawn filters” look may be interested to know that I found out that the latest Vector Magic standalone now does batch processing.

Spitfire in hangar – free scene and props

This is a free iClone 4.0 project file (20Mb) depicting a Second World War British Spitfire fighter plane in an RAF hangar near sunset. Hopefully the ShareSend service will keep it around for a while. Those unfamiliar with the .7z zip file format may need to install the excellent open-source 7-zip.

Click on the picture for the large version.

The Creative Commons RAF Hanger model was done in Blender by Gabich. It was a pain to convert, but I managed it. Various useful hangar textures have been extracted from Blender, and are in a folder in the .zip file. I’ve also included an extra unused Creative Commons model of a Spitfire, also made in Blender, by Gabich’s friend Fashion Nuggets. I wanted to use this but his texturing doesn’t convert with 3DXchange 2.0 (but I imagine it might with the new 4.0?) even when the textures are pre-extracted and there’s a .mtl file present.

So I had to find another Spitfire. The one you see in the picture above is from Google 3D Warehouse — “Spitfire Mk XXII with Landing Gear Down” — by Kimjiso of South Korea. Unfortunately it’s one of those odd “luminous” models (is there a tutorial on how to fix that?), so you have to be careful in shining lights directly at it or it starts to look day-glo.

Feel free to use this scene and its props for any film-making or stills you want. It’s getting a little sluggish in iClone, possibly because of the lighting(?), and is running at about 140,000 polys for the whole scene. You might get away with adding a very low-poly animated figure or two, and having them walk and animate in the middle-distance.

With a few strategically-placed props, the hangar might also serve as a grand wrought-iron Victorian railway terminus building. It could be rendered out as a 2D background for such a scene.

Nice low-poly autumn tree freebie

A free low-poly “autumn tree” here, part of the $299 Marlin TreeFarm pack. 10,000 faces. Converts fine, with textures, for iClone — although on import into a scene a few of the top-most leaves don’t take their textures. They just come in as outlines. But that could be because I dropped the tree into a very high-poly scene…

Three free iClone project files, made with Blender movie props

Once again available — the three iClone project-file conversions (14Mb .7z file) of props from the three open-source Blender movies. Hosted via ShareSend, the only respectable-looking no-sign-up file uploading/hosting service I could find that doesn’t have some crappy tool-bar to install before you can upload. I’ve no idea how long they’ll keep the file.

Those unfamiliar with the .7z zip file format may need to install the excellent open-source 7-zip.

Instant ivy

Ivy Generator is a simple free application for forest and garden fans. It’s very easy to use, but sadly it makes huge meshes — though it could still be useful for those using a 3D rendering app (such as Poser, DAZ Studio, Blender etc) to make a 2D background for an iClone scene.

Ivy Generator in action.

Ivy Generator is a very simple. To use:

1. Extract the .zip file. There’s no install — just find the /ivy_generator folder, and then the /bin folder. This is where the main ivyGenerator.exe lives. Double click on it to open the application.

2. Click on ‘Import OBJ’, find a suitable model (keep it a simple one, not an entire DAZ house) to grow your ivy on. Import. (You may have to click inside the viewport window to get the model to display).

3. Double-click somewhere near the base of the model. A small green dot will appear and stick there. This serves as the “root” point for your ivy.

4. Adjust some of the Grow sliders, then press “Grow”. Your ivy will slowly grow itself over the model. This may take a minute or two.

5. Now press “Birth”, and the leaves and branch textures will be added. Lovely!

6. Give the export function a minute or so after you click it. There’s no indication of completion, other than looking at your output folder and seeing that the output file has stopped growing in file-size.

7. When you export an OBJ it’s just the the ivy that gets exported, not the model + ivy. 3DXchange works fine with the model but can’t seem to handle importing the .mtl file (I think this is Lightwave’s material format for textures?), but perhaps the new version of 3DXchange will be able to. Poly-counts for a large mesh such as the one seen below are huge — 800,000 faces…

… but as Ivy Generator’s author suggests, you can stop the “grow” process when you just have a little bit. Even then, it’s probably going to have more polys than you want to use up in an iClone scene. As I said at the start, it seems that this application is best used on models in Blender , Poser, or similar.

(Update: use the free Meshlab to reduce the number of the polys in the model)

Of course, from a distance I guess you might fake clambering ivy in iClone by using billboard “cut-out” leaves (from the packs by Marlin or Dosch) and by “drawing” the ivy branches directly onto the tree’s texture? In fact, for a static scene you might just render Ivy Generator’s mesh against a blue background then use Photoshop to remove the blue and bring it into iClone as a billboard? But you’re first need to match it with a render of your tree from the same angle, and use Photoshop to remove the ivy where there should be a tree branch in front of it. Then, of course, you run into the problem that iClone’s branches sway in the wind…

Game Play festival, NY

Got an idea for an innovative iClone/videogame/theatre crossover? The Brick Theater, Inc. in New York is calling for entries in their Game Play festival (7th – 25th July 2010). Application deadline: 1st April 2010. Selected works/ideas/proposals will be staged, offering a unique opportunity for creatives to…

“explore the collision of technology, theater, performance art, and video game culture by staging the collaborative work of performance and media artists”

Last year’s festival saw three pieces selected for stage performance…

“Technicians use several XBox 360 consoles and laptops linked to each other and to gamers over the internet to control digital characters in real-time in front of an audience.”

“Told via provided Zune Media Players, the story unfolds as audience members (six at a time) are guided through their roles with both aural and visual cues. Video flashbacks and narrative voice-overs fill in your back-story while maps of locations and your dialogue are displayed on screen.”

“Evoking the Golden Age of home computer gaming, Adventure Quest is both a nostalgic treat and a glimpse into the yawning void” [of plot destruction via ‘wrong’ gameplay].

Cover image from the free ebook Live Movies : A Field Guide to New Media for the Performing Arts (PDF, 12Mb. 2006).

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.