Is Unity becoming a Machinima tool?

So is Unity a good Machinima toolkit?

Will this improve Unity as a game engine or detract from it?

Could a game developer make more money making short films than games?

 

I don't see a problem with that, I'm planning hybrid game/machinima/machinima puppetry tools

 

I don't think 4 examples, 2 of which are your standard GDC Engine tech demos, is really enough of a trend to ask if "Unity becoming a Machinima tool."

 

Probably picked the worst examples you could find to say that when 3 of them are demos and using the "movie director" feature that has been in the roadmap for years and still not in our hands. 4th one falls almost the same category.

How about showing something that has been made with existing features or assets before talking about the subject in that light

 

Yes, its actually a conspiracy. How deep does the rabbit hole go?

 

The title is is becoming not has become

 

Clickbait.

Unity is getting more features out of the box that aid in generating cutscenes or movies if people need those. Most modern engines need those.

Arch vis and previs and even small animation shops all stand to benefit alongside games. I don't think it's changing or becoming since you can already do all this albeit with a bit of elbow grease.

It just so happens that things look nicer nowadays. You can thank GPUs for that. And artists. All hail artists.

 

These guys certainly use it as a tool for producing movies.

 

Nice yeah. Smaller animation studios use engines for rendering - you know kids shows and stuff like that.

 

Heh, making cutscenes is already quite easy with mecanim and clever scripts that plays the right animation at the right time (moving stuff can be done using animation tools, the only part that needs to be really done in a 3D soft is rigging and bone/blendshape animations, really). The only hard part I (and probably more of Unity users) have problem with is some easy way to tell Unity which Camera component (or rather object with camera component) should at this very specific moment be drawing to the screen - the current way this is done (having multiple cameras, then disable the ones that AREN'T in use instead of just telling Unity the one it should use to draw to the screen) is hardly intuitive even to people accustomed to the "Unity way" such as myself.

 

Wait, you cant teleport the camera to transform pivot to mimic multiple camera? I never seen the use of multiple camera if there isn't more than one render at the same time. Or if you don't use crossfade between the image ...

 

That's what I do. I just have a bunch of fake camera gameobjects and bounce between them as needed.

 

I use a spline track, camera just follows the path..

 

I do that sometimes too, but sometimes I just want a static camera and I'm too lazy to implement a spline tool that can handle single points.

 

My CGI Short made in Unity without the Director Feature still to be released.

 

Yes, a game engine can be a good choice if you can't afford or justify the cost of rendering your movies through more traditional methods. That said I would choose an engine that offered features out of the box that you would use for a movie.

Features like a sequencer.

https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Sequencer/Overview/

Or matinee.

https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Matinee/index.html

Does that answer your actual question?

 

Yes, it can be done this way, but most of the time, especially in game context where you want to have third person camera, then topdown one and perhaps few static shots, it's very hard to achieve when each camera is supposed to move in a different way. Camera management needs a serious rework in unity, both in game and movie/cutscene context.

Of course there are no impossible things, there is only lack of skills needed to complete the task - but why would you want to go hard way, when easier one is possible if only Unity would change the way cameras work so switching is easy?

 

I don't see the issue, the camera isn't supposed to move, the pivot is, and it pass his transform (and potentially a structure for FOV and other setting) to the camera.

 

If you don't mind some massive overdraw you can always mess with the depth of the cameras. Keep everything on and just move the appropriate cameras to the front. Doesn't make much sense for a game production. But there really is no problem using this for a rendering tool.

And yes, it is just further hacks and work arounds. But using Unity to produce cut scenes is in itself a hack.

 

Since when does machinima mean it's just rendered in real time?

 

Interesting point, I hadn't bothered to look up the definition of the word in the begining. According to wikipedia the term refers to using actual game footage to make movies. Something like the early seasons of Red vs Blue. So pretty much none of the OP examples are actually machinima.

So yes, Unity is getting more tools useful to making cinematic scenes in Unity. But no, Unity is not getting any special tools for machinima.

 

The term had inconsistent meaning anyway, it also mean made with a game engine (see early film made by moding games), and given the diversity I would say it use game technique and game engine to make animation. But the difference between a game modding, game engine and actual 3d soft start to blur and became semantics very quickly. And with advance of game engine the game aesthetics is also becoming obsolete as the render start to rival cg movie of pas and present.