GTA IV Cameo by Ricky Gervais - One of my favorite comedians / performers of this generation will be lending his personality, voice, and material to the next Grand Theft Auto. Someone should start up a blog documenting celebrity voiceover and/or character work in video games; the list would be surprisingly long.
I was pleasantly surprised to see this come through one of my Google Reader feeds yesterday. Sounds like Leo is pretty excited about the possibilities of the Reallusion toolkit.
Leo’s animation skill set is remarkable, to put it lightly; by comparison, I’m the skinny scarecrow to his Lou Ferrigno. Easily, he’s the machinima director I most look forward to meeting in person one day, after having talked and collaborated so many times across the Web. It’s really great to see him given this kind of recognition in this nicely put together little documentary / interview, filmed by John Martin of Reallusion.
When I did a voiceover role for Leo for this film (I’m the guy on the phone at the beginning who sounds more than a little bit “J. Jonah Jameson“), I had no idea what he was using to make it… I had no idea it was being made with iClone. The guys at iClone wisely tapped Leo to do a short film which showed off their new City Elements add-on pack, and iClone in general.
Most impressive to me was Leo’s command of such a variety of dialects, both British and American. A couple of the voices had a noticeable similarity in timbre, but for the most part there was excellent distinction in that regard as well. It’s not easy to be on screen with one’s self… but then Leo already has extensive experience doing that, and doing it well.
Blahbalicious on Stage6 - A timeless classic from the earliest days of machinima, as good as it has ever looked (since it was watched in the Quake engine itself). *You may have to be logged in to Stage6 to even see the vid; contains adult language.
This demo shows just some of the possibilities for bringing outside models into the world of iClone, using their extremely powerful tool 3DXchange2. While Sketchup isn’t the sole input path, it’s one of the more appealing ones for quick results because of the mind boggling volume of freely available models in Google’s 3D Warehouse.
What’s most impressive to me about this isn’t just the ability to import while preserving textures, but the features like auto smoothing and specularity adjustment - extremely difficult feats for beginners to do via other methods.
Keep an eye out for more 3DXchange videos on Reallusion’s YouTube channel, which is already loaded with fantastic iClone2 tutorials by James Martin.
If you’ve been looking for a good machinima demonstration of what iClone can do, look no further than Paul Louis‘ latest film, “The Opera-tives.”
Performed in the style of classic-era comedy (Groucho Marx, Stan & Laurel, a bit of Abbott and Costello), this piece is a phenomenal representation of the variety of animations possible in iClone 2.5. Additionally, it’s a very nice showcase of some of the different character looks which are possible in the platform. Paul is a prolific character designer in iClone, both commercially as well as via the unbelievable number of freebies he gives away on his blog. And, he’s the author of what I think are the best video tutorials on the subject.
Even if the style of the piece isn’t your typical fare, if you’re interested in evaluating iClone for your toolkit I encourage you to take a look.
