Liyil Animated (My first crack at Machinima)

[Liy]

If I haven't been in Azeroth lately, that's because I've been busy experimenting with a new medium of story telling.

This is my first time attempting machinima. For that matter, it's my first time trying to do animation of any sort.

The following is an animated adaptation of my very first (and very brief) installment in the introductory series of Liyil's backstory. I changed her name to "Liy" because I'm random, capricious, and just like it better.

Liyil's backstory in full, including the first segment upon which this animation is based, is here:
indelibles.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=intros&action=display&thread=94



www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wQTuXx562Q

[kytai]

This is so awesome! I watched it with Cay earlier, really good job Liy. Hope you make more!

[Xelas Stormfeather]

Awesome job indeed, Liyil! What tools did you use?

[Liy]

Thanks!

The two most useful tools were patience and perseverance.

Beyond those, I used Fraps for in-game background video caps; WoW Model Viewer for character manipulation; and Sony Vegas video editor to blend it all together. These were all the free versions that I downloaded, which was a real pain at times because I had to edit out the Fraps watermark on every scene.

This is definitely something anyone can do, if you are so inclined. I had zero experience with computer art and graphics of any sort as of last week. It just takes a healthy dose of imagination and curiosity, which I think most WoW players have in abundance.

Also, doing this project revealed the limitations of my video card, which is why some scenes are a little choppy. Looks like I'll have to upgrade. Any suggestions for a decent middle of the road video card as an upgrade to whatever comes stock in Dell laptops?

[Xelas Stormfeather]

I have an ATI Radeon HD 3650 w/ 512 MB cache on it. Not knowing how old your Dell is (my rig is bout 3 years old now -- Intel Core2, w/ 4GB memory) it's a little hard to say what would be an upgrade. Also, I seem to remember DELLs being fussy about compatibility with non-DELL parts, but they may have changed that.

Nat tends to be one of our more hardware-oriented people. Perhaps he'll weigh in on this.

[Nathaenii]

It all comes down to how much you want to spend. A less expensive 3d gaming card will do fine, but if you want to really get serious a NVIDIA Quadro card is purpose built for this. Get something with dual heads while you are at it. A second monitor really helps with this kind of work.

Might not just be the video card you want to invest in. 4gb+ of RAM at least is ideal. You'll want a couple of big, fast hard drives (7200 rpms at least). One for the system and the other for storage. They will fill up fast.

[Liy]

Thanks Nat!

I actually just purchased a new laptop two months ago with 8gb of RAM, so I'm set on that score. But freakin genius that I am, it never occurred to me to consider that I might want to bump up the graphics card as well when I bought it.

I'm looking at getting a 1g ATI Mobility Radeon HD 550v. And you're absolutely right about the external hard drives. After one very basic machinima video, I can see my hard drive getting very crowded very fast.

Thanks for the input!