Machinima in 3-D

Recently, my curiosity was awakened by the latest generation of machinima; animation created using games engines, their cameras and their characters in combination with original dialogue and music. An interesting medium that is closer to puppeteering than animation, depending on the amount of post-production employed. Because the more post-production, including animation refinement and image manipulation is employed, the more it becomes what animation is: fully controlled, frame-by-frame film.

Right now machnima all have clumsy elements that detract from the enjoyment of their end result and their classification as serious competition to the art of animation. Mostly, the preset animation loops of characters in games are game-specific and to tell a narrative story, unfit animation has to be used regularly. Also, when dialogue is involved, lipsync is almost always off, with generic open-close positions to the mouth. Facial expressions are equally generic with smile/frown/surprise being the basic range of emotions available.


Only the strong survice - by Riot Films

However, machinima’s saving grace is that a good story is always gripping, no matter how clumsy the animation or low-poly the rendering is. We are humans and love to see human interaction (or humanoid creatures, humanoid objects or otherwise anthropomorphic character dialogue).

So where does the stereo 3-D come into play? Well, being computer-generated, rendering machinima in 3-D is relatively easy to do. Nothing new there, but there’s one more element to this new medium that makes it very interesting indeed in terms of 3-D transmission. I am talking about the way games transmit their animation data online. Basically, because computer games work with client-side rendering, based on a collection of textures, polygons, character rigs and image rendering rules, only the character rig animation control points’ coordinates, the environment’s parameters and the camera’s position and settings need to be transmitted over the internet to create a machinima. This, and of course the original dialogue and music & effects tracks. So not much more than the amount of data transmitted in a high datarate audio stream, and definitely much less than today’s standard Mpeg-2 (satellite, digital antenna and DVD) datastream standard.



Recording wise, actors and presenters are only motion-captured and scanned for their face’s, body’s and clothes’ textures and their dialogue is recorded for the audio stream.

What we are looking at is a possible future of television. It is a different, inverse way of thinking compared to how we watch TV now, because this is active client-side rendering in combination with a small datastream, rather than our current passive, bandwidth-consuming image signal reception.
The most obvious benefit is the endless scalability, as seen in streamed Flash animation, so a HD or SHD end result (there is talk of 8K broadcasting in Japan), is no longer a problem in relation to available bandwidth. No need for a nationwide fibre-optic network. Only a need for very powerful computers on the receiving viewer’s side to render all the imagery in real time, or with a slight delay. And computers are becoming more powerful at a higher rate than the implementation of fibre-optic networks.

Of course, the real issue with this way of doing TV is the need for items like textures, rig configuration, polygon models etc. to be sent ahead of each channel’s program. And that bit of transmission can quickly go up to hundreds of megabytes, which, at Mpeg-2 data speeds, can take anywhere between 30 seconds to 3 minutes. Not very realistic then, unless a fixed preset of textures and models is used for every program. And that would be a bit samey and Big Brother-esque…

We keep on thinking about it, and in the mean time, enjoy another episode of Red vs. Blue…

Machinima in 3-D

A little more on the history of 3-D display systems

Jaws 3-D: over-under 3D projection

Inventors and investors in the field of 3-D have since day one been looking for a way to display the 3-D image in a better, cheaper and mostly in a less obstructing way. This idea has proven itself to be a must over the last century if 3-D cinema is to climb out of the depths of obscurity and cheap-thrill exploitation. The golden egg of 3-D image display would without a doubt be a worldwide glassless cinema / TV system. A system where consumers will not need to purchase new equipment, pay more for their theatre ticket, TV subscription service or DVD and where distributors, broadcasters and theatre owners do not need to make additional investments or have direct costs. So this would be a system that works on current hardware, both in the cinema and at home, or on the up and coming hardware systems like DLP projection and HDTV. However much that means a transitional period of backwards incompatibility, and however much all parties involved agree this is an acceptable sacrifice.



An auto-stereoscopic system is not likely to happen in cinemas, though. S.P. Ivanov devised a perfect one in 1940 for use in the Soviet Union and it worked beautifully, but seating was limited to a few seats in the middle of the theatre. This spelled financial doom for glassless 3-D in cinema.
The best and most practical system ever devised is the polarizing system developed by the Polaroid corporation in 1929. Light travels in both horizontal and vertical waves, so this property can be used to separate the left-eye and right-eye image by means of transmitting one by horizontal light waves and the other by vertical ones. This can be done by using polarizers which let through only one angle of light. Being an optical system, this works perfectly in cinema with its projection through light, but not with television. Only those people with a beamer at home will be able to use this system to view 3-D films. This system was used almost exclusively in the 3-D boom of 1953 and of 1983. Different ways of projecting through these polarizers was used, though, in both years. First, two synchronised projectors and two strips of film were used, later one strip of film with (anamorphic) side-by-side or over-and-under imagery, projected through recombining lens systems.

The field- or frame-sequential system works in different ways for cinema and television, where at the moment it is only used in IMAX theatrically, employing a system of 48 fps film, infrared emitters and LCD glasses responding to these emitters by opening and closing left-eye and right-eye glasses at 48 fps as well. For television, the systems uses even and uneven fields to display the left-eye and right-eye image sequentially, resulting practically in an image that runs at 12.5 fps on PAL and 15 fps on NTSC. This low frame rate and the resulting flicker can cause quite some discomfort with viewers. However, this is the only system useable on current televisions that can display proper 3-D without resulting in ghosting or the need for spinning cameras like in the Pullfrich system.

A little more on the history of 3-D display systems