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Build Your Own Sci-Fi: Films

One of my favorite film festivals is Sci-Fi London, which will be coming around again from April 28th to May 3rd, 2010. If you build your own Science Fiction or Fantasy, be it live action or animated, they would like to see your film and consider including it in their festival. Submissions are now open at their web site; if you want to get an idea of the kinds of things they will accept, check their TV segment and watch some videos.

Likewise, on this side of the pond, the Boston Science Fiction Film Festival coming up February 5 – 15th, 2010, is also looking for submissions. In fact, they are almost done, but you still have time to get your film in (just) with the regular deadline on November 30, and the late deadline on December 15.

Gearing Up for Halloween

It’s that time of year again, and one of the best online resources for Halloween is the Instructables Halloween Costume collection. Since these are instruction sets teaching you how to make your own costumes, I figured I should post now so you had the lead time to start building. Another great place to get ideas and help on creating costumes are any of the Cosplay groups, including Cosplay dot Com or the Cosplay Lab.

Miku Hatsune Sings

Miku Hatsune is the name of a Virtual Idoru, or Idol. She sings whatever you program her for, because she is software that takes your input and generates custom made anime music from it.

Miku was sampled from anime vocal artist and singer Saki Fujita, who brought to life characters in Bleach, Speed Grapher, Shuffle, and many others. Including Zoku Sayonara Zetsubō Sensei, the show where she actually played the character Hatsune Miku. The software she (and a number of others) was sampled for is Yamaha’s Vocaloid2, a program that lets you enter the lyrics and notes for a song, select the singers, and generate the music. Or you can input the lyrics and play the computer keyboard in realtime to generate the notes. Unlike most software (OK, pretty much all software) I mention here, this program isn’t free by any means, and the crippleware version you can download to try is limited to 5 words and very truncated song length.

But I had to post about it, because very few news reports out of Japan make it to the US. There are Widgets for Miku, multiple CDs released, large user communities, dedicated music players to embed on web pages like the one below, entire anime’s built around the Miku songs generated, other anime voice artists who have since been sampled and call her Big Sister; and for the entire month her sample set was released it was the number one best selling item on Amazon Japan in any category. Pretty impressive for someone who doesn’t actually exist, isn’t it? Rumor has it there is a newer version of the software as well. You might also want to download the MikuMiku Dance animation software to make your own dance videos to go with the songs you create (that one is Freeware, and you probably want the multi-model English version).


Watch Hatsune Miku 3D Bleach Ending Song Remix PV in Animation  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

Build your own Sci-Fi: 3D

A brand new update to one of the best free 3D tools has just been released: Daz Studio 3.0. This is a well-rounded software package to allow you to import and modify models, create scenes and animation sequences, and render them into video. If you are looking for 3D Animation training, you can visit their YouTube channel for a collection of free tutorial step-by-step videos. If you try the free version and want something even more powerful, you can upgrade to the Daz Studio 3.0 Advanced. Download the 30 day free trial of the Advanced version; it decays gracefully into the Free variant if you don’t purchase the license. Happy creating!

Build your own SciFi: 3D

For the last few decades, one of the major players in the graphics/3D modeling/rendering/animation arena has been Caligari Truespace. Their all-in-one 3D software suite sold for $600 and required nothing else to take you from start to finish on creating your own models, movies, animations and commercials. You can download it here for free, and you can see the full specification list to get an idea of just how powerful this tool set is.

While not completely free (you have to buy the magazine), you can get Realsoft 3D 5.1 on the disk that comes with this months 3D World Magazine. Another industrial grade software suite, this one normally sells for $750, and again covers every aspect of the 3D modeling and animation process from beginning to end.

Both of these are professional fully featured animation packages, actually used to create things you have seen online, on TV, and in the theaters. If I had to choose between them I would go with Truespace, but that is probably because I have used it for the last decade or so and was always impressed with the results it gave. I don’t have the same hands-on experience with Realsoft, so I have no basis of comparison so far. Thanks to Vesa (a name, not a credit card) in their Tech Support group, who helped solve my registration issues, I now have the chance to find out, and will report back here about it.

Caligari’s Truespace was bought about a year ago by Microsoft, who changed the price to free. The idea was to make this the core tool for creating content for their Virtual Earth project in their ongoing battle with Google. The economy train wreck means Microsoft has pulled back support for the product a few weeks ago, so you should download all the software, plugins, and training materials for your archives now, as at least some of them may be going away.

With Realsoft 3D, they have released version 6 for the full money amount, and are offering an upgrade deal (just under $400) for those who install 5.1 from the magazine. Basically a variation on Trialware without actually crippling the software before making it available; it is only missing the new bug fixes and features of the more recent version. The June issue of 3D World actually leaves the stands on June 24th, so you still have 2 weeks to go out and find a copy; after that it will be gone.

Build your own SciFi: 3D

If you want to create your own 3D SciFi images and animations, you will need software suitable for the job, and there are some free resources to help you. DAZ Studio is one of the best, although I recommend scrolling down the page to the stable version rather than grabbing the Beta. If you are really adventurous, DAZ 3D 3.0 Beta version is now available. There are tons of free 3D models to use within that enviro online as well. Another world-class software package is Blender, which just released its new stable version yesterday; and again, lots of free models are available. Then there is POV Raytracer, like Blender a Linux freeware program that has now made its port into the Windoze and MAC environments. There are a lot of online tutorials for Point Of View you might want to check out. For building 3D landscapes to allow your animations to have a place to happen, they have released Bryce 5.5 as freeware, as well as programs like Anim8or and Dogwaffle to create animations from your source files with.