3D Animation Movie Maker – The evolution of making animations at home

I guess a lot of people would like to make their own movies. By this I mean going beyond editing movie snippets taken on vacation, to making movies that tell a story. In most cases, professional actors are expensive, and most of the friends are not good actors. That’s why making a 3D animated movie is a satisfying low-cost alternative.

I remember a Christmas movie my father made in the 1950s. It had an animated title shot, like the rest of the movie, on 8mm celluloid film. When I asked him about it, he told me that he had put his camera on a clamp pointing at the ground. He then created the first letter of the title using a piece of string and filmed it for a couple of seconds, then created the second letter and so on. Several days later, when the film returned from the developing lab, he discovered that his desk lamp had not been adequate to illuminate his work properly.

Then came the computers. It took a while before computers were good at graphics, even stationary ones. But of course they eventually got good at not only rendering still scenes, but also animations. Unfortunately, the Hollywood studios that can afford high-powered hardware and software have not made it accessible to the amateur filmmaker.

The high price of professional 3D animation software led to the concept of Machinima. In Machinima, inexpensive computer games are used to record 3D animated movie clips. Some computer games have a built-in camera or recording feature, and for others that don’t, there are additional utilities like Fraps, which can be used to record game action.

Popular Machinima games include Quake, Unreal Tournament, and SIMS 2. These games come with the ability to design your own settings and characters, either as part of the main game or using the utilities provided with the game. Admittedly, getting exactly the movie clips you want from these games can be challenging. I never quite figured out how to separate the characters in Unreal Tournament or Quake from their weapons, which meant that unless you wanted to make a shooter, they weren’t ideal. Obstacles like this could certainly be overcome, but it seemed like he couldn’t get very far unless he was prepared to immerse himself in the programming language.

Of the three games I’ve mentioned, SIMS 2 is probably the easiest to use for making Machinima, except that the characters, or in our case the actors, tend to have minds of their own. So your movie star may stray mid-shoot, or someone you don’t recognize may suddenly show up and interrupt the scene you’re filming. With SIMS 2, you might even find your film set spontaneously burning up during filming if you forgot to buy fire insurance. Maybe this is like making a movie in real life, but I’d rather not have to put up with all these uncertainties.

So you may wonder why no one has produced an inexpensive software product specifically for the purpose of making 3D animation at home. In fact, Microsoft did exactly that in the mid-1990s with a product called 3D Movie Maker, aimed at the children’s market. However, the product was designed for early PCs, so it was pretty basic, on most home PCs it was slow, and was soon discontinued.

This unmet need has recently been recognized. Reallusion in particular has developed a 3D animated movie maker called iClone. This software is practically a dream come true for anyone who wants to tell a story using 3D animation. In its basic form, it costs about the same as a new high-end computer game, while the more advanced and more useful Pro version is still very reasonable.

Although you could make an entire movie in iClone, I think it’s best to use it to build a series of 3D animated movie clips and then edit them together using Microsoft Movie Maker, which comes as part of Windows, or using a more advanced version. home movie editing suite like Pinnacle Studio.

Other key points to note about iClone are that if you want to get up and running quickly, there’s a nice library of actors, scenes, and props, which you can purchase to add to the collection, that comes with the program itself. On the other hand, if you are cash-strapped and prefer to build everything yourself and have a lot of free time, you can also do it using the tools included in the software.

An optional utility, which I recommend buying along with iClone, is Reallusion’s 3DXchange. This allows you to import content from other sources, including Google 3D Warehouse, which is a fantastic resource full of free building models and other accessories to enhance your 3D animations.

It amazes me to think that with a budget of less than $1,000 I can now buy a PC and the software required to make 3D animated movies, when twenty years ago it would have taken $millions for less skilled facilities.