3pointD.com

Second Life resident Pierce Portocarrero, one of the virtual world’s most gifted creators of the in-world filmmaking art known as machinima, has been on hiatus of late. He returns this week with a new piece that’s even better than the ones I’ve seen before. Check out Game Over, which aired in-world as part of the latest monthly machinima festival run by Alt-Zoom Studios. Seemingly a parable of love in the age of self-replicating objects (or something like that), the short film features some truly creative character models, an excellently ambiguous plot and ending, and acting that’s conveyed very well through animations and completely without dialogue. It’s a really excellent piece, including in its camerawork and editing. All we need now is for credit rolls to come to machinima, so we’d know if it was Pierce doing all the work or whether there are other people who deserve some kudos as well. Whatever the case, it’s nice stuff, and we look forward to more.

Andrew Reynolds over at eightbar (the blog of a few IBM researchers at the company’s Hursley installation) writes that he’s put together a crude version of an app that 3pointD has been looking for since earlier this summer: a tool to export shapes from Google’s cool free 3D modeling app SketchUp and import them to the virtual world of Second Life. Andrew’s plug-in for SketchUp writes basic model information to a text file, from which it can be imported to Second Life in notecard form (presumably by manually cutting and pasting). After that, an in-world object parses the notecard and re-generates the model in Second Life. It seems to only handle very simple objects, but it’s a good start. (more…)