Hello! I'm very interested in using GameGuru but I'm not sure yet if this program is quite right for me. I had a few questions and I'd be very grateful for any feedback you folks can offer.

GameGuru looks like it's capable of what I need, in terms of the actual gameplay, environments and effects. But any games I'd make would be heavy on story and dialogue so decent cutscenes would be essential. (In addition to making games I'd also like to create machinima at some point.) I understand that I could import characters and animations but is there really no way to do mouth movements or even to control facial expressions or eye movements? Are you stuck with fixed expressions for an entire game?

I'm very impressed by what many of you have done with the program, but I haven't seen any games like I have in mind. I'd like to make romance games, games with female characters, games with cute designs and some sex appeal, but GG's character creator tool and animations seem like they're mostly set up to make burly soldiers. Do you think that I could get what I want out of GG by importing characters and animations, or is this just not the program for it? Has the character creator evolved much since the tutorial videos? Is this still state-of-the-art?: [video=youtube]https://youtu.be/6-nmv8Vdrg8[/video]

I'm really hoping I can work with GG. I'm an eccentric artist type and I'm hopeless with anything too technical or math-y, and when I look at tutorials for other engines it seems more like doing homework than making art. (I also don't know if facial movements, etc., would actually be any simpler with a program like Unreal or Unity.) GG seems like something I can grasp and I have high hopes for it. What do you folks think?

I recently started playing "Life is Strange" and was thinking about how it would be possible to make any game similar to that in GG. Unfortunately the majority of the work would really be on a talented animators to get the eye movements and mouth movements done. Game Guru certainly does not support this out of the box.



Games like these typically require someone with more experience in animation and 3D short film rigging than video game development. Since they rely more heavily on their cut scenes.

This style of game play would also heavily rely on scripting in LUA. So math would be required, especially when working the camera repositioning and animated angles and pans.

On top of that I do not believe any of the Game Guru characters we have nor the character creator characters have any eye movements or mouth movements in their animations.

Game Guru's predecessor, FPS Creator, was eventually given rudimentary facial animation thanks to 'Dark Voices', a system that analysed dialogue .wav files and created automated lipsync on certain specially rigged characters. However, there was very little control with this method and even the most basic facial animation like eye movement was never implemented. GG ditched this system altogether. The current default character models in GG don't have any bones for lip or eye movement, so to get that you'd have to build your own custom character models. On top of that, there isn't an animation blending system that can add phoneme animation on top of everything else, so each line of dialogue would need to be its own separate animation stored in the model file.

In terms of machinima, I can tell you it's still quite tough at the moment. The camera, for instance, relies not on pitch, yaw and roll angles in degrees, but on Eulerian angles...which I find difficult to grasp. Characters animations can be strung together though, with enough time and practise spent tinkering around in LUA scripts. Here's one I made earlier:



There's no GUI to do this sort of stuff, no in-engine solution, you need to get your hands dirty with code. With a bit of perseverance, you can get something like this (although this video uses a mixture of machinima, full 3D animation and some compositing into machinima plates):



Hope that helps!

Best Regards,

AE

Thanks very much for the info guys! Avenging Eagle, that's a REALLY impressive cinematic, far and away the best I've seen using GG, although your comments about the camera, etc., are pretty discouraging.

I've given some thought to doing the cutscenes with a different program that's more set-up for actual animation, but for some reason there doesn't seem to be a simple, viable consumer-level program for 3D animation right now. The ones that exist are all pretty old and have major drawbacks. Moviestorm might be a candidate, but it's looking dated and judging by the comments on the forum it's been all but abandoned by its creators. (You also can't do kid characters, and one of my game ideas features a kid in a prominent role.) Muvizu is in a similar state and they already went bankrupt once. They offer great flexibility in animation, etc., but you're kind of stuck with their goofy character look. The Sims could do it, but EA doesn't allow you to create commercial work with the program. What I really need is a viable, 2018 version of Moviestorm, but such a thing doesn't seem to exist. So frustrating!

Second Life has its own limitations creating Machinima, but you can alter facial expressions and do other things you can't do in GG, and you can create commercial work with it, so I fear I may be stuck with doing my cutscenes in SL and then importing the SL characters into GG for the actual gameplay. (Impressive example of SL machinima: [video=youtube]https://youtu.be/9T6F8um8Wyg[/video]) Would you guys have any opinion on the viability of that, or could you suggest another 3D animation program better suited to it?

I feel your pain, decent quality animation software that is easy to use is basically impossible to find. Normally even if you find a software that can handle character animation, it sucks at environments or lighting. And it also depends how long you want to spend making your cutscenes and what level of quality you're prepared to accept.

Assuming you aren't going to teach yourself a full-on 3D package like 3DS Max, Maya, or even Blender, the next best thing is iClone. Version 7 is so packed with features, the demo video on the homepage made me salivate. But it's $199 base level, and $400 for the version that allows you to import models (like all the Game Guru ones you'll want to use to tie your cutscenes to your game world).

Hash Animation: Master is about $80 I think and does quite a lot but I don't know if it's supported anymore. I saw it in an article but when I went looking for examples, YouTube didn't turn up much. Maybe it has a small, dedicated community that keep plugging away at it (not unlike a certain game creation software I know of )

Source Filmmaker is free and very powerful; it's what Valve use to do their animations, such as those for Team Fortress 2. Not everyone can get on with it though and it may be a bit weighty for a beginner.

If you're literally just interested in character animation, you might want to look into Poser, Daz 3D, and Mixamo. Other users on here have experience of using those I think, I have no experience in any of the programs I just mentioned; I use Anim8or, Fraps, and Adobe After Effects mostly.

AE

Thanks, AE! I've heard iClone gets expensive in a hurry, and I'm on a tight budget. I will definitely look into Hash. Somehow I'd never heard of it before. I'd checked out Anim8or a few years ago and for some reason it didn't grab me, but looking at it now it looks like it has real potential. I looked into Moviestorm again and it seems they're actually charging hefty prices ($75 for the program with just one pack of assets, $250 for the full version) for a program that's virtually abandonware at this point! It's so weird that there WERE relatively simple, consumer-lever programs to make machinima, like Moviestorm, Muvizu and the Movies, but they're all so old they're virtually obsolete and there's nothing new to replace them. There's a big hole in the market.

I haven’t played with it because I own maya LT but have you heard of bforartists? It’s free like blender but it’s interface is supposed to make more sense than blenders. I can run every Autodesk software they made but can’t even draw a cube in blender...

https://www.bforartists.de

bforartists is very good

Honestly, I'd say look elsewhere. You can import animated characters but the script work required to even get a simple scene (even the most basic shot reverse shot type of dialogue) going is quite large. And I gather that this is exactly the type of technicality you would want to avoid.

Game Guru lacks any and all feature for cutscenes with facial animations, timed animations or lipsynching required for any believable character interaction. Users who have made cutscenes usually found clever ways to conceal this but its simply true.

I think the software you are looking for is source filmmaker.

Id have to agree with Wolf here , for cinematic sort of things GG is a real tough cookie to deal with and it doesnt have a lot of the animation support. FPSC did as mentioned above have some support, which hopefully we get some day here but it would require the appropriate models for it.

The camera is hard to deal with in GG. I have not yet grasped how to 100% operate it.

My attempts:



Here is what was possible with FPSC's newer models with lip bones and the dark voices software:

While Source Filmmaker is very capable it does have some unfortunate drawbacks. I've read that they don't allow commercial work using their assets, and I've also read that importing and exporting assets in Source is a real pain. It also can't be used to create games, so I'd have to learn to use some game engine anyway. Ideally I want to find a game engine I can also use to make the cutscenes, or failing that I'd like to find some program where I can create the cutscenes and then export those same characters into a game engine, probably GG, so the player can control them. If I do it right, the player wouldn't know I'd used two different programs to create the cutscenes and the gameplay.

Second Life has a lot of drawbacks for machinima, such as cruddy lip sync, but the character creator is versatile and you can use it for commercial work. Some of the characters look really beautiful. I know you can export SL characters, but I haven't found much info about importing them to GameGuru. I'd be really curious if anybody has tried this! In desperation I've also been looking at The Movies, because it's actually built for machinima and you can get decent results from it. The graphics do look dated, but frankly they don't look much more dated than GG characters. It looks like Movies characters can be exported too, but I don't know if they could work in GG.

Ugh, so much work just to get some halfway decent cutscenes in a game! GG is an amazing program, but instead of releasing packs for more props and so on I really wish they'd work on stuff like giving the characters the ability to have expressions. Even just for the simplest FPS games, it'd be nice if your enemies could look angry when they're shooting you or upset when you shoot them!

The content creators and coders are completely different persons! Why should the content creators sit around and do nothing Also the most are extern artist who would do it anyways.

I think you are simply in the wrong engine. GG has a bug where on some hardware configurations the sound and the video are not sync, so even when you get a decent looking cutscene, you will have more problems than angry looking npcs.

Also you are wrong with source filmmaker: https://steamcommunity.com/app/1840/discussions/0/624075482703612009/
If you want to create cutscenes do it there and create storyzones in GG. Some artist also say, importing in GG is a real pain, so maybe the source filmmaker is not that bad