Nintendo to Launch Indie Game Development For the Wii

GigaOM reports that Nintendo wants to open up the Wii platform to indie developers next year. Dubbed "Wii Ware", this new service will be designed to enable developers to create small, downloadable games for the Wii in a manner similar to Microsoft's XNA Game Studio for the XBox 360. Considering the Wii's motion-control capability I think this is great news for digital puppetry and suggests all kinds of exciting developments could be on the horizon. It's really great to see Nintendo embracing the potential of user generated content.

Thanks to Brian for the heads up about this!

Quick Panda Puppet Update

There's been some renewed interest in Panda Puppet recently in the blogosphere and I've been getting emails asking about the status of it so I wanted to post a quick update. Long story short I had a somewhat unexpected death in my family back in April and some of the things I was working on (primarily Panda Puppet) had to be set aside for a little while, which I'm sure everyone can understand. I'll be returning to work on Panda Puppet more or less full-time in a few weeks and when that happens I'll bring everybody up to speed on all the latest.

For those of you visiting Machin-X for the first time, read these posts to get a general overview of the project.

CalArts Teaches MoCap

It's not secret that most traditional animators hate motion capture (often with good reason). Well, the good traditional animation minded folks at CalArts decided to have some fun and produced this video as the opening for the school's annual showcase of student showcase last week. It's pretty funny and apparently got more laughs than just about anything else that was screened.

Via Cartoon Brew.

Michael Bay Gets In To Machinima

Looks like Michael Bay and his Digital Domain FX shop are the latest Hollywood players to jump aboard the Machinima bandwagon:

As foreshadowed by the studio's "Mad World" Gears of War TV spot, Digital Domain won't be using game engines for just games. Also on the agenda will be a series of teen-targeted animated features, which will utilize machinima er, a "new" cost-effective animation method. Does Hollywood actually have anything to offer the games industry? Or are Bay & co. just hopping over the fence 'cause the grass smells greener? "I make world-class images," says Bay. "Why not put those images into a game?"

It'll be interesting to watch this play out. Thanks to Brian for the link!

Conan O'Brien Gets Motion Captured

Conan O'Brien recently paid a visit to Lucasfilm and among other things spent time goofing around with ILM'sreal-time motion capture system , which looks really impressive (the motion capture segment start about halfway through the video above).

Link via Cartoon Brew.

Why Machinima Is Different

Peter Rasmussen - an indie filmmaker who crossed in to Machinima and is now producing a feature length Machinima film called Stolen Life - has written an interesting piece called Why Machinima Is Different that's worth a read. I especially liked the way he compares the current state of Machinima to the miliseconds after the Big Bang, full of pieces that are very basic but very powerful.

Via Overman's Blog.

ANIMAC: Digital Puppetry in the 1960s

A dancer performs using ANIMAC - likely the world's first digital puppetry system - in 1962.

ACCAD at Ohio State University offers a course called A Critical History of Computer Graphics and Animation (link via BlenderNation). As you might expect, the course examines the history of the computer graphics, which stretches back much further than you might expect. The course section that I found to be the most interesting-looking was part twelve which looks at the work of Lee Harrison III, an computer graphics pioneer who in the 1960s developed ANIMAC, which was probably the world's first digital puppetry system.

A .pdf file with additional information about Lee Harrison and ANIMAC is available here.