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Home ? General Discussion ? xtranormal no longer free...

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04/01/2011 17:52:40

freakmoomin
freakmoomin
Posts: 272 		Just read this interesting article........http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101228/ap_on_hi_te/us_tec_xtranormal_cartoon_fees;_ylt=AtXesuiZBcFtNCPpzCufsjKs0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTFoc2p0MHQ3BHBvcwMxMzMEc2VjA2FjY29yZGlvbl90ZWNobm9sb2d5BHNsawN4dHJhbm9ybWFsY2g-

I wonder if this will have any bearing on the muvizu userbase or anything else for that matter...
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05/01/2011 12:48:44

Emily
Emily
(Account inactive)
Posts: 346 		Kev, that link doesn't work.

Here's one for ya:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=132369313

This is the best Xtranormal vid I've seen so far:



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05/01/2011 12:55:25

freakmoomin
freakmoomin
Posts: 272 		link must have expired!

cheers emily

that vid is class!!!!!
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06/01/2011 14:23:01

mos6507
mos6507
Posts: 34 		Hi, I'm a long-time vet with Xtranormal, disgruntled with the company as most are, and looking for another pony to back.


Here is a recent example of the stuff I've done with Xtranormal lately.



I think that some of the areas around character movement/idles and expressions are more advanced in Xtranormal than anything else I've seen, certainly better than Moviestorm, but the underlying engine itself is very weak. No character interactions. No collision detection. Static sets. No texture modding, etc....
I've learned a lot about how Xtranormal works under the hood, as this video represents a texture mod and character-sharing hack that I came up with, and am interested in comparing it to Muvizu and/or assisting them directly in bringing over some of those ideas.
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06/01/2011 16:17:34

freakmoomin
freakmoomin
Posts: 272 		welcome to muvizu mos6507

im sure you will enjoy it here, looking foward to what you can come up with in muvizu
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07/01/2011 09:21:03

Emily
Emily
(Account inactive)
Posts: 346 		Hi mos6507,

You have made some excellent videos with Xtranormal, I'd love to see what you can do with Muvizu. I'd also love to hear what you think of Muvizu, and how it compares with Xtranormal. In particular, if you have any input to the usablilty of it, and how you think it could be improved, as this is something that we are looking into.

Hopefully in the near future we'll introduce more control over facial animations, this is something that Muvizu is definitely lacking, and character interactions would be great to have at some point too. It all takes time though, and we are currently updating the back end of things - the Unreal Engine 3 and the morpheme blending system. More info here
In the past, suggestions made on this forum have made their way into a release build, so feel free to point out anything that you think we are lacking, or anything that you think would be good to have in the app. We are a small company, and we are glad to take input directly from our users.

All the best,

Emily.
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07/01/2011 12:31:33

FurryCakes
FurryCakes
Posts: 7 		Emily wrote:
Hi mos6507,

... we are currently updating the back end of things - the Unreal Engine 3 and the morpheme blending system.

Emily.


I would love to know what improvements we end-users can expect to see when these updates have been made.

...just so that I know why I am so excited about them!
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07/01/2011 13:33:23

NeilExperimental userMuvizu staff
Neil
Posts: 396 		FurryCakes wrote:
I would love to know what improvements we end-users can expect to see when these updates have been made.

For the most part, the changes will be "under the hood", so there likely won't be any immediately obvious new features or other improvements. It does enable us to start working on a whole raft of things that wouldn't have been possible with the older engine, however.

For a brief rundown of some of the things we're considering once the update is complete, have a read of our latest news post:

http://www.muvizu.com/News/88/Thanks-for-a-great-year
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10/02/2011 02:49:50

PinguinoStudios
PinguinoStudios
Posts: 13 		Going back to this thread's original topic for a moment, I am not familiar with all the ins and outs of the Xtranormal paid-to-free fiasco, but I do kind of sympathize with them and why they changed their service. They are losing money (although they plan to break even in 2011 I believe) and it's impossible to keep a product/service free without charging for something, especially when you're primarily a web-based service that has to scale and buy more servers and whatnot as you grow more popular.

What's terrible is that they seem to have done it in the worst possible way and alienated many of their users; I first heard about Xtranormal because people were upset with them. I did download Slate (the desktop version of Xtranormal) and played around with it, but when I realized I couldn't even render a movie without spending 300 credits buying assets I just quit, uninstalled the program and probably won't try it again. I'm sure I'm not the only person who has done that.

In terms of a business model for products like Xtranormal, Muvizu, iClone, etc. I think it's much better to get users hooked on a free product, then get them to upgrade to a more full-featured program or premium content that you can charge for than it is to suddenly cut them off.
edited by PinguinoStudios on 10/02/2011
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10/02/2011 09:54:34

freakmoomin
freakmoomin
Posts: 272 		for sure PinguinoStudios!

They have to make money somehow.... i hope they do well out of it as they have delivered a decent bit of software for budding film makers.

Im not sure of all the in's and outs myself of how they went about starting to charge but it defo caused some waves and upset people.

its something that has to done very carefully and thoughtfully otherwise you can **** a lot of people off!
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15/02/2011 18:59:01

mos6507
mos6507
Posts: 34 		As the resident Xtranormal interloper, let me say that when I write about it, it's not to bash Muvizu, as I'd like nothing more than for Muvizu to wipe the floor with Xtranormal.
However, XN is where I've invested all my time, and I've grown really attached to their character designs. The lack of stylistic variety in the Muvizu characters is a big impediment to me jumping over. I just don't identify with the Veggie-Tales aesthetic. I fully expect that to be remedied sooner or later, so I do watch the progress here with great interest.
XN continues to be a comedy of errors, the most recent screwup being the unannounced removal of the Nuance voices in State, which has buggy side-effects.
But on the plus side, someone on my mailing list revealed a crack that allows us to retexture all of the characters and sets, something that will at least give us some more flexibility which heretofore was limited to their "Suitz" package in which they erroneously deployed with external textures.
Since that time I was unable to convince them to officially switch over all their assets to external textures. They promise some form of user-friendly "customization" within six months or so. I don't believe in waiting, and they have a history of overpromising and underdelivering, so we will proceed full speed ahead with the crack.
I much prefer the cordial and respectful way that Muvizu devs interface with the users to XN. XN power-users have had to huddle together and treat the company as more of an antagonist than anything else.
Here is the first result of cracking the XN object format:

I wish we had some really good texture artists over there.
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