Surely by now you’ve watched TheSidDog’s Black Widow Flower Garden by now, right? Hopefully so, as Peter finished up a mini-guide for upcoming machinima artists consisting of tips and tricks he used to create his masterpiece.
He covers some important aspects of recording video with The Sims 3: changing the recording resolution to 1280×720 HD Video, adjusting the camera speed, getting facial animations from your Sims, maintaining your character’s mood and how to break a television and triggering the electrocution animation (oh joy)!
You can find his tutorial here – TheSidDog’s ‘Machinima Tips and Tricks Learned from Black Widow Flower Garden’
Oh, and to show him your appreciation, check out the other places that ‘TheSidDog’ hangs out: TheSidDog.com | TheSidDog on Twitter | TheSidDog on YouTube | TheSidDog on The Sims 3
Thank you for hosting this, Jud. I hope it’s useful to your readers. You can also find me on the MachinimaTV forums. I’ll be able to answer any questions you have there, as will the other users. http://www.machinimatv.cyberachel.net/forum/index.php
Thanks for your tips TheSidDog. Can’t wait for hacks to make it even easier though. I found your video funny 🙂
Thanks The SidDog.
I assume you can change the recording codecs as well by modifying LowQuality = video:vp6 to use a different codec. For some reason Vista 64-bit doesn’t play nice with Sims 3 or Sims 2 videos for me. It’ll record and I can watch them but when I go to import them into Windows Movie Maker all I get is the audio and no video. Vegas 8 will import them fine but causes graphical errors that aren’t present in the original video and only become worse in the final render.
I didn’t know you could modify the VideoCamera.ini while the game was running either. That’s going to come in handy fine tuning the hacks I’ve been doing to the camera limits.
@ Thomas: I’m not sure if you can change the codec. I always record uncompressed video, much to the dismay of my hard drive. I would think the codec is hardcoded into the game. Let us know if you’re able to change it.
From the looks of things it just ignores any changes to the codec. I’ve run two videos thru Gspot, one before the change and one after both still use vp60 even though the second one should have recorded using divx. Although at least knowing the codec used I can try to find a solution for why Movie Maker blacks them out.