Help with New Machinima Tool

Making short films on ROBLOX is often hard without multiple people, but some scenes are outright crazy and require scripts to move characters accordingly.

Here’s an example scene:

A police van shows up to a building, and 6 armed officers exit the vehicle.
They aim their rifles at the windows, moving up to the door.
The gunfire starts and two officers are killed.

How this would be filmed with the machinima tool:

Each person was, in fact, me. The script would record any actions I take and on command, would play them back. You notice in the example scene someone is killed, requiring a humanoid object. For more reference on what I want to create look at Space Engineer’s Replay Tool.

What I would do is:

  1. Record the officers that were shot first. They would get out of the vehicle and stand there.

  2. Then record as someone out of frame, killing those officers.

  3. After that is done, I am able to record the officers who didn’t get shot. Since they are last to be recorded I can react to the officers that got shot, turning and firing back.

This leaves me to go into a no-GUI spectator mode to screen-record the entire thing. When playing+recording everything happens live action, meaning while I am recording, the entire set plays out again. (The two officers would get shot and killed while I’m recording the others).

I hope I was clear on what I want to create. If you have any idea or concept on how I was to create this, please post your idea! I’m not asking for scripts, although snippets can be useful!

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When I created an intro for a game that I am working on, I used Camera Interpolation combined with NPC animations. Camera Interpolation is basically an easy way for you to tween the camera’s position and focus.

What you could do is use the officer’s positions as a focus for the camera, and have it pan around them while they are getting shot.

Then, you could change the position to a farther point, and maybe lower the FOV so it seems like it’s from another persons point of view, and I’m assuming since it’s someone far away, we are using a sniper scope overlay? I could be wrong with guessing what you want but this is how I would achieve something like this.

Here is info on Camera Interpolation:

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If you click on the link, it shows you how to use the SE Replay Tool. I want to make it so that I can record my actions, and then play them back. By record I mean act it myself. Sorry if that was unclear.

I want to make it so I don’t need actors.

This would not need actors, you would just have to animate the NPCs using the animation editor.

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Oh, and also would it be possible to not have a focus for the camera, and instead have it just point in a direction? I want to do first person views. So I would have the camera be inside the head, locked to rotation and position.

Guess I’ll drop Moon Animation Suite here.

This plugin allows you to edit multiple NPCs at one time and animate the camera, among several other tools helpful for animating and the like (hence suite). You can get everything done via this plugin - no uploading animations or camera work quite requied.

If you’re only creating scenes for a video then this would be good for you. Creating scenes for a Roblox game will require significantly more work on your behalf.

There are video tutorials on how to do video editing and how to use this plugin in general both by its developer and the community, as well as a Discord server for receiving help or sharing creations with MAS. Won’t link it for obvious reasons but you’ll be able to find it easily.