Metamovie at La Biennale di Venezia Film Festival, Metaverse Maker Competition
Hello and welcome back to the Neos Weekly Update!
This week we have a few exciting community updates to bring you, involving Neos’ involvement with the MetaMovie Project, which has been accepted by La Biennale di Venezia film festival! We’ve also got the Creator Jam competition to talk about, so check out the news below!
[h2]MetaMovie Project @ La Biennale di Venezia Film Festival[/h2]
The team within the MetaMovie Project have shown their hard work and dedication through various previews and progress videos, and they’ve been accepted to show their hard work off at the La Biennale di Venezia Film Festival!
The team have spent a year or more building the sets, worlds and avatars from the ground up, so to have their work shown at one of the worlds largest film festivals is truly an amazing and honorable accomplishment.
Jason Moore, the director of this project, has been amazing to work with. Below, you’ll find an excerpt of his, detailing his excitement for being able to make his team’s project a part of the festival:
Stay tuned to the Weekly Update for more information as we continue the coverage on this project and its entry into the La Biennale di Venezia Film Festival.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[h2]Creator Jam’s Metaverse Maker Competition[/h2]
Medra and his group of creative friends are holding a massive, month-long competition with an equally large prize-pool, with about $1700 thousand in USD worth of NCR and may grow to be over $2000. Below is an excerpt from Medra’s Creator Jam discord, laying out the beginning announcement of the competition:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
It has been a while since we held our own Neos Creator Contest and the community has grown considerably since, so we’re very excited for this event, as we’re sure it’ll be way bigger than NCC and we’ll see even more amazing stuff.
We hope many of you will be able to participate, whether it’s to compete for the NCR and CDFT prizes, custom official badges or just the fun of collaborative creation! If you'd like to learn more, join the Creator Jam Discord.
[h2]Progress on World UI and custom persistent session ID / URL[/h2]
As part of the work on the new World UI, many related systems are being refactored and extended with new capabilities. The world/session discovery system has received many improvements and fixes and has been extended, so components in Neos can efficiently listen to updates to sessions.
Each hosted session now also includes information about which world it actually represents, which will allow the new UI to group the information and show all instances of each published world.
One of the major additions thanks to this refactoring is the ability to use a custom permanent session ID for your hosted worlds. Normally the ID is random and changes every time you restart the session, but with the new system you can configure your headless client to use a specific ID every time, in the format “:”.
We’ve also added a component SessionInfoSource, which will automatically populate its fields with live data from a session with given ID, such as whether the session is running, what is its Name, how many active users it has, thumbnail URL and more.
What this means in practice is that you can now create interactive portals in your worlds that will always link to a particular session. You could for example make the portal light up whenever the session is live, show a thumbnail inside of the portal and transition the user to the world when they walk through.
We’re curious to see how you’ll use this functionality to interlink the worlds inside of Neos and hope this enables some new interesting workflows. There’s still a lot more to come as we work on the new World UI piece by piece, so stay tuned!
[h2]Procedural Capsule Mesh, Small optimizations and more[/h2]
As usual, Neos has also received a bunch of smaller additions, tweaks and bugfixes. We have finally gotten a procedural capsule mesh, completing the set of basic primitives and providing visuals for the collider primitive as well.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
It’s now also easier to setup animations on imported 3D models when the model comes with the mesh and animations in separate files. Simply attach a new Animator component on the root of the mesh, drop in the animation clip from the imported animation file and click the “Setup fields by name”.
We patched up many bugs as well. The elusive bug with text rendering sometimes showing the wrong symbols has been patched up, as well as a hard to find race condition that would break UIX and prevent it from updating on certain machines. Another bug that would make the UI freeze for a long time was patched up as well.
If you’d like to read more, check out the #neos-updates channel on our Discord!
[h3]July Community Showcase[/h3]
This Friday we've done our regular end-of-the-month community showcase livestream, showing some of the amazing stuff you have created over the past month. If you've missed it, you can watch the archived footage here:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[h2]What’s next?[/h2]
With a lot of preliminary parts in place, we’ve now started implementing the actual UI for the new world browser, so hopefully you’ll be able to see and play with it soon! There are still some underlying tasks that need to be done to support it, but they’ll provide other new features on the side as well.
Thank you very much for reading this weekly update and helping Neos to grow into a powerful mature platform!
This week we have a few exciting community updates to bring you, involving Neos’ involvement with the MetaMovie Project, which has been accepted by La Biennale di Venezia film festival! We’ve also got the Creator Jam competition to talk about, so check out the news below!
[h2]MetaMovie Project @ La Biennale di Venezia Film Festival[/h2]
The team within the MetaMovie Project have shown their hard work and dedication through various previews and progress videos, and they’ve been accepted to show their hard work off at the La Biennale di Venezia Film Festival!
The team have spent a year or more building the sets, worlds and avatars from the ground up, so to have their work shown at one of the worlds largest film festivals is truly an amazing and honorable accomplishment.
Jason Moore, the director of this project, has been amazing to work with. Below, you’ll find an excerpt of his, detailing his excitement for being able to make his team’s project a part of the festival:
Originally posted by MooreHaving Alien Rescue invited to the VR Expanded area of the 77th Venice International Film Festival is a dream come true as this is one of the world’s most prestigious VR showcases. And it only happened because of the power of the Neos metaverse engine and the creativity and hard work of the Neos community.
Nexulan, Aegis Wolf, RueShejn, Lewis Snow, Ultranique and many others have poured hours of time and energy into this project and without them and the entire Neos community this would never have happened.
During the week of the festival, September 2nd-12th, we’ll be running live performances for festival pass holders and I will personally be inviting every artist and creator I meet at the fest to come tour Neos and see for themselves why it’s the best place on Earth to build, program, imagine and create.
Stay tuned to the Weekly Update for more information as we continue the coverage on this project and its entry into the La Biennale di Venezia Film Festival.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[h2]Creator Jam’s Metaverse Maker Competition[/h2]
Medra and his group of creative friends are holding a massive, month-long competition with an equally large prize-pool, with about $1700 thousand in USD worth of NCR and may grow to be over $2000. Below is an excerpt from Medra’s Creator Jam discord, laying out the beginning announcement of the competition:
Originally posted by MedraSuper exciting news! Creator Jam will be holding it's first ever month long competition:
Metaverse Maker Competition
A date has been set:
September 1st-October 1st 2020.
Free entry. Anyone can participate.
We are still in the preparation stage and would like to raise as much prize money as possible. So far we have $1650 USD worth of NCR and a lot of CDFT to contribute. I'd like to see us raise at least $2000+ in NCR towards the prize pool.
Sponsors send NCR to the Creator Jam or Medra accounts. Any sponsor who wants to be recognized specify this in the NCR message details.
USD, EUR, etc... are accepted, but NCR is preferred.
Those of you Neos old timers remember the Neos Creator Contest and how much positive fervor surrounded that time. Let's help create another positive buzz in the community.
More details will be coming soon!
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
It has been a while since we held our own Neos Creator Contest and the community has grown considerably since, so we’re very excited for this event, as we’re sure it’ll be way bigger than NCC and we’ll see even more amazing stuff.
We hope many of you will be able to participate, whether it’s to compete for the NCR and CDFT prizes, custom official badges or just the fun of collaborative creation! If you'd like to learn more, join the Creator Jam Discord.
[h2]Progress on World UI and custom persistent session ID / URL[/h2]
As part of the work on the new World UI, many related systems are being refactored and extended with new capabilities. The world/session discovery system has received many improvements and fixes and has been extended, so components in Neos can efficiently listen to updates to sessions.
Each hosted session now also includes information about which world it actually represents, which will allow the new UI to group the information and show all instances of each published world.
One of the major additions thanks to this refactoring is the ability to use a custom permanent session ID for your hosted worlds. Normally the ID is random and changes every time you restart the session, but with the new system you can configure your headless client to use a specific ID every time, in the format “:”.
We’ve also added a component SessionInfoSource, which will automatically populate its fields with live data from a session with given ID, such as whether the session is running, what is its Name, how many active users it has, thumbnail URL and more.
What this means in practice is that you can now create interactive portals in your worlds that will always link to a particular session. You could for example make the portal light up whenever the session is live, show a thumbnail inside of the portal and transition the user to the world when they walk through.
We’re curious to see how you’ll use this functionality to interlink the worlds inside of Neos and hope this enables some new interesting workflows. There’s still a lot more to come as we work on the new World UI piece by piece, so stay tuned!
[h2]Procedural Capsule Mesh, Small optimizations and more[/h2]
As usual, Neos has also received a bunch of smaller additions, tweaks and bugfixes. We have finally gotten a procedural capsule mesh, completing the set of basic primitives and providing visuals for the collider primitive as well.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
It’s now also easier to setup animations on imported 3D models when the model comes with the mesh and animations in separate files. Simply attach a new Animator component on the root of the mesh, drop in the animation clip from the imported animation file and click the “Setup fields by name”.
We patched up many bugs as well. The elusive bug with text rendering sometimes showing the wrong symbols has been patched up, as well as a hard to find race condition that would break UIX and prevent it from updating on certain machines. Another bug that would make the UI freeze for a long time was patched up as well.
If you’d like to read more, check out the #neos-updates channel on our Discord!
[h3]July Community Showcase[/h3]
This Friday we've done our regular end-of-the-month community showcase livestream, showing some of the amazing stuff you have created over the past month. If you've missed it, you can watch the archived footage here:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[h2]What’s next?[/h2]
With a lot of preliminary parts in place, we’ve now started implementing the actual UI for the new world browser, so hopefully you’ll be able to see and play with it soon! There are still some underlying tasks that need to be done to support it, but they’ll provide other new features on the side as well.
Thank you very much for reading this weekly update and helping Neos to grow into a powerful mature platform!