Well, saying "and a small amount of code" is rather misleading. He is saying to animate your scene in 3D Studio Max and export it to b3d using B3D Pipeline (look in Specs and Utils.) But then you have to write quite a bit of code for all the other stuff (camera control, lighting, sounds, any particle effects, etc.) plus you probably want to write an editor to tie all the content together. I assume he suggested gile[s] as an editor for adding that other stuff, but it is at most a dropper for placing entities; at that you might as well suggest Droplet since that is free. You would need something with a timeline to trigger effects and camera moves at specific times in the movie. Depending on what you are doing you might even want a way to write text to display, and then set triggers on the timeline to popup the text boxes.
I had been thinking of writing tools to do this stuff. That is, an editor for composing a scene, and then playback code that parses the scene file exported from the editor. I had been thinking only of cutscenes for use in games, but you definitely have a point that this would be an interesting tool for doing machinima.
I eventually decided not to undertake this project however. It would be an enormous amount of work for a tool I do not currently need, nor is there much demand from others for a tool like this.
But, now that you've gotten me thinking about it, I think a simple cartoon/movie creator app could be really popular shareware. Probably with lots of provided animated characters for hobbiests to drop into their movies. In fact, I vaguely recall someone I know once worked on an app along these lines for kids to use.
I had been thinking of writing tools to do this stuff. That is, an editor for composing a scene, and then playback code that parses the scene file exported from the editor. I had been thinking only of cutscenes for use in games, but you definitely have a point that this would be an interesting tool for doing machinima.
I eventually decided not to undertake this project however. It would be an enormous amount of work for a tool I do not currently need, nor is there much demand from others for a tool like this.
But, now that you've gotten me thinking about it, I think a simple cartoon/movie creator app could be really popular shareware. Probably with lots of provided animated characters for hobbiests to drop into their movies. In fact, I vaguely recall someone I know once worked on an app along these lines for kids to use.