Dragon Age Toolset News

The community using the Dragon Age Toolset is steadily growing. Besides some Machinima tests I've not seen any Dragon Age Machinima so far, but that will change soon. Some members have already announced to work on a Machinima film.
The Dragon Age Forum has been better structured and now the Toolset has 6 sub-forums. One called 'Cutscenes' which is for disussions around Machinima and the tools to be used to create cinematics (like the cutscene and FaceFX editor). 'search' is now working as well in the forum.

A new version of the Toolset has been released (Version 1.01). This version fixes the missing FaceFX entry and now using the toolset should no longer interfere with playing the game.
And even better - it now has ALL the game assets form the single player campaign included (levels, cutscenes, etc.) . Ready to explore, learn from and ready use in your own mods or machinima. Single player and core resource source files are available as seperate downloads as well.

The number of video tutorials for the toolkit is growing.
DragonAge22's toolset video tutorials (now 12) where the last two are cutscene/machinima tutorials. DragonAge22's video's on YT

SilentCid has reworked and improved his video tutorials:
Cid's Video Tutorials ver. 2 parts 1,2, and 3
Cid's Video Tutorials Version 2 Part 4

Qkrch shows how to begin with the DA toolset, focused for the experienced NWN builder.
Videos are in youtube, HD enabled, spanish voice with English subtitles: Qkrch's Toolset tutorials Spanish/English sub

Dragon Age Toolset Tutorials

The community around the Dragon Age Toolset is very productive and besides the very helpful Toolset Wiki some members have already created great tutorials which I want to share with you:

st4rdog's Level creation tutorial
and his video tutorials:
Dragon Age Toolset - Tutorial 1 - Playable Area and Conversation
(3 more on YT as well)

Silentcid's Video Tutorials

dragonage22's Toolset tutorials (4 parts):
Dragon Age Toolset tutorial 1: Downloading and installing toolset

Neverwintergirl's Video Tutorial:
NWG Video Tutorial 1: How to Make an Interior Level with Lighting.

And as already posted this 6 part video tutorial for the toolset on Bigdownload.com:
Dragon Age: Origins Toolset Video Demo #1
Available on YT as well at:
Dragon Age PAX Toolset Video #1

Dragon Age Toolset

Installing and first steps with the Dragon Age Toolset worked well so far for me (Toolset Links in my last post). Unfortunately there are many posts on the forum, that there can occur some problems during installation of the toolset and even some side effects to the game as well.
Best to prevent sides effects to the game is not using the 'single player' or 'demo' modules that come with the toolset and insetad create your own module from scratch as described in the wiki.
With reading through the Wiki before it was quite easy to get the fist cut-scene done and be able to play it with the game. Although not as tough to use as the Cryengine2 or Unreal3 engine it need some time and knowledge with that kind of toolsets to have fun right from the start. It's for sure not as easy to use as MovieStorm or iClone.
To help you get started I've found this 6 part video tutorial for the toolset on Bigdownload.com:
Dragon Age: Origins Toolset Video Demo #1

But there are not only good news. From reading through the Wiki docs I was quite impressed about how easy it can be with this toolset to create facial animation and lipsync with just a few mouse clicks. That was the main part I got interested and already had a project in plan to try and use it. Unfortunately it looks like they have totally removed that feature from the toolset. The tool (FaceFX) is delivered, but the integration in the toolset has been removed.
That limits the use of the DA toolset for machinima. Of course we can have our characters put helmets on and and create RvB Halo style films. But I expected more and now can throw my project into the bin. I'm disappointed since that's not the first time that happened.
I'm even pesimistic enough to claim that we'll never get that feature back into the toolset.
Without that capability the DA toolset fails to be a promising Machinima tool and we won't see many films made with it. That's the same story as with engines like Cryengine2, where they removed automatic phoneme extraction. And even worse, after we have found a workaround for that, patched the facial editor dead and useless for everyone. Same story goes for the Unreal Engine. FaceFX was delivered, but couldn't be used with the ingame characters. You had to create your own facial rig, which is out of reach for most of us and needs good knowledge of tools like Maya or 3dmax. And that's the main reason why you haven't seen only very few Machinima made with these engines so far. How to get it right is shown by Valve and their toolset. They included a nonrestricted version of Faceposer that simply worked. And you know what comes next. Yes, there lot of excellent HL2 machinima films out which creatively used facial animation and lipsync for storytelling.