Moviesandbox

Normal generation

admin — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 19:10:10 +0000

One of the bigger headaches I had was with Normal generation for drawn lines. In order to get some nice lighting into the drawings, normals need to be generated, ideally on a per-point basis in order to give things volume.

I decided to implement a sort-of tube like system in which each particle’s normals are generated as if it was a segment of a tube, with added information on where the next particle was.

I also added some blurring along the tube direction to make things look less awkward.
Here’s the result…

This is with 2 shadow-casting lights. Without lighting, things look a bit more bland. However, working on the shader code also allowed me to make all the particles round even without multisampling on. The framerate will be all the happier for that…

The next weekly release should be up tomorrow. More info on what has been fixed in due time. Let me know what you think or if you have any suggestions on how to make drawings look nicer!

MSB in Brisbane

admin — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 01:58:58 +0000

Hello from Australia!

I just arrived in Brisbane, where the lovely folks of Creative Industries are hosting a Machinima exhibition showing off works from Strange Company, Phil Rice, a bunch of local artists working in the field and many more at the Queensland University of Technology.
I’ll be giving an introductory workshop covering basic Machinima making and Moviesandbox tomorrow at the QACI, giving a talk and opening the exhibition and just generally be bathing in excitement. So, just a heads up, there will be little time for code enhancements this coming week!

Tutorials online now

admin — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 09:22:26 +0000

Just a heads up that I managed to upload a first set of Video-Tutorials for the Pre-Release to vimeo. You can find all of them in the Tutorials Section, or embedded below for your viewing pleasure…

Here’s the first one:

Moviesandbox PreRelease Intro Tutorial 1/6 from Friedrich Kirschner on Vimeo.

And here’s a link to the vimeo album with all 6 of them.

It’s a series of 6 tutorials, broken up into separate parts so that you can quickly revisit certain aspects. 3 of them should be up by now and I’m uploading the other 3 as I write. They cover some basic functionality and should be a good starting point for creating some content and getting your feet wet. More Tutorials, revealing more functionality, will follow soon. Please let me know if and how things work (or don’t work) for you in the forums or in the comments below!

New Pre-Release out now!

admin — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 18:12:19 +0000

After a short introductory workshop at the MIT media-lab last week, all the major cracks in the software came to glaring light! Still, fun stuff happened:

So I decided to postpone the tutorial making and instead focus on a more robust user experience, implemented in a new Pre-Release versioned 0.352. You can get it from the Download page on the right. As always, any feedback is appreciated.
Plus: I have recorded some introductory videos and hope that I can have them up on vimeo in a few days. Sorry for the delay on this!

Moviesandbox public pre-Release 0.334

admin — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 02:35:41 +0000

Yay!
This marks the first public pre-Release of Moviesandbox. Feel free to download and test if it works on your computer. And please please let me know if it does!
This version is a first venture into the scary realm of public availability and I’ll create some (video-)tutorials for you to get the hang of it this coming week.
It will still have numerous bugs and will crash a lot! It’s not a stable release!
However, this gives me the opportunity to get some early feedback on how it runs on people’s computers and any feedback will lead to a better experience down the line…

System Requirements:
Windows PC or Mac
(both executables in this package)
GeForce 8 or higher
(ATI graphics seems to be buggy, please let me know!)

You can get it from the Downloads page!

**EDIT: Removed link to old version! Please go to Downloads page and download the newest version!**

It also includes full Sourcecode for both Codeblocks and XCode. If you know about svn and would like to subscribe to the repository, it’s here:

http://code.google.com/p/moviesandbox/

Please comment if things are running on your machine, or go to the forums to let me know about your experience. Tutorials and bugfixes are coming next week!

3D drawing tests

admin — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 22:35:58 +0000

Yesterday night, I asked some people to try out the 3D drawing functions to see if the program would crash and if the interface makes sense. These are the test doodles they came up with:

Shawn’s Dino-Donkey-Horse:

and Hannah’s Floating Castle:

I learned a lot from this session. I am currently restructuring a bunch of interface stuff to make drawing a lot more intuitive and fun.
Oh, and I will make a beta-version available for download on July 1st!

Bugfixing and features for first release

admin — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 14:01:54 +0000

So, it has been a bit of a stormy time for moviesandbox these past months, but I am finally back on track and working on bugfixes and the general user-experience.
There’s only a couple more features to be added before first release, the main thing being turning and a clean procedural walking system for any arbitrary character.
If all goes well, this stage should be finished by the end of the week, and then it’s off to painting icons, packaging things up and creating examples and tutorials. It’s close!

skip week

admin — Sat, 01 May 2010 10:33:46 +0000

Remember to take care of the things that really make you happy.

Hello Facebook!

admin — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 12:23:26 +0000

Let’s see what happens now. I am in the process of integrating the Moviesandbox blog to facebook. You know, for the hits and stuff…

Stress test

admin — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 11:27:23 +0000

In an effort to get a bunch of numbers on how well Moviesandbox performs as a renderer (while still being super-unoptimized) I ran a quick test drawing 3.3 million particles.
This is done through a simple cloud picture created in Photoshop with 512×512 resolution. (note that I am filling in missing particles for high variance in depth, which is why it’s such a high particle count!) resulting in a 1.1 million Vertex Buffer Object is being drawn three times with a super-simple vertex shader to make it wave around.
Framerates with Deferred Lighting (1 shadow casting light) and Ambient Occlusion (SSAO) go down to 10fps, without SSAO, we get 15 fps and without lighting at all
we get 20 fps. Recorded with awesome FRAPS on a Macbook Pro with a Geforce 9600.

I noticed that there’s a definite need for some sort of occlusion culling, as the particles right now are drawn independently from the viewport rotation. So even if I don’t see any, the framerate stays the same. Not very good. But not too hard to implement either. In addition, importing the 512×512 image took ages and actually crashed the program. I guess there’s a need for a binary filetype at some point…

I am however very pleased with the general performance, knowing that there’s more to get once optimizations start. And the image quality was quite decent.