From Moviesandbox

Welcome!

Moviesandbox is a graphical filmmaking tool in progress for the Unreal Tournament engine. It allows you to easily create your own characters, sets and poses and direct them in the way you imagine. It is also an open project, which means that all the code and tools are free and open for people to change or add to, and, where possible, licensed under the lesser GPL. Development started in early 2006.

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the Moviesandbox Scene Editor

Moviesandbox tries to come up with intuitive ways to create your stories and uses simple tools to make the transition time from idea to first sketch as fast as possible. It thus supports tangible interfaces such as the Wiimote, the GameTrak controller or the "Guitar Hero" Controllers to control your characters or paint your sets.
It's goal is to give people of all ages and backgrounds an inexpensive and fun tool to be creative and expressive. It should also show possible new implementations of modern day computer game technology and tactile interfaces.

A lot of different independent subprojects have come out of the work on Moviesandbox, such as an Amplitude recognition tool or the Milkscanner, that can be used with other software packages (such as blender, Maya, or any other 3D application) as well.
One of the current subprojects is a DIY Motioncapture tool using two cameras simultaneously to record and keyframe real motion and then simply drag and drop the bone positions yourself.
All these tools are licensed under lesser GPL and built in a way that makes them useful for other applications as well, sometimes only requiring minimal adjustments.

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work in progress picture of the DIY MoCap Tool.

The concept and programming of Moviesandbox and all the small tools attached has been done by me using UnrealScript and C#, but wouldn't have been possible without all the discussion and advice i got from numerous people and organisations, eyebeam being one of them (sponsoring the first LEGO in summer 2006 during a stay in New York to try out some 2D Character stuff and later leading to milkscanning).

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the first version of the Milkscanner.

The videos you see on the upper right hand corner of this page are demonstration videos of differet aspects of moviesandbox, ranging from a general overview and presentation to specific work-in-progress feature documentations such as the tracked camera. Moviesandbox and its Code is documented using a Wiki including Tutorials and bug/feature lists open for everyone to contribute to, supported by a weblog and a newsletter regularly updated with announcements and update/feature information. </p>

What do you need to make this work?

Moviesandbox is a modification of the computer game Unreal Tournament 2004 from Epic Games, so you need a copy of the game in order to use Moviesandbox. It is available for PC, Mac and Linux, although Mac and Linux versions of Moviesandbox haven't been tested for a while.
For the additional functionality, such as WiiMote, GameTrak and Milkscanner support, you need Windows though - sorry (the code for these Tools is licensed under lesser GPL, so if someone wants to port it to Mac, i'd be happy to assist!).
For complete instructions on how to install Moviesandbox and a complete list of requirements, please visit the Downloads page.

Thanks

Continuing work on Moviesandbox would not be possible without the help and support of the following individuals and organisations:

Paul Marino for much of the 2D Character feature identification, example content and continuing support.
Florian Berger for continuing mathematical programming support.
Andreas Jalsovec for the bone setup and skeletal mesh.

Hannah Perner-Wilson for the new Icons, art direction and example content.
Klaus Neumann and Alex Scholz for example content, puppetry feature identification and continuing support.
Epic Games for continuing support in technology and research.
Ars Electronica Futurelab for continuing support in infrastructure.

TMA Hellerau and sächsisches Staatsministerium für Wissenschaft und Kunst for continuing support in infrastructure.
Georgia Tech and Michael Nitsche for continuing support in infrastructure and research.
Eyebeam Art and Technology center for providing the first LEGO.

And finally, all the people that left their comments on the wiki, all the pre-Beta testers and everyone who helps shape the project to what it slowly becomes. Thank you.