blender better watch out! Microsoft's 3d Movie Maker source code gets released!

[Salv8 (sam)]

Summary

the program that created iconic videos such as Rat Movie, is partly open source, some work is required to compile it but knowing the internet, it won't be long until it's up and running on modern systems.

 

Quotes

Quote

Originally launching in 1995, Microsoft’s 3D Movie Maker has long been enjoying its retirement, however, in a surprising turn of events, the aged software is now being given a new lease of life thanks to the source code being released after 27 long years.

The release of the 3D Movie Maker source code comes to us thanks to software necromancers Foone, Scott Hanselman, and Jeff Wilcox, who recently proclaimed their success at nabbing and releasing the software’s source code.

 

My thoughts

can't wait for people to start porting this old mate to other systems, hopefully we'll see a linux port but it might take some polishing and adjusting to get it to work. i do hope that we'll get the option to render out projects in 1080p or 4k since i need Rat Movie in 4k.

 

Sources

https://www.techradar.com/au/news/microsofts-1995-3d-movie-maker-is-back-if-youre-bored-with-windows-movie-maker

https://github.com/microsoft/Microsoft-3D-Movie-Maker

[TrigrH]

A photo just incase you're curious what this shit is:

 

 

[SupaKomputa]

cant wait for ray tracing support!!!

[PeachGr]

I still can't see what the possibilities of that program are. There are way too many open source or free video rendering software available, for example ue5, unity, omniverse, blender and some other rendering engines that can be used on non- free softwares

[Master Disaster]

14 minutes ago, PeachGr said:

I still can't see what the possibilities of that program are. There are way too many open source or free video rendering software available, for example ue5, unity, omniverse, blender and some other rendering engines that can be used on non- free softwares

Timmys first 3D Modeller sounds like a great thing for younger kids wanting to learn the process and unlike Roblox it also comes with no chance of predatory behaviour attached.

[PeachGr]

1 hour ago, Master Disaster said:

Timmys first 3D Modeller sounds like a great thing for younger kids wanting to learn the process and unlike Roblox it also comes with no chance of predatory behaviour attached.

It is also a 3D app that Autodesk or Adobe can't buy . Not many apps can say that those days

[Rauten]

4 hours ago, TrigrH said:

A photo just incase you're curious what this shit is:

<nightmare fuel>

I foresee a veritable tsunami of youtube videos about creating, and reacting to, abominations made using this.

Truly, a new era of machinima is about to begin.

[GoodBytes]

17 hours ago, TrigrH said:

A photo just incase you're curious what this shit is:

 

 

It actually looks pretty impressive, for 1995. Keep in mind that GPUs weren't really a thing back then. It had to be CPU rendered.... at a time where CPU were extremely limited in performance. In those days everything was CPU rendered. The most you would get a graphic accelerator which cost a fortune, on a computer that already cost you more than a high end gaming PC today (give or take). And you had shit cooling, beige box next to you.

 

Fun fact, the actual developers of the the app, BRender, is the same team under Argonaut Games, the mad scientists that designed the FX chip in the Super Nintendo game cartridge for making the game the game they wanted to do, on a console that could not physically do what they had in mind...  StarFox. Imagine today, a company goes "Nintendo Switch is nice and all... but let's add a GPU in the game cartridge to do that ray tracing all without having the game cost more than 60$... yup.. we will add a GPU in every game cart...." As crazy as it sounds, basically this is what they have done. Of course, it's not actually a GPU back then, but enough to add the ability to make look alike 3D, and add support for fancy things, like sprite scaling, stretching and rotation. This had open the doors for other games were visually impossible to do for the Super Nintendo without that chip, like Yoshi Island.

 

 

 

 

[da na]

I'm legitimately excited about this. I animate in Cinema 4D but mess around with 3DMM on the side, excited to see what comes out of it! 

[Doobeedoo]

Well ok then.

[jagdtigger]

What a clickbait title, this ancient program has 0 chance to take a shot at blender....

[Mark Kaine]

3 hours ago, Mel0nMan said:

I'm legitimately excited about this. I animate in Cinema 4D but mess around with 3DMM on the side, excited to see what comes out of it! 

From the looks of it, its definitely going to be a challenge to make it not look shit / scarry haha.

 

How do u compile it though...? there are no real instructions lol 

[da na]

17 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

From the looks of it, its definitely going to be a challenge to make it not look shit / scarry haha.

 

How do u compile it though...? there are no real instructions lol 

The fact it’s 5 fps and has no timeline makes it more challenging, be interesting to add one. And I hope it doesn’t look less like shit, that’s it’s charm. Although it’s locked to windowed 640x480 and you can’t resize, perhaps that can be fixed 

[Master Disaster]

1 hour ago, Mark Kaine said:

From the looks of it, its definitely going to be a challenge to make it not look shit / scarry haha.

 

How do u compile it though...? there are no real instructions lol 

You create a C toolchain and brute force it, you might be able to get it to compile in a modern compiler using hackery however its more likely you'd need to install an older version and use that. You try it, see where it fails, trace the error back, fix it, try again, trace error, fix error, rinse and repeat until it compiles.

 

Unfortunately for me, I don't understand C well enough to give it a go and even if I did fully understand modern C, 1995 C is very different, ANSI was still pretty new and only in its first iteration so it has different constructors and declarations compared to newer code. Its one of those pretty niche things but there are still plenty of people around who can still understand it though so I'm sure someone will make it work.

 

Heck over the last weekend I watch an Ex Ubuntu developer port and compile a pretty modern version of automake tools and half the GNU core utils suite over to System V Unix on the Commodore Amiga simply because he was bored and wanted to see if he could run Neofetch on Amiga Unix

[Mark Kaine]

14 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

You create a C toolchain and brute force it, you might be able to get it to compile in a modern compiler using hackery however its more likely you'd need to install an older version and use that. You try it, see where it fails, trace the error back, fix it, try again, trace error, fix error, rinse and repeat until it compiles.

 

[Master Disaster]

1 minute ago, Mark Kaine said:

 

This actually perfectly describes my relationship with C and its modern variants, I can sort of understand it but have no idea what its actually doing

[AudiTTFan]

Hopefully people will keep updating it for years to come, I still remember the last time MS open-sourced an old piece of software and how it died off after about a year

 

Oh, and yes, I actually used OLW at one point. Not anymore though, because it no longer works with Blogspot

[Kisai]

13 hours ago, PeachGr said:

I still can't see what the possibilities of that program are. There are way too many open source or free video rendering software available, for example ue5, unity, omniverse, blender and some other rendering engines that can be used on non- free softwares

 

Different things for different audiences.

 

No 12 year old will figure out blender, unity or unreal. Hell most 40 year olds won't either.

 

There was a woman I watched on twitch go from loving 3D to hating it over the course of one year, just from blender. She was good at it, but decided that 2D was less of a hellhole to sit in.

 

Basically what is needed out there is some middle ground between Blender/Maya style film production and a box of crayons.

 

While I don't really see this application being something someone would want to spend the time trying to fix (trying to fix any 199x-era software written in C or C++ tends to be an exercise in frustration) there is definitely a needed middle ground, and the closest we have to that are kids playing Minecraft/Roblox and teens playing VRChat or Fortnite.

 

You can only get so far with fixed assets.

[Salv8 (sam)]

10 hours ago, jagdtigger said:

What a clickbait title, this ancient program has 0 chance to take a shot at blender....

how dare you!

mark my words the blender foundation will collapse within seconds once this gets ported to linux!

 

[PeachGr]

1 hour ago, Kisai said:

There was a woman I watched on twitch go from loving 3D to hating it over the course of one year, just from blender

Yes, because people just rushed in by hype to that. I m into blender for 2 years and I love more now than the beginning. Truth is that not even 1% makes it to a professional on that space, but even thou it is free, it's still a professional tool and no professional tool is easy. Also don't underestimate 12yo. I started on HTML when I was 13 or so.

Anyway, I still think that that program is more of a toy, but let's hope for the best

[Quackers101]

RIP paint and pinball space cadet. Also blender 3.2 to 3.3 be wild and more AI.

1 hour ago, Kisai said:

No 12 year old will figure out blender, unity or unreal. Hell most 40 year olds won't either.

 

There was a woman I watched on twitch go from loving 3D to hating it over the course of one year, just from blender. She was good at it, but decided that 2D was less of a hellhole to sit in.

 

Basically what is needed out there is some middle ground between Blender/Maya style film production and a box of crayons.

A bad part is that there is a lot to get into, and you need to find what you can dedicate yourself to. Just like a language or anything else.

As it can be so different between each, more so in both structure of code and controls in a 3D space, to every tool that is out there with "too many options".

As with most developers having this issue with UE5, it's layered for big teams with it's own sections for those that are good in this area. Unlike unity that can go by smaller teams, and is more drag and drop in a main window than 5+ windows for any specific thing. (although it might get there with the focus on getting big productions like UE5 have done, seen in star wars etc).

 

but then again engines like the UE5 do offer a lot of simple and easy tools that can make it a lot easier than unity too. While all of these programs have addons or marketplace for tools that might be a "must have" for some or their workflow.

 

Do wonder what VR and other options to work in the 3D space will do with people trying to create things.

[Kisai]

1 hour ago, PeachGr said:

Also don't underestimate 12yo. I started on HTML when I was 13 or so.

 

12 year olds have not yet reached the right attitude or maturity to deal with programs without seatbelts. Yes, many kids are smart, but "my first BASIC program" and "My first Webpage" are things that don't need fancy programs to make.

[Master Disaster]

My guy NCommander is doing a charity stream over this weekend (he usually does them on Sunday) to raise money for female rights and to get 3D Movie Maker running on modern hardware, this is the same guy who spent 7 hours last Sunday porting Automake, Bash and Coreutils to Amiga Unix because he was bored, ported Doom to Solaris because chat said he couldn't do it and took an app from Visual Studio 1 and Win 3.11 through every version up to VS2016 and Win 10.

 

By the end of the stream I suspect 3DMM will be running perfectly on at least Windows 10/11.

[Helly]

Found this pretty funny actually. I used to play around with it, wasn't very good at it. Think its also pretty funny that in 2 days there's already 144 forks. Never really got into c/c++ or i would have taken a look at it myself. Gonna keep an eye on this to see where it goes.