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Microsoft 3D Movie Maker

by Don Freeman

3-D Movie Maker is Microsoft's new home entertainment CD-ROM for creating 3D animated movies. A Microsoft Kids product, 3D Movie Maker claims to be a full-fledged 3D movie studio with actors, sets, special effects and music. But can Microsoft 3D Movie Maker really do all that it claims? The answer is not really, but what the program can do is pretty amazing, indeed.

The ability to create 3D graphics is the one big breakthrough computers have brought to animation. Normally, only sculptors can make three dimensional images. Other artists have to create an illusion of the third dimension by using perspective and shading. However, a computer can project actual 3D images onto a screen. It does so by mathematically plotting the three dimensional shapes, and moving or turning them around. Spheres or cubes or any other 3D images can be calculated by geometry and placed anywhere on a computer screen. By combining many different 3D shapes and surfaces together, a computer artist can plot realistic looking images, such as cartoon faces or people or scenery. Any movement of these images can also plotted mathematically, allowing them to careen through space much more dramatically than could ever happen in traditional two-dimensional animation.

The trouble is that it takes a huge amount of computing power to create realistic looking 3D animations. So far, "Toy Story" has been Hollywood's only full length computer animation film. To make this movie, it took 300 powerful Sun microprocessors 800,000 hours of computer time. Three frames of this movie, approximately an 8th of a second, would fill up a one-gigabyte hard drive. So how can Microsoft claim to have a program that can create actual 3D animations on a home computer? The answer is that Microsoft cuts a lot of corners. However, despite its limitations, 3D Movie Maker is a very impressive program that can do some very good things in three dimensions.

When you first install Microsoft 3D Movie Maker onto a Windows 95 computer, a 3D movie begins, starring McZie, a delightfully drawn 3D comic character with deeply elongated facial features. McZie has got great knee and finger movement, is very agile on his unicycle, and can spin and morph around very quickly. He zooms down a very dimensional roller coaster as he takes you on a guided tour of the program. The only drawback to McZie is that his voice is a bit condescending, and throughout the CD-ROM, he can be quite repetitive.

McZie has a sidekick, Melanie, who, is a smaller, simpler drawn character, but who has some pretty agile moves on her roller skates. Melanie has a special room where she gives six tutorials on how to create various 3D animation effects. Both Melanie and McZie have a collection of movies you can watch, and in some cases work on and change.

However, you are soon encouraged to create your own movie, which is very easy to do. First you choose one of the fifteen scenes that are offered, such as a street scene, a scary house, or the interior of an airplane. For each scene there are about 15 different versions you can use, each representing a different camera angle for viewing the scene. Some of the camera angles are really new scenes, such as adjoining rooms, or views from around the corner, or scenes from outside a window. Once you have picked a scene, you choose from any of 42 characters and put them in your scene.

The scenes are quite dimensional looking, but they are not 3D graphics. The characters, however, are real 3D images. They appear in transparent rectangular boxes, which can be placed anywhere in the scene by moving the mouse. In fact, moving these characters into place turns out to be a lot of fun because there is a real sense of agility as they turn around as they move, and get smaller as they descend into the back of a scene. There's a whole new mouse skill involved in moving them in a straight line, because any deviation sets the characters spinning around so quickly.

Clicking a character into place begins the movie. Then, you choose one of 33 different actions for your character, such as walking or running, dancing, jumping, or karate kicking, as well as shrinking or stretching. Each action is actually a mini-animation, up to 25 frames long, which keeps looping. Pressing the mouse over the character begins the action, which continues for as long as you press the mouse button. You can also move the character at the same time, so that characters can dance around a room or karate kick down the street. While the character moves, or the action progresses, all movements are recorded at a 20 frames per second. This results in a movie which can be saved or changed at anytime. To play the movie, there is a viewer control panel with sliders that also let you stop and start anywhere on the movie You can change actions at any point, and add any other characters and have them interact with each other. Included with the characters are a three animals, and 20 props such as an airplane, a car, a spaceship, and the earth. The props can also be moved and given actions such as spinning or shrinking.

The characters are very small and quite simply drawn, much simpler than McZie or even Melanie. However, despite their primitiveness, it is quite amazing to bring them to life and animate them. They are almost like little Frankenstein monsters when they arrive in their boxes, ready to be wakened. Like Frankenstein's monster, they aren't always easy to control, as they dance or jump around the room bumping into things. But they can make many lifelike movements, such as moving their arms and legs as they talk, spin around, sit or fall down, and get up again. And they do seem to develop a life of their own, especially when you go back and reposition them or change their action in the middle of a movie, and then find that their actions have changed in all the later frames of the movie.

You can copy and paste characters and copy and paste their paths in the scenes. You can even change their clothing and colouring a bit. With one click of a mouse you can erase a character's role from an entire movie. You can also join and rearrange scenes and cut out frames at the start and the end of a movie, but the movie editing tools are a bit rudimentary. Hopefully, future versions of 3D Movie Maker will allow for more user control.

Also, the characters can't move freely throughout all parts of the scenes, because the different camera angles don't give a complete 3D view of everything. Sometimes camera angles take you down dead ends, or just give you partial views of your scene. However, it's a lot of fun sending characters moving throughout a scene, and then changing the camera angle to see if you can find them again. It's like working through a 3D jigsaw puzzle.

The characters can also talk, although very few of the actions allow their mouths to move. There are 29 different dialogue clips you can give them, such profundities as "Hey, what's happening, " or "This place give me the creeps." Fortunately its very easy to add your own sound clips. Plugging in a microphone and clicking on an icon lets you record 10 seconds of any dialogue you want, and adds it to the list of dialogue clips. There are also a lot of sound effects choices, and a lot of background music choices, much of it quite effective. Sound effects can also be imported, but not background music.

There is also a way to make 3D titles for your movie and have them flip or spin or twirl or cartwheel. For some people, this feature alone might be worth the cost of the CD-ROM. However, while the movements are very good, and there are nice ways to decorate the letters, and bend or shape them, there are only four font choices, all very similar.

It's very easy to move around in 3D Movie Maker, and the program is constantly offering you advice and steering you towards being creative. You are also encouraged to explore; in fact that's the only way to get the biographical data on each character to help you develop plots. There's also an idea helper that starts you off with a character and a scene. As well, there's a small but instructive booklet that comes with 3D Movie Maker, as well as a help button.

The only real limitation with 3D Movie Maker, aside from constraints with graphics and editing, is the silly comic book world of characters and scenes. All the actions and situations are restricted to the adventure computer game genre. The characters are mainly either nerdish looking guys, slim females from slightly visible minorities, or Arab looking villains, as well as the odd alien or skeleton. There is also a tendency for giant voodoo objects to appear in many of the scenes. 3D Movie Maker makes great movies of people moving around to music, but it's very hard to have the characters interact in ways other than comic book slapstick violence.

As a program designed for kids, 3D Movie Maker will definitely stimulate children's visual imaginations. It will be probably be harder for the program to stimulate children's story telling creativity. Possibly, making instant movies out of building blocks of computer adventure games may even be bad for their imaginations, as colouring books are said to inhibit children's artistic ability. However, 3D Movie Maker is so much fun that it might not matter. And for any child or adult who really wants to push the limits of 3D Movie Maker, there are a lot of possibilities for dark humour and going beyond the narrative constraints.

All in all, Microsoft 3D Movie Maker is great step forward into the world of 3D computer animation, for children and adults alike. I suspect, as more and more people find out about Microsoft 3D Movie Maker, or future programs like it, 3D movie making will become very popular home computing activity.

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