About

The free Muvizu 3D animation software and this Muvizu website are the ever-evolving creations of Meshmellow, a company based in China.

Many years later, with an eclectic mix of 3D projects done and dusted (including animated Shakespeare shorts for the BBC and a TV show series with Channel 4), the artists and developers started work on the Muvizu project.

Our 100-word spiel for industry shows and brochures describes our work thus:

Meshmellow develops Muvizu: free 3D animation software, integrated with an online collaborative community, that gives individuals or groups the power of Unreal Engine 3 to create compelling videos in minutes, not months. You don´t need specialist kit or training, just a good idea. Our motto is: "Direct, don´t animate."

Which is about right, really. We set out to create software, free for non-commercial use, that would allow anyone with decent hardware to create 3D animated videos. They wouldn't need expensive software and they wouldn't have to spend a few years in college learning animation - and then take further courses in modelling and rigging.

The teams came up with a motto, "Direct, don't animate", and two innovative concepts, creating animations in passes and mood-based animation, to achieve that goal. The Muvizu 3D application comes pre-loaded with a vast library of models, characters, animations (not to mention sound effects) which you, as the director, choose and control - all the tedious work having been done by us. You create your film in a series of passes, adding and refining gestures, movements and sounds as you go.

With the relaunch of our website, and the latest version of the Muvizu 3D application, we are gradually closing in on the collaborative side of this project. Forums already allow people to bounce ideas around and seek people to help out with voices, images, music or scripts (there's a scriptwriting tool on the site), but now we're moving into the area of user-created 3D models.

Technically, this is a can of worms and not for the faint-hearted. In fact, it's for people who know a thing or two about 3D models and environments. We hope that this generous and gifted sub-group of Muvizu members will soon be able to share their creations via the website for others to use in their Muvizu productions. (The latest software release already allows users to import objects - static meshes - into the program.)

Those of you who've known us for a while will be familiar with our approach to development: make a simple product and then see what extra features Muvizu members would find the most useful. Our users inform what we build next - with the natural caveat that requests have to be achievable with our resources and within the capabilities of our core technologies.

So it will be with collaborative tools. Let us know what you think and what you'd like. We'd prefer it if suggestions emerged from discussions with fellow members via the forums, but we'll still take on board suggestions from individuals.

This page, "About", will therefore change depending on you, the users, and what you want Muvizu to be about.