Muvizu news - recent articles

Muvizu on your wall

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 12:01:18 GMT

The generous team here at HQ have decided to help Mark Zuckerberg in his quest to raise a few squillion dollars by making it easier for Facebook users to watch Muvizu clips.

Yes, we thought that the fresh-faced philanthropist who has selflessly - and entirely through his own and no one else's genius - allowed advertisers everywhere to share the entire world's personal information, deserved a helping hand. We humbly present the Muvizu Facebook app.

All you need to do to add a touch of animated class to your Facebook presence is go to the Muvizu app's URL - which is this - http://apps.facebook.com/muvizu_app/ - and add it.

The very first time that you use it, you will be asked to give your permission for Muvizu to access your profile and to publish to your wall. The app requires this: if you don't trust us or something and decline, then it won't work so there's no point adding it in the first place.

If you do trust us, but then later on develop a bad case of paranoia and decide that we're responsible for your recent identity theft, including a multi-thousand pound haggis and Irn Bru spree charged to your credit card, it's a simple matter to remove the app.

We'd point out that the need for offline permissions is so that we may publish videos to Facebook users via our content management system.

Anyhow, the upshot of all this is that you'll be able to liven up your wall with Muvizu stuff that you like and animations that you fancy sharing with friends, family ... and advertising agencies.

Go on, you know it makes sense, join our Muvizu for Mark Zuckerberg campaign and make a wee little lad a bit richer.

Best regards,
The Muvizu team

Zuckerberg portrait on this page by kind permission of Guillaume Paumier / Wikimedia Commons, CC-by-3.0. www.gpaumier.org

Come and get it!

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 14:13:47 GMT

Yes, after the festive season's spell of indigestion and a slight hiccup yesterday, today we've released the latest version of Muvizu, or v0.19b as it is affectionately known to us.

Hot on the heels of our newly pimped website comes the release that dialogue fans have been anticipating eagerly for rather too long. Muvizu now has multiple audio tracks, so say farewell to shuttling frantically between shush and talk.

Another feature worth hitting the sherbet for is the introduction of toon shaders, which give the ability to alter considerably the stylistic look of your Muvizu creations.

Under the hood, we've tweaked the Morpheme system to reflect the very best in contemporary animation blending.

The characters can now be customised with some visual effects and there are some animations to show the effects off nicely.

One little fly in the ointment is the expected implementation of DirectX 11. We ran into some memory overhead problems and a few minor niggles, which we think have now been fixed but which we intend to test further on a variety of hardware.

If all goes well, we expect to release another upgrade, with the DirectX 11 implementation, to you in about a month.

As usual, you should check the known issues list on the download page and, if you run across an interesting bug during your Muvizu work, drop us a line at bugs@muvizu.com or mention it in the forums; talking to other users may well tip you off to some useful workarounds.

Thank you, as always, for your enthusiasm and forbearance; we look forward to seeing what you create with this latest version of Muvizu and its new features.

The obligatory image is a picture that the fair Emily sent us from her holiday in Australia, her thoughts at the time are not known to us. However, let us hope it keeps us shipwreck free!

Best regards,

The Muvizu team

A new look for 2012

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 14:56:30 GMT

Apologies for going dark for a while today, but, as you can see, we needed to take the site offline so that we could publish this new version.

We decided to change things around partly to reflect the style of the Muvizu application user interface, which was refined a while back, but mostly to try to make it easier for us to display choice user content and for users to find the videos that they want to watch.

Our new home page incorporates a video player, preloaded with what we consider to be a worthy example of contemporary user creations, plus some other recent submissions in a scrolling strip beneath that.

Elsewhere, we've ironed out some irritating glitches in using the back button when browsing certain site sections and we've also hooked into YouTube's APIs to bring back the "most viewed" sorting function. This should now reflect the view count as recorded by YouTube.

Part of our plan for 2012 is to involve Muvizu users ever more closely in the project, to which end we've revamped our Mogul section and will expand its range of functions bit by bit throughout the year.

As with all things new, however shiny, we expect to find a few glitches here and there so please drop us a line if you spot anything that's broken, or flag it up in the forums.

Now, while on the subject of broken things, we've discovered that our forthcoming release (which we had hoped to publish today) is stuttering and falling over in Windows XP when more than half-a-dozen or so characters are created. Clearly, this won't do - given that many home users still rely on XP.

We could have put out a version for Vista and Windows 7 users, but this would have been messy (especially given our automatic update checker) and the sensible option is for us to disappoint people again and ask them to bear with us for a few days more. Rather that than give XP users something useless to them. We really are sorry about this. Really.

Best regards,
The Muvizu team

And ... we're back

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 08:11:05 GMT

Team Muvizu has returned to the mothership to go boldly into a 2012 full of promise, or, at least, expectations. Our release, delayed from last month, is anticipated for January 9.

As the vigilant among you will have noticed in the forums, we announced the winners of our AMD competition, the full details of which may be found here: http://www.muvizu.com/Forum/topic1474-has-he-been-yet-.aspx?Page=1#post8102

Many congratulations to Dylly, Ziggy72 and Hexslayer on their winning entries.

Commiserations, of course, to those who submitted fine videos but who did not win a prize this time around. It was a close call for the top places and we hope only that you'll enter our next competition; we've not yet decided its format, although Bigwally reckons that a ten-second clip - a format considered previously but dismissed as too tricky - may be the way forward.

Please let us know; perhaps a Muvizu elf will start a new forum thread in which to thrash out some ideas.

But competitions may not be the only thing for us to consider this year. We reckon that Muvizu is a powerful creative tool and that with the right publishing and, dare I say it, inducement model, we might usefully explore ways to raise its profile - and with it the work of Muvizu users.

More on this as the rusty cogs of management brains grind slowly into action. Watch out for rumours, hints, proposals and discussions. Don't watch out for teasers, though, because that just isn't our style. As soon as we decide something concrete, we'll tell you about it.

Now to our delayed release. We were to have given you the latest Muvizu update - with its multiple audio tracks, Unreal Engine 3 and morpheme upgrades, toon shaders and a few other bits and bobs - just before Christmas. However, a last-minute bug prompted us to pull the release, which is now slated for January 9 ... if no further nasties raise their ugly heads.

On the subject of ugly, you may be wondering (or worrying) about the picture at the top of this page. This was a Christmas present to the Muvizu boss from our very own Dreeko. We don't know whether it was intended to improve the MD's fashion sense or to brighten the dark winter in Glasgow - for anyone within half a mile of him - but we do know that when he opened the package it rendered him temporarily blind. Apologies, then, for any typos in the above :-)

A very happy new year to everyone. We plan to make 2012 a big one. Let's have some fun.

Best regards,
The Muvizu team.

Judgment daze

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 08:32:08 GMT

Muvizu's competition to win an AMD Fusion-powered laptop closed at midnight with more than 70 entries; that's quite a bit of judging to do - and it may be stressful.

We mentioned when launching the competition that we'd be interested in comments and ratings left for submissions.

Given the substantial number of video shorts to judge - and it would seem that these run the gamut from comedy to politics to the surreal to an old favourite, the fart joke - we'll be looking all the more for public feedback to help our deliberations. So go on: flick through the clips and have your say.

We expect to try to notify the winners on Monday, December 12th, and to announce the results by the end of that week.

As mentioned in a previous bulletin, we (together with the rest of the world) are not hopeful of getting our hands on a Wacom Inkling any time before the New Year.

This being the case, and out of our hands, we'll ask the winner of the third prize how they'd like us to proceed; either opt to wait for an Inkling or go for some other piece of kit of similar value.

Our thanks to all of you who entered this competition, there really are some splendid examples of Muvizu work. We'll update you on any progress but in the meantime, keep making those videos - we love them.

Best regards,
The Muvizu team

Competition countdown

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 15:56:27 GMT

The deadline for our 30-second clip competition to win an AMD Fusion-powered laptop is fast approaching. There's only a week left to submit your video to be in with a chance of winning.

We're very pleased with the response to our competition, and you may remind yourself of the details here, and have received more than 50 entries so far. The deadline for submissions is midnight on Sunday November 27, so if you've not yet done so there's still time to get a clip or two together.

Just to let you know, we're becoming a little bit anxious with respect to the third prize. We decided, having read favourable reviews, to offer a Wacom Inkling gizmo but are worried at the production delays that seem to be affecting this product.

We've just contacted the folks at Wacom and have been told that someone will get back to us, but to be on the safe side we've decided that should the Inkling not be available by the time we announce the competition winner and runners-up, we'll ask whoever comes second whether they'd like to wait for an Inkling or just choose something else to the same value. We're very flexible here so it's not as though anyone will lose out or anything.

In other news, we're still on course to release an updated version of Muvizu on December 19. This version should add, among other things, multiple audio tracks for character dialogue - more news nearer the date.

Finally, we just have to make mention of a rather special video posted by ukBerty at the weekend. His version of Tim Minchin's White Wine in the Sun is truly sublime and quite the best seasonal creation we've seen anywhere, ever. Many a jaded soul at Muvizu HQ has been moved to teary-eyed wonderment by this extraordinary work.

Best regards,
The Muvizu team

30-second heroes

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 11:23:10 GMT

We're chuffed here at Muvizu HQ to see that our 30-second video competition has already attracted a flurry of entertaining and often amusing clips. Keep 'em coming, folks, there's still a month to go until the deadline.

We've had a couple of queries from people asking whether they are allowed to submit videos animated in Muvizu and then post-processed in a video-editing package.

No problem at all, and the competition details have just been edited to clarify this. Should anyone have any further queries, email competitions@muvizu.com.

So, if you'd like to win an AMD Fusion-powered laptop, or a copy of Sony Vegas Pro video-editing software or even a Wacom Inkling doodles-to-vector gadget, you have until November 27, 2011, to submit your 30-second clip - or as many clips as you like - on any subject or subjects you'd care to choose.

Perhaps some of the early entries will prove inspirational. First off the mark, and followed swiftly by a second entry, was Mysto with his 30-second news offering, displayed left.

No doubt we'll be seeing a few more entries from the Mysto stable before too long.

Among the other entries that we've received so far - and they're all on the site anyway, just look in the gallery for videos that include the words AMD Fusion in the title - we really must highlight an entry from Dylly.

It is a rare delight to see, in this exemplar to our right, someone tread so confidently the fine line between preserving their artistic integrity and shamelessly sucking up to the company that's providing the main competition prize.

Way to go, Dylly! Mind you, the good people of AMD won't actually be doing any of the judging.

We're looking forward to seeing what the rest of you have up your sleeves by way of competition entries. Remember to provide full descriptions for your videos and to tag them accurately and comprehensively in YouTube to improve their chances of being seen.

As mentioned previously, we are likely to be swayed in some small measure by comments posted and the number of views registered against your video submissions.

Moving on from matters to do with the competition, have we mentioned yet that we plan to release another upgrade to Muvizu?

Perhaps it's already been leaked to or rumoured in the forums, but it's probably worth making it official here: we aim to have another release out before Christmas ... in all likelihood not terribly long before Christmas, but a festive treat nonetheless.

One feature likely to be of interest to many of you should be the implementation of multiple audio tracks, so that each character may have, if desired, his or her own dedicated dialogue input.

Finally, and this has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the competition or even the forthcoming release, we saw this clip today and thought that it was worth sharing.

This is a work showing Muvizu characters with live-action actors; well, one actor cloned several times.

We think that this is an accomplished and entertaining piece of filmmaking, and all of us here hope that its maker will pop in to the forums at some point to share tips and tricks.

Best regards,
The Muvizu team

Win a Fusion-powered laptop

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 15:05:58 GMT

At last! The long-awaited competition to win a next-generation laptop is here. By next-generation, we mean one powered by an accelerated processing unit, or APU, from chip-maker AMD's Fusion range.

As we've said previously, for all the official and technical information about AMD Fusion APUs you should visit AMD's dedicated pages. (Also, the marketing people would like us to point out that AMD Fusion chips are found in machines whose "consumer branding" is AMD VISION. Clear?)

In our strictly unofficial layman's terms, though - because we've been playing with a Fusion-powered laptop, kindly lent by AMD - we can confidently say that the technology rocks. It runs Muvizu beautifully and, as a gaming machine, it is equally impressive.

The machine that AMD is providing as top prize in our competition is this:

HP Pavilion dv7-6165us
AMD Quad-Core A8-3500M with AMD Radeon HD 6755G2 Graphics
17.3inch 6GB RAM 640GB HD Windows 7 Home Premium

More information about this laptop is available here.

Without further ado, then, we invite you to make a Muvizu clip of between 10 and 30 seconds long, on any subject you choose, to enter this competition. Oh, we should mention that second prize is a copy of Sony Vegas Pro 10 video-editing software and third prize is a Wacom Inkling paper-to-vector gizmo.

The closing date for this competition is midnight GMT on November 27, 2011.

What you have to do:

Create a Muvizu video of 10- to 30-second length
Append to the title the words "AMD Fusion"
State in the description "This is an entry for Muvizu's AMD Fusion competition"
Publish it on the Muvizu site
Sit back and cross your fingers - or get busy and create another entry

Naturally, this whole ersatz news page will be reproduced as a sort of permalink competition page here - with the added bonus of legal-sounding jargon, otherwise known as ass-covering. The bottom line (if you'll forgive the pun) is that the competition is a bit of fun and the judges' decision will be final.

Best regards,
The Muvizu team

A little patch

Wed, 21 Sep 2011 12:23:45 GMT

We mentioned on September 9 that we wanted to publish a patch for Muvizu to fix some annoyances that some users had found with our big release of September 5. We've just published the patch.

We are now fairly confident that sets incorporating animated properties should once more load reliably and that the timeline will once again respond to a right-mouse-button click.

Also, saving sets that include imported objects with ID textures should now retain the texture info.

Elsewhere, the font on menu lists should be slightly more readable, keys have been assigned to zoom functions and a problem with crashes caused when preparing character properties for a character with no attachments should also be fixed.

In short, we've tried to address the main headaches that users spotted a couple of weeks ago. Please let us know how we've done.

As is usual, though, we won't have been able to please everyone. However, and also as usual, we'll try to make excuses for any shortcomings. For instance, we're a very small team here and today's patch has been created without the benefit of our lead developer, Robert, who is in New Zealand for a while because he thinks that he deserves a holiday. He has posted some pictures of this hard-earned jaunt here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mcmillan_ra/collections/72157627556486577/

Furthermore, we're currently without our lead artist, Barry. He'd have given anything to be here but is away for a few days because his four-year-old daughter has been a bit poorly.

This is where the picture on this page comes in. The little girl, despite being ill, drew this and sent it to us this morning. I think she may have been worried that we'd sack Barry if Muvizu users complained about things missing from the patch, so she wanted you to have this to show you how sorry she is for keeping her dad away from the important business of responding to your comments.

Anyone want to ruin a little girl's day? ;-)

Best wishes,

The Muvizu team

In yer interface

Mon, 05 Sep 2011 14:09:38 GMT

The latest iteration of our free Muvizu 3D animation software has been released and we're pretty chuffed with it, especially the revamped user interface.

Other changes include:

Lighting and shadows

New “simple” and “realistic” lighting modes make it easier for users to control the way shadows are cast.
Shadow-casting may be deactivated for each object, character or light.
Directional lights may be added to the scene to simulate distant light sources, such as the sun.
Sharpness of shadow edges is now adjustable.

Locomotion

Walk on the spot. Users may direct locomotion where the character stays in the same position.
Only walk/only run. Characters may be instructed only to walk or only to run during locomotion.
Double-click to walk. Locomotion destinations may be set by double-clicking on a position in the scene.

Miscellaneous

“Snap to” object manipulation. Objects may be easily set to align nicely with each other.
Users may now animate character attachment properties; for instance, hat colour.
New online content (sets and 3D assets).
New microphone attachments and objects.
Users may now drag and drop colours and textures between interface panels.
Eye-dropper tool allows you to select colours from your scene or elsewhere on your computer screen.

As usual, we'd appreciate your feedback on this release, to which end we've created this forum thread for English-speaking users, this one for Italian speakers, and this for Portuguese.

Before posting, though, please take a look at the known issues on the lower half of the download page.

Finally, we'd like users to start thinking about their entries for our video shorts competition to win an AMD Fusion-powered laptop. There's a forum post here that talks about it. We still don't know exactly which model of laptop AMD will be giving us for this, and neither have we decided yet what to offer as runners-up prizes. We'll let you know when we do.

We hope that you enjoy our latest upgrade to Muvizu and look forward to seeing what you create with it.

Best regards,
The Muvizu team.

Release countdown

Fri, 26 Aug 2011 16:20:36 GMT

It's fast approaching that time when we unleash an update on Muvizu users. True, we had originally aimed for August 30, but now we've settled on September 5 as a more likely date.

As we've said before, the main thrust of this release is the user interface. We've ripped out pretty much all of the old one entirely and rewritten it in C#, largely to give us the flexibility to extend its functionality as and when required to add yet more features.

Just to give you a flavour of it, here's a screen-grab of the UI in action:

Elsewhere, you may be interested to know that we'll be attacking this website in the not-too-distant future. We aim to make it easier to use and a better place for you to showcase your work. We also want to provide you with advice on how to ensure maximum viewings of your videos on YouTube; it has to be said that nearly everyone gets a fail with respect to providing content descriptions and tags - without which many fine clips will never be found by their target audience.

In other news, I'd like to draw your attention to this forum thread - http://www.muvizu.com/Forum/topic1141-machinima-expo-2011-now-accepting-submissions.aspx - which, as the url suggests, is all about a prize competition at this year's MachinExpo, or MachinExpo 2011 as it is more properly known. Read about the event here.

In a similarly competitive vein, you may be pleased to know that AMD, the chip-maker rolling out its Fusion APUs - as mentioned in this forum post a little while ago - has rather generously offered us a Fusion-powered laptop as first prize in a competition to be announced at the time of our next release. So far, we're toying with the idea of asking for 10-second clips on any subject you fancy, but anyone who'd like to make another suggestion may do so by commenting on this article.

Finally, one of our investors has been bleating on and on about how great it would be to see news/political satire clips being made with Muvizu. Come on, guys, step up to the mark, it's actually quite a good idea and the right clip at the right time could easily go viral (ahem, especially with the right tags and a full description). Perhaps we can come up with an incentive such as a modest weekly prize for the worthiest bit of satire. Any suggestions, again, welcome as comments to this item. Help me out here, this old spuffer isn't getting any younger but he is getting louder and louder.

That's all for now and for those of you south of Hadrian's Wall we wish you a lovely late-August Bank Holiday.

Best regards,

The Muvizu team

Thanks to all at CMC

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 12:37:53 GMT

Muvizu attended last week's Children's Media Conference in Sheffield, and what a brilliant event it was. We met lots of new people, showed Muvizu to anyone who was interested - and plenty were - and generally had a fantastic time.

We should explain that the CMC is "the UK's premier meeting place for the children's content industries"; for which read TV channels, production companies, writers, filmmakers, distributors and a whole lot more.

The organisers of this year's CMC had been bowled a few googlies by fate, but even so they pulled out all the stops on our behalf to ensure that we could give 3D animation demos in spaces where such things are usually not allowed.

Special thanks to Alison, Rachael, May and Greg at the CMC for being so flexible and creative in finding ways to accommodate us.

We'd also like to thank Matt, one of our early-adopter users, who rocked up to the event on all three days and helped us out, and Dreeko, one of our high-maintenance users, who travelled with us in his now official capacity as Muvizu ambassador.

Dreeko also becomes our first user to be able to say that he's demonstrated Muvizu to delegates from Aardman, CITV and others.

Another thank you goes to our unfortunate intern, Max (pictured left), who was over from California for some work experience and got press-ganged into the Sheffield trip.

As you can see from the photograph here, working so closely with Muvizu people seems to have given the lad a drinking problem, not to mention a steep laundry bill.

And now to other matters, namely our next release ... which is slated for a week from now, Monday July 18.

It's not a huge release because we're holding back the new user interface until Jamie's test team is happy with it; it's been totally reworked in C#, whereas it was previously handled by Scaleform, because this should give us far more flexibility.

The important changes in next week's release are these:

An improved locomotion system; far more accurate as to where a character will end up
A slider to control shadow intensity
64-bit optimisation; this should fix performance problems with the current release
Mappable textures on characters

Bug-fixes for:

TGA-saving, now much improved and should avoid crashes
To stop the director escaping the sky dome
Wobbly walk stop
Look-at remaining applied when unwanted
Sepia-effect glitch with dark lights
Audio recorded via the app being forgotten
Anti-aliasing should no longer cause certain machines to hang

All things being equal, our plan is to release again at the end of next month - this will introduce the reworked interface plus a fair few more enhancements.

As usual, keep the comments coming and let rip in the forums. We like a lively debate, but we should caution you, though, that the mission statement of our latest corporate client reads like this:

"ITT Geospatial Systems is a global supplier of innovative night vision, remote sensing and navigation solutions that provide sight and situational awareness at the space, airborne, ground and soldier levels."

So, play nicely or we may just ask our new friends in high places - and I do mean in orbit, here - to take a closer interest. We're talking military-grade laser hair removal at the very least ... from space :-)

Best regards,
The Muvizu team

PS: We're looking for another tester. Ideally, the candidate should be called Jim, but failing that, this sort of experience would help:

Bug-tracking software use in a professional role
The ability to write and execute test plans
An understanding of social media/networking
Website testing experience
Familiarity with 3D environments - Unreal 3 games engine experience a bonus
An interest in animated shorts/web clips
The ability to use a range of video-, audio- and image-editing software
Knowledge of computer hardware

Interested? Message pyrrho for details.

It's upgrade time

Tue, 24 May 2011 14:29:43 GMT

All of us here at Muvizu Towers are pleased to announce the release of the latest version of our free, 3D animation software.

As you may already know, we are now providing two versions of the Muvizu software, 32-bit and 64-bit, so those of you running 64-bit operating systems will be able to take full advantage of all those gigabytes of RAM hitherto unused in your machines.

Because we've changed the software pretty much from the ground up, or from the guts out, you should uninstall your existing version of Muvizu before you start. After uninstalling your existing version, visit the download page and install whichever version suits your set-up.

System requirements for the latest Muvizu iterations remain largely unchanged; you need:

Windows XP SP2 or later (ie Vista, Windows 7)
A 2.0GHz processor or better
2GB system RAM or more
A graphics card with Shader Model 3.0 support (Nvidia 7800 GTX or ATI 1300 or better). Note: previous versions ran with Shader Model 2, but this is no longer supported by the upgraded version of Unreal Engine 3 which drives this latest Muvizu release. A link to download the existing Muvizu version will be available on the download page.

So what are you waiting for? Head over to the download page and grab yourself the very latest in free, 3D animation software. We think you'll like what you find.

Best regards,

The Muvizu team

Ready to rap?

Tue, 24 May 2011 12:24:03 GMT

We're enraptured to let you know that Muvizu's latest release day is finally almost upon us. The appointed hour for the Muvizu faithful to note is 3:30pm BST tomorrow, Wednesday May 25.

Granted, our believers have been preparing for this world-changing event for many, many weeks now. As you are probably aware, our original readings of the literature available to us had led us to predict an earlier date, one rather nearer to Easter. This erroneous prophecy had been due to our lead seer - aka Robert - having calculated the date, from numbers chosen randomly from his favourite work of fiction, on a beer mat after several pints of heavy.

But the long wait is over. Tomorrow, at 3:30pm, your patience will be rewarded with the release of Muvizu v0.15b. This will come in two denominations, a 32-bit (fundamentalist) version and a 64-bit (progressive) version. Both will be available from the download page.

In order to cleanse the way and make our final preparations, we will be taking down the Muvizu website at 2pm tomorrow and it will be reborn at about 3:30pm bearing the latest, and most spiritually uplifting to date, versions of our free 3D animation software.

So what's in store? As we've mentioned previously, the main deal is that the core technology under the hood in Muvizu has been upgraded - so that's Unreal Engine 3 and the morpheme blending system.

We've also squeezed in a few visual and artistic goodies for users. There's a new mood, "Wobbly", which lends itself to zombies, drunks, the concussed and so forth. The art team have produced a fair few character attachments to complement this mood - think bandages and wounds. There's also a new character, "Boy".

The animations and poses for the female character have been refined and improved, we've added more motor vehicles, face masks, robot attachments, gestures and poses for everyday conversations plus animations for motorbike mounting and dismounting. You'll be able to add textures to abstract objects and make foliage sway.

A novel and suitably apocalyptic touch, revealed exclusively today, is the addition of "dark lights", or rather negative lighting. Spooky or what?

Furthermore, I should mention that art-team sinners have also undertaken much tedious, purgatory-grade work to reduce texture sizes, tweak models and generally polish up their act.

We thank our flock for their patience during the build-up to this tremendous day and apologise for the delays suffered on the way. Still, it could have been worse - at least we've not postponed until October 21.

Yours in the fervour of faith,

The Muvizu team

Good news

Fri, 13 May 2011 15:16:44 GMT

Two bits of it, actually: we're on the home straight with our latest Muvizu release and there's a film competition for Glasgow's youth.

Dealing first with the competition, or rather a series of competitions. This is an initiative of the Glasgow Film people, with whom we were involved a few months ago for the excellent Glasgow Youth Film Festival. The latest wheeze is called Wee Movies, four competitions running throughout the year for young filmmakers or would-be filmmakers in the Greater Glasgow area.

The competitions take their theme from Glasgow's coat of arms, which has on it a bird, a tree, a bell and a fish. If anyone is interested in the story behind these motifs, and it's recommended reading for anyone who appreciates a fine blend of charming nonsense and quasi-religious tosh, then this entry on the "Glasgow: Scotland with style" website is a good place to start.

Anyhow, the deal is that anyone under 18 (either entering as an individual or as part of a school/club/whatever) may submit a short film loosely based on the city's coat of arms as broken down into bird, tree, bell and fish for competitions one to four.

There are, of course, some prizes on offer, but the main draw has to be that winners will have their films shown on the big screen at next year's Glasgow Youth Film Festival. Further details, helpful suggestions and rules governing the competitions are on the Wee Movies pages.

In other news, it really does look as though we've finally solved our gnarliest problems which had until a couple of days ago scuppered efforts towards our forthcoming release. We are now aiming for the week after next.

Many of you will already have seen this "Coming soon" video, which Barry posted on the forums yesterday, but it does no harm to include it again here:

As you know, most of the work that has gone in to the release has been upgrading the core technologies - Unreal Engine 3 and Natural Motion's morpheme blending system - but, as the video shows, we have managed to squeeze in a few useful goodies and a smattering of extra eye-candy, too.

Once again, we'd like to take the chance to thank the crew at Natural Motion for their tireless help over the past couple of months. We will be buying the beers when we get to meet you, which should be pretty soon :-)

Thanks, also, to our users for putting up with this frustrating delay. We'll be posting more information about the release and the nitty-gritty details in about a week from now.

Upbeat and chirpy regards,

The Muvizu team

Best laid schemes

Mon, 18 Apr 2011 15:43:53 GMT

The best laid schemes of mice and men, Gang aft agley - or so wrote Robert Burns in his poem, To a Mouse. We wouldn't claim that our plans were the best laid, but they've certainly gone awry.

As you know, our Everest of an upgrade to the core Muvizu technology has already been put back and in our previous update we apologetically forecast a release date of April 26. This had been looking shaky last week as testing threw up some remarkably ugly bugs with pointy teeth covered in plaque.

No bother, we thought, we'll just work through the Easter break, live on pizzas and coffee and all should be well.

Even that would have been a struggle, though, what with one of our six-strong technical development team going under the knife this week and so expected to be out of action for at least a couple of days.

Imagine our horror, then, to find out this morning that another developer - known to users as CrazyDave and to us as, er, Crazy Dave - called to let us know that he is in hospital, on the wrong side of Scotland from here, with his leg in plaster having broken an ankle at a funeral. Don't ask.

Furthermore, he sustained his injury on Saturday, but didn't notice at the time. Neither did he notice on Sunday until in the afternoon he "felt a bit sore". By night-time, apparently, it was very painful; only this morning did he decide to visit a hospital. Given that splintered bones tend to knit together fairly soon after being broken in two, this delay was probably unfortunate.

It's worth pointing out that David had originally been a medical student but, having successfully completed most of the course, decided that computing was more in his line. He certainly got that one right.

Much as we'd like to, it would be very foolish - as we were so presciently warned by Kerry at the time of the last news update - to give an exact date for our release. The gods have had enough fun with us for now and it wouldn't be advisable to tempt them into making more mischief for Muvizu.

Our apologies, even as we throw our hands in the air, are heartfelt and our sadness to have to disappoint our users again is sincere and extremely deep.

Any comments posted below and directed towards David will be forwarded to him. Please be gentle with him; we worry about him a lot - mostly with good reason, this item gives us the right to say QED - and he's going to be off his pins for quite some time.

Our foresight has indeed been in vain; we hope that you will find it within yourselves to pity us mice.

Doleful regards,

The Muvizu team

To a Mouse, as Burns originally wrote it, side by side with a "translation", may be found on its Wikipedia page: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/To_a_Mouse

A Muvizu version of the final stanzas, produced way back with a private alpha version of the software, may be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlAGN47pR9k

Out of time

Fri, 25 Mar 2011 12:23:37 GMT

We mentioned a while ago that our next release - the biggest transformation yet to Muvizu, updating as it does the core Unreal Engine 3 plus the morpheme blending system - was causing a few headaches.

Originally, we had intended to get the new build out to you by the end of the month, but that just isn't going to be possible, even with late-night and weekend working plus the loan of a time machine.

Also, because of the sheer volume of code changes in the guts of the Muvizu app and the core technology, we're having to extend our testing window to roughly twice what we'd usually expect. All this adds up to a release date of April 26.

We are very sorry about this delay but we're keen try to start future development on as stable a platform as possible rather than release something that's too wobbly to build on.

During our (very long) hours of need, we've been helped out by the guys at Natural Motion, who make morpheme, and we'd like to take this opportunity to thank them. A quick glance at the inbox shows a 50-strong chain of support correspondence in the space of a couple of weeks and the morpheme people also spent a couple of days hooked into our systems to work on problems directly.

Particularly special thanks to Steve, Mark and Peter for the ones and zeroes, and a big thanks to Paul for pulling all of this together on our behalf.

So, when it finally arrives, what will the next release contain? The short answer is everything and at the same time, not much. Everything under the hood has changed - for the better, we think, and so that should improve stability, but very little of this is visible.

However, there will be a 64-bit version of Muvizu, so those of you with 64-bit machines will be able to throw as much memory as you fancy at it. Oh, and anyone running Vista or Windows 7 will benefit from smoother renders - so far fewer jagged edges - because of the Direct X 10 and 11 support.

Naturally, the art team is releasing a pile of new assets - and I'm told to expect more and more characters in future releases, too.

Please accept our apologies for this delay and our assurances that we're doing everything we can to distract you from it. So, have a look at what Dreeko's made by way of a tutorial:

Best regards,

The Muvizu team

Overdue update

Fri, 11 Feb 2011 15:52:12 GMT

January was a long month at Muvizu, lasting until now according to the previous news item. Whoops and sorry. There is plenty of news though, we've been just too busy to mention it.

The Glasgow Youth Film Festival is in full swing and Muvizu will be round and about throughout the celebration, which lasts until February 16. Information about the film screenings and events may be found at the festival site.

Animation created by teenagers at a Muvizu workshop will be screened at the Focus Left: Youth Edition event to mark the festival's close. Details about that may be found at this page.

This may be a good time to mention that we're heading to animation and entertainment events in Stoke, Leeds, Dublin and Sheffield over the next few months and we'll let you know more when we have the exact dates. We'll also carry on visiting colleges and community groups to give Muvizu classes.

Anyone involved in education who would like such personal attention from the Muvizu team should get in touch and we'll see what we can do to help.

Now: our next updates. We're on track to get our asset library online by the end of the month. This'll be a place to download more and more of our models and also a place to which you'll be able to upload and share yours, if you're in the habit of making models and you are a sharing sort of person.

The mad March release, a humungous overhaul of our core technologies (upgrades of Unreal Engine 3 and the morpheme blending system) are still slated for the end of next month. However, we have hit a few problems and had some bad luck so it's looking a bit tight. We will keep you informed.

There has also been a traitor in our midst. Glasgowjim, he of the vast technical knowledge and breathtaking geekery, is bowing out as a tester and changing career to something far more boring. On the plus side, though, possibly something to do with the horse's head he found in his bed this morning, he will continue to contribute to the forums where his output has been prolific.

We will miss Jim sorely and wish him well trying to stay awake at his tedious post. We'll be having drinks for him and expect the usual suspects (you know who you are, Dreeko et al) to join us.

January joy

Fri, 14 Jan 2011 17:14:59 GMT

Hello, folks. January may often be written off as a miserable month, but not for Muvizu. Momentous things are happening - but right now, they're invisible.

We're currently undertaking what is probably the most difficult work since we launched our public alpha about 18 months ago.

Frustratingly, though, all of the work is under the hood, dealing as it does with ones and noughts right at the core of the Muvizu application. We won't be able to show you the fruits of our labours on the dev side until the end of March.

On the art side, however, we have lots of things happening. The team have been knocking themselves out making a helicopter, a jet and other things that fly as they start to create more models that exploit our moving object functionality, released a couple of months ago.

The art team's recent output won't be available in the application until its core upgrade is completed. However, because we are finally building our 3D asset library, you should be able to get your hands on their work by the end of next month by downloading it from the website.

Not only that, but you'll finally have an easy way to upload your own models for people to share in Muvizu. We'll also be providing a gallery of pre-made sets to download from the website; this was actually an initiative by user Than, who started a fan site for Muvizu at http://www.moviesets.org/ and which has served as a place for users to upload their creations. We've now decided to bring his idea in-house (and he's cool with this - we asked his permission first) and see if we can't expand the resource.

So. It isn't that long until the end of February so you don't have too long to wait until there are plenty of new toys to play with.

In other news, the Glasgow Youth Film Festival deserves another mention. You can find out all about it here: http://www.glasgowfilm.org/festival/information/festivals_within_the_festivals/gyff

If you're local enough, you might consider offering a few hours as a volunteer - details of what's required are on the site.

Finally, a huge Muvizu thank you to user Corentino who has produced a French localisation file for Muvizu. Have a look at the forum thread here - http://www.muvizu.com/Forum/topic832-muvizu-in-french--muvizu-version-francaise.aspx - for more info, but, essentially, if you've always wanted Muvizu with menus in French rather than in English, Corentino has done all the work for you.

Many, many thanks to him. His work is available from this site - http://www.themovies.fr/portal.php - which seems to be a resource for French-speaking users of animation software such as Muvizu, The Movies and Moviestorm.

As usual, any feedback on any of the above will be gratefully received, so don't be shy.

All the best,

The Muvizu team

Thanks for a great year

Fri, 24 Dec 2010 10:05:51 GMT

With Christmas upon us and the New Year just around the corner, all of us at Muvizu HQ would like to thank all our users for their hard work and support throughout 2010.

As you know, our free Muvizu 3D animation software has gone through quite a few changes in the past 12 months as we've added more and more features, largely driven by your requests and discussions in the forums. Who would have thought, for instance, that you'd finally be able to open a door, or play a guitar, or train your own dragon? OK, so I lied about the dragon.

Our plans for the coming year are as ambitious as those for 2010. We've started upgrading our core Unreal Engine 3 technology and the morpheme blending system, which is a huge task and one that we expect to take until the end of March. This means that you'll need to wait a while for extra features in the application. Please bear with us.

However, we will use these early months to focus on sharing and collaboration features for the website. We've had a few months now to see how people are getting on with importing their own 3D assets into the Muvizu application so now it's time to think about how best to integrate this function into the website.

We want to do this for a few reasons, mainly to encourage sharing of user-made content but also to limit the size of the Muvizu download. The more sets of assets we put in the app, the bigger and more bloated it gets, so it makes sense for us to try to separate out as many assets as we can and make them available - still free, of course - for download from the site.

So, what happens after the big tech upgrade? In no particular order, we've been considering an enhanced locomotion system to make object and character control easier and more accurate. We've also given thought to a facial animation system. Vehicle physics and allowing characters to get in and out of cars is another idea under consideration.

Other items on the to-do, or would-like-to-do, list include titles and subtitles, scene transition effects, a text-to-speech tool within the app, character visual effects, multi-track dialogue, moving foliage and water. There's even talk of a quadruped.

We've not yet done our planning schedule for this, or even finished arguing among ourselves about which features should be tackled first. Your thoughts about this will be taken into account, especially those written down on a large, brown envelope stuffed with cash and posted to Muvizu HQ in Glasgow and marked "for the attention of the MD".

So, 2011 should be a lot of fun. We'll have more competitions and we're going to try to attend more events. The logo at the top of this spiel is for the Glasgow Youth Film Festival in February, an event at which we'll be running some animation workshops - more details as and when we work them out.

If you know of any animation events that you think we should consider visiting, let us know. Any schools or colleges interested in using Muvizu for fun or for learning should also get in touch, we're happy to help out however we can.

We're off now until the New Year, so please bear with us if your videos take a little longer than usual to appear on our site. We will try to get in to the office now and then to publish them if we're unable to access our content system remotely (this happens quite a bit, thanks to IP addresses being reset every time BT's home broadband service falls over).

Thanks once again for all your videos, all your suggestions, all your forum posts and all your hard work and hours spent using Muvizu. We really appreciate it and hope that wherever you are you have a great Christmas and a happy 2011.

Best wishes, with all the trimmings,

The Muvizu team

Sorted

Mon, 29 Nov 2010 16:30:39 GMT

A little while ago, we released a Muvizu version that contained a health warning - "may contain nuts" - but we're pleased to say that we've put an updated release out this afternoon that, er, contains merely traces of nuts.

We're pretty sure, however, that we've nailed the more irritating bugs and it's actually been quite heartening to see so much content created even with the previous bleeding-edge build. I hope that Mysto won't mind us embedding his teaser video here as an example. It shows off a lot of the musical stuff that now comes with Muvizu:

We can't wait to see the finished piece - and I'm sure that Status Quo will be magnanimous in their acceptance of a Muvizu user borrowing their copyrighted material :-)

Anyhow, back to the business of today's release. The issues we know about stack up like this:

Using the timeline to extremes - to record, re-record, undo, reorder and redo multiple times may cause a character to become confused and stop responding
When scrubbing through the timeline, a character may appear to slide rather than perform animations, or perform animations standing rather than sitting. However, rewind and play back again and you should find that everything is as it should have been
Animation blocks may be moved forwards but not backwards, so be careful of the order in which you record or to which you move
Character attachment changes are not covered by the undo system
If you put a decal on the back of the female adult character, it will colour her fingertips as well. (This has to be the silliest bug ever and had been fixed, but the fix didn't make it to the release version today so enjoy/suffer this while you can.)

As usual, we'd appreciate feedback on this release. Also, we've had a couple of reports of videos being uploaded to YouTube via our website or the Muvizu application which haven't appeared in our content management system. This happens usually when the copyright protection stuff kicks in (most of the time you can still view the content on YouTube but we can't display it on our site) but we suspect a few glitches somewhere. Any info would be appreciated.

We hope that you enjoy today's calmed-down version of the previous Muvizu release and look forward to watching what you create with it.

Best regards,

The Muvizu team

Teenage flicks

Wed, 17 Nov 2010 15:08:37 GMT

Muvizu HQ has decided to sponsor next year's Glasgow Youth Film Festival. After all, we work in this city and it seems like a good way to keep the little so-and-sos off the streets.

No, we jest. That's what the courts and detention centres are for, and we already support those via our taxes.

The Glasgow Youth Film Festival, aka the GYFF, on the other hand, is an event that we're supporting by choice because we're keen to see Muvizu used in education, especially in schools and colleges.

Festival organisers point out in their literature that, despite the increasing educational focus on media and technology, costly software and equipment still represent barriers to entry in filmmaking, especially for young people for whom opportunities to get involved are already rare.

So, enter the GYFF, which is part of the wider Glasgow Film Festival. It evolved from its roots as the Glasgow Schools Film Week in 2006 to become a film festival in its own right last year. You could say that it's grown up.

The purpose of the festival, which runs from February 6 to February 16, is to offer young audiences the chance to watch quality world cinema and to encourage them to get involved in filmmaking themselves.

As part of this mission, Muvizu is running a workshop on Saturday February 12 at which we'll show 14- to 18-year-olds how to knock out cinema-worthy 3D animated clips. These will be shown at the end-of-festival party.

Full details of the schedule and events haven't been set in stone yet, but Muvizu will probably be around throughout the festival to give demos and, who knows, maybe even the odd T-shirt.

More information may be found at the Glasgow Film Festival website: http://www.glasgowfilmfestival.org.uk/youth

Any other businesses out there who'd like to join us in supporting the GYFF should take a look at Arts and Business #BigArtsGive here: http://www.glasgowfilmfestival.org.uk/youth

For those of you who like such things, relevant Twitter info is available here:
@glasgowyouth
@glasgowfilmfest

All of us at Muvizu HQ wish the organisers the very best for the forthcoming festival and we look forward to helping out wherever we can. One thing is certain: you needn't be short of fart jokes.

Best wishes,

The Muvizu team

Do you feel lucky?

Wed, 10 Nov 2010 15:48:07 GMT

I know what you're thinking. "Did they add six new features or only five?" Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself. But being as this is Muvizu, the most powerful free animation tool in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: "Do I feel lucky?" Well, do ya, punk?

All of which is a showy way to let you know that Muvizu has decided to go a little bit experimental. Our way of operating until now has been to plan features for an upgrade, mostly based on user feedback, work on it, test it, release it and then repeat the process with the next one.

We've come to a point, however, where we don't just want feedback about our released work, we want input while it is happening. We're already looking for ways to allow interested users to gain access to our daily releases so that they can make suggestions and criticisms earlier in the development cycle.

We've decided, then, to publish our latest release with a health warning. Yes, it has features such as moving objects (you'll finally be able to open a door), animatable object properties, lights that can switch on mid-performance, extra visual effects such as fireworks, bubbles, dry ice and so on (and the ability for users to control them to a far greater extent), plus musical instruments and a whole set of accompanying animations. This is all cool and, for the most part, tried and tested.

However, this release also has much more fundamental changes - the ability to split character animations between upper and lower body, for instance, plus a different underlying mechanism for undo, redo and some timeline functions.

This, too, is cool - but it is pretty extreme and we're putting it out there now to solicit feedback from hard-core users. Some of the work is radical and, as such, not so stable in places. Based on your responses, we'll aim to release a more locked-down version in a few weeks' time.

So, the choice is yours. Stick with what you know, or for new users the safest thing to try, which is the main download button. This one:

Or, for extreme Muvizu users, or impatient, rash, maverick, drunk ones (possibly called Dreeko), download the full-fat, maxed-out, untamed brute that's available here:

Known issues with the bleeding-edge version:

- Some animations for the girl character sheer when combined with locomotion
- For musical animations, the character must be in the correct state for them to work. So, characters must be standing for guitar animations but sitting for drum and keyboard animations
- It has been observed, albeit rarely, that some camera cuts may come out in the wrong order. If this happens, right-click on the cut event in the timeline, change it to another camera and then change it back before re-recording the final output
- A character's initial mood is applied only after a locomotion block has finished. So, if you set a character to be angry initially and then record movement but then go back and change the initial mood to sad, the sad mood will be applied only after the movement block is completed

Anyone who decides to take the plunge, you have our admiration and appreciation in equal measure: please, please send us your feedback to contact@muvizu.com

As for the rest of you, you're very sensible people. We bet you wear sensible shoes and everything. Yawn.

Best wishes and good luck,

The Muvizu team

Get a life

Tue, 02 Nov 2010 11:07:15 GMT

By which we mean, of course, a Second Life. The Machinima Expo 2010 is to be held online and in said virtual world - and we'll be there.

You may find out more about the expo and its events via the MachinExpo 2010 portal and there are details of a joint Muvizu and expo competition, with a fair few prizes to be had, here.

More news as and when it happens, but as we mentioned in a recent news post, we'll be in the office manning our virtual booth at the expo and we've decided to throw open our doors to any users who can get to Muvizu HQ in Glasgow.

Bring a laptop if you can, but we've got machines here that you may use and we'll be in party mode with pizza and beers on us. It's on the weekend of November 20 and 21.

We had asked that anyone who fancies dropping in should message user pyrrho (that's vince, the Muvizu MD), and leave an email address as well, but we're revising that advice - email contact@muvizu.com instead.

This change of instruction is because, firstly, our internal messaging service needs a little work and, second, vince is very shy and retiring, timid even, and random messages from strangers may well scare him.

Moving swiftly on, we hope that by now you will all have seen this little demo by Barry of some of the features due out in our next release on November 9:

So look forward to moving objects, more effects with enhanced user control, animated properties, animated lights, rock animations and musical instruments, plus a few other bits and bobs.

Some planned features, though, such as user-controlled tempo for animations, have had to be shelved until after we update to the latest version of Unreal Engine 3 - and more particularly upgrade the morpheme blending system.

These core upgrades form the bulk of work going in to the release after next. The devs may well try to include additional features at the same time, but until they see what they're working with they can't make any promises.

Now for the customary homely bit of our news. We're very pleased to announce that Robert, the lead dev, and Angie, our office manager, returned safely from their Kilimanjaro hike.

Thanks to all of you who donated to the Prince and Princess of Wales Hospice on the Clyde here in Glasgow, the cause for which they were raising money. So far, the charity has received more than £2,270 from the intrepid duo's efforts.

We are also pleased that Robert has reverted to his usual attire of fleece, jeans and trainers and left this in some dark wardrobe where it clearly belongs. Less disturbing images of the trip may be found at Robert's Flickr page.

Best regards to you all,
The Muvizu team

These are the champions

Fri, 22 Oct 2010 08:57:31 GMT

Muvizu is delighted to announce the winners of the 90-second short film competition. We're similarly delighted to announce another competition to mark our participation in Machinima Expo 2010.

So, first things first. Our competition really did focus the minds of so many Muvizu users desperate for recognition as filmmakers ... or was that desperate for high-end computer kit from Workstation Specialists. Whatever, the quality of submissions was superb.

Frst prize, then, went to user Matt, an early Muvizu adopter who's been with us for more than a year. His creation, The Book, fairly blew everyone away. This is an awesome piece of filmmaking that showed off Muvizu's capabilities to the max. You'll be pleased to know that some of the effects added in post-processing will be incorporated into the Muvizu application in next month's release.

Second prize went to Hermit for his spoof trailer The Attack of the Crappy B-Movie Aliens. This is an absolute riot and the profile shot of Captain Starbox striking a pose is to die for.

Third prize went to Mysto for his charming Adventures Inc. - a work that gives a mischievous nod to familiar Muvizu sets and which stayed just on the right side of, er, blowing sunshine up our collective butt not to be ruled out for sycophancy. We admire your cheek ... just as much as you clearly admire our cheeks ;-)

Arguments really did rage back and forth about second and third places. There were a fair few more submissions in the running, too, and we'd ask entrants to make their work public - which will probably start off a whole new set of arguments in the forums. Well, we like a bit of heated debate so, guys, would you delete your vids on YouTube that you shared with us and upload them through your Muvizu profiles so that we may publish them.

Much as it's great to announce winners, it really is a downer to have to disappoint people whose work was splendid but just didn't quite make it.

If it's any consolation, though, we are launching another competition, this time to support Machinima Expo 2010. We're funding the prizes for the Expo's own film competition and we're also running a competition of our own at the expo. Details of that, and of the prizes on offer, will be announced soon so please stay tuned.

The expo, which takes place online and in Second Life on November 20 and 21, should be quite a lark. We'll be in the office manning our virtual booth there (again, more details as and when we finalise arrangements) and we've decided to throw open our doors to any users who can get to Muvizu HQ in Glasgow. We've got plenty of machines here that you may use and we'll be in party mode with pizza and beers on us.

Anyone who fancies dropping in should message pyrrho (that's vince, the MD here), it would be handy if you could leave an email address as well.

We've already invited jonbez, a prolific Muvizu user and creator of many fine Muvizu works, including the recent YouTube hit Ghost House, who visited us this week. All of us here enjoyed meeting him and want to thank him for his help with suggestions and hard-core tech insight on how to improve Muvizu. What a star.

To end on a personal note, which seems to be the way these news items are drifting, we had a text message at 5:56am today from Robert, our lead dev mentioned at the end of the previous report and whose phone received a weak signal at the top of Mount Kilimanjaro. It would seem that he and Angie, our office manager, made it to the roof of Africa without serious injury.

We hope that they'll make it safely back and are pleased that their efforts have so far raised £2,195 for The Prince & Princess of Wales Hospice in Glasgow. It'll be a few more days until they get back down the mountain so there's still time to make a donation via http://www.justgiving.com/kilimanjaro-krapper

Have a great weekend and we'll catch you on the other side.

Best regards,

The Muvizu team

And the winners ...

Tue, 19 Oct 2010 08:20:35 GMT

Will be announced on Monday, at the latest. We aim to be in touch with our video short competition winners on Friday with a few questions about how their films were made.

We are just as impatient as you (with the possible exception of Toonarama) to make the announcement and to make public the splendid work of competition entrants. Watch this space, and probably the forums as well.

Elsewhere in the world of Muvizu, we're delighted with the success on YouTube of the first episode of Ghost House - The Phantom Premise - which was made for machinima.com by Jonbez. A YouTube search on "ghost house muvizu" has just given an index listing of results showing that, at the time of writing, this four-and-a-half-minute animation has been viewed more than 82,000 times.

Nice work (although the humour is not suitable for a very young audience) and we look forward to a further five episodes in this series. As it happens, we're also looking forward to meeting Jonbez, who's due to visit Muvizu HQ in Glasgow tomorrow.

Moving on now to some more news, this time about our forthcoming release. We've delayed it until November 9, whereas the original plan was to have got it to you by November 3. Sorry about that.

The date has been pushed for a few reasons: illness, emergency travel by a key artist, downright frustrating technical problems and, of course, the eccentric antics of Robert, our lead developer, who is as we speak walking up Kilimanjaro.

Robert, together with Angie, our office manager, is prone to bouts of extreme self-induced pain by way of running marathons, cycling for silly distances, hiking and kayaking or sometimes doing all these things in one event.

The picture here is of said nutters just after their completion of Gaelforce West in Ireland a couple of months ago. The so-called "adventure racing" event was over a 67km course embracing a mountain, some bogs, the sea, dirt tracks and bits of fine Irish roads, ahem. This, according to the organisers, "is not a fun run". Really?

The Kilimanjaro attempt is intended to raise much-needed funds for the Prince and Princess of Wales Hospice on the River Clyde. Anyone wishing to find out more or even to donate money to this cause should visit this link - http://www.justgiving.com/kilimanjaro-krapper

Anyway, now that we've pushed the release date, Robert will be back in time for code freeze (now slated for October 27), assuming, of course, that he doesn't fall down a ravine or get eaten/molested by yetis.

We apologise for the delay, but we hope that you'll bear with us. The new features, which include more visual effects and greater control over existing ones, moving objects, musical animations and much more, are, perhaps, rather more complicated to implement than at first envisaged.

More personal news. Congratulations to Alan, one of our artists here, whose wife, Helen, was delivered of a 9lb boy, Freddy, at the weekend. No pictures yet, though :-(

And finally, our thanks to Craig, who recently endured a work-experience week with us at Muvizu and who has just sent a thank you card. No problems, Craig, it was a pleasure to have you here. Good luck with the ambition to become a "proggramer", but you'd probably be more suited to a job as a programmer. ;-)

Best regards as always,

The Muvizu team

You will be judged

Tue, 12 Oct 2010 08:10:59 GMT

Our thanks to all of you who submitted 90-second videos to our competition for the Raindance Film Festival. As with a previous competition, held with 3D World magazine, the lure of quality computer kit has seriously raised the bar as far as showing what may be achieved with Muvizu software.

We have a couple more competitions in the pipeline and will let you have details of those as soon as we have sorted out arrangements with our prospective partners.

Talking of sorting out arrangements, we rocked up to the Raindance festival at the weekend, bursting with enthusiasm and eager to wow the audience with an exclusive showing of a four-minute short by Jonbez, which goes on public release at www.machinima.com on October 17th.

Sadly, the attendant IT personnel were unequal to the mighty task of connecting our strange equipment (a PC laptop) to a parallel universe (the internet), and as for hooking up an output to the projection system, dream on.

Organisationally, one word that springs to mind is elbow. There's a T-shirt for the first person to email the other word to contact@muvizu.com with the subject line "doh!".

[Well done Ian - aka Stonehead of Bathtime Spider fame - who has just scooped the T-shirt. Talk about quick off the mark!]

Gremlins notwithstanding, our little audience - a truly sympathetic bunch - gathered in a lobby area to hear what we had to say and to peer at our laptop to watch a few clips and a demo by Jamie, our lead tester here. The more intimate environment lent itself to a Q&A session and some useful conversations.

One subject of particular interest was collaborative filmmaking, which is something that we're keen to promote and which, as some competition entries featuring multiple voice talent amply demonstrate, is a concept already grasped by many Muvizu users.

We'd appreciate your suggestions about how to make the Muvizu website a more fertile ground for this sort of activity. There's certainly nothing new about the concept, and the superb www.wreckamovie.com is a study in collaborative excellence, but we'd like ideas specifically to help people to pool their talents and squeeze the most from Muvizu.

As you know, we're already working on an area for sharing user-made models. Suggestions, questions and random thoughts in the forums, please.

In a related vein, it was lovely to see a Muvizu user at Raindance and to be able to chat about her experiences with the software and her hopes to create a children's cartoon series with it. Again, she was looking for a more experienced user to help to bring her scripts to life.

We'd like to meet more of our users and, having had a few visitors to Muvizu HQ here in Glasgow, are toying with the idea of planning regular open days. Furthermore, we are attending more and more events around the UK so we'll try to flag these up in advance so that you can come and chat to us.

We'll try to ensure that Jamie and/or members of his team - these are the people who answer most of your cries for help - are available to give you hard-core tech assistance and expert tuition on how to push Muvizu to its limits.

Jamie likes to travel and on the left is a picture he drew on the flight to London, it was created with the excellent iPhone program Brushes. (His Muvizu work is of a rather higher standard.) To be fair, it was his first look at the program; to see what may be achieved with it, visit the Brushes site.

While we're plugging random things that we like, here's a central London hotel recommendation: Club Quarters, Trafalgar Square.

The hotel, in Northumberland Avenue, is a splendid building with a superb, stately lobby and bar area, but what really swung it for us was the nice touch of providing a dictionary/thesaurus and serious literary works about London in the guest bedrooms. Not a Gideon in sight.

That's about it for now. Thanks again for all your competition entries, we'll report back in a couple of days on how the proper film experts at Raindance are getting along with the judging process. We'll let you know when we expect to announce the winners.

Best wishes as always,

The Muvizu team

Festival fever

Fri, 08 Oct 2010 16:29:11 GMT

The midnight Sunday deadline for entries to our competition with the folks at the Raindance film festival is nearly upon us, so please get any last-minute entries to us as soon as you can.

Publish your clip to YouTube as normal, but mark the video as private and send the url to raindance@muvizu.com - don't worry, we'll then contact you to let you know what to do next so that we'll be able to see your entry.

Your 90-second short could win you one of these prizes from Workstation Specialists:

A high-end mobile graphics workstation: WSM – Power 15.6” 3D Graphics Configuration Intel® Core™ i7 720QM 1.60GHz 64Bit Quad-Core Processor
High-end graphics workstation: WS1600 High End 3D Graphics Configuration Intel® Core™ i7 930 2.83GHz 64Bit Quad-Core Processor
Graphics workstation: WS1400 Powerful 3D Graphics Configuration

If you need a reminder of the competition terms, they may be found here.

Elsewhere as we get festival-happy, Muvizu will be at the Apollo in London's West End to talk about what we do and to demo the software - not that many of you need any demos. Mind you, we'll have a few laptops handy for inside tips.

If you fancy joining us, please do. Details of the event may be found here.

Should you need a very good reason to join us, try this: there will be a cinema screening of a four-minute short by our Muvizu mogul jonbez. It'll be available online at www.machinima.com as of October 17, but unless you turn up to our event you'll have to wait until then. Our thanks to the folk at machinima.com for letting us use it.

Welcome to the new-look site

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 12:38:22 GMT

Muvizu regulars will have noticed by now that we've revamped our site; an exercise undertaken to try to improve its looks, simplify things that were just too complicated and to put more emphasis on displaying our members' work.

One notable victim of the big Muvizu axe was the projects section. This did not work at all well and the feeling was that, far from encouraging collaboration, it acted as a barrier by hiding projects from easy view. Members, it would seem, prefer to use our forum and messaging system to communicate with each other, so we'd encourage anyone wanting a script, voice talent, custom 3D model, editor, artist - or whatever else to help out with their film - to submit a post outlining their needs.

We intend to develop some tools to facilitate collaboration, but this time we'll do it based on what you say you'd find useful. Again, it'd be great if members discuss their ideas for such tools in the forum, that way we stand a fighting chance of arriving at something approaching consensus.

Today's website and application updates mark a step-change in our Muvizu odyssey. The application will now allow you to import 3D models (static meshes), a feature not for the faint-hearted. One could, to paraphrase a better-known text, say of messing with the world of 3D assets, "No one should enter into it lightly or selfishly, but reverently and responsibly in the sight of ..." their peers.

We mean a few things by this. First, this is a tricky function and there are rules to be obeyed and best practice to follow. We have some notes about this, but very few so far, on the 3D assets page of the gallery section.

The intention is to see how people get on with importing models, thrash out conventions and parameters that work properly for users and optimally for the Muvizu 3D application, and then to use the 3D assets section of the gallery to allow people to import from the website into the application.

The goal is to integrate ever more closely the application and website to foster collaborative work and user interaction. Also, we should be able to provide more and more 3D assets without having to bloat the program download still further.

As regards other new features released in the application update today, we'd like to hear what you think about:

- Grouping/multiple selection
- Cue points
- Extended range of pre-built sets
- A proper dog character

Not forgetting, of course:

- Moving cameras

Which brings us neatly to a reminder that our deadline for the video short competition in conjunction with the 18th Raindance Film Festival has been extended to October 10th. (See the revised terms and conditions.) Moving cameras will be a boon to all of you who have been itching to display your mastery of panning and tracking shots.

That's about it for now, we hope that you enjoy the new site and find the latest upgrade to Muvizu 3D beta useful.

Best wishes,

The Muvizu team

It's a Muvizu makeover

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 12:18:07 GMT

The team at Muvizu HQ is moving to the battle bridge tomorrow to engage boldly in an enterprise hitherto unprecedented in our sector. We're relaunching the website and, simultaneously, releasing our next update to our free Muvizu 3D animation application.

The plan is to have the website switchover and the application release completed by 5pm GMT. At some point tomorrow morning the existing website will be taken down and replaced with a holding page while data migration is in progress. Application download mirrors should also have been updated by 5pm. A revised set of tutorial videos will also be published to walk you through the latest features of the application.

The main additional features to the Muvizu 3D animation package are:

Moving cameras
Grouping/multiple selection of objects
Ability to import 3D objects (static meshes)

We'll be publishing some release notes tomorrow and information about known issues. As usual, we'd appreciate feedback about the inevitable bugs and general comments and suggestions. It would help us greatly if, especially regarding comments and suggestions, you spent a little while throwing around ideas in the forums with fellow Muvizu 3D users before emailing us. We have found previously that this gives us a more rounded and complete idea of what is likely to work best for the highest number of users.

Elsewhere, there's good news regarding our competition with the Raindance film festival people: the deadline for submissions has been extended to October 10. The terms and conditions of the competition have been amended to reflect this change and may be found here: Raindance competition terms.

Feedback from entrants and would-be entrants - especially those coming to the competition from the more traditional film community - have shown a consistent "if only" theme. If only I weren't limited to static cameras, if only I'd been given the equipment for a tracking shot. And so on.

With the original deadline set for August 31, the very day that these features are to be released, we would have squandered an opportunity to see what people with a proven talent for storytelling and directing can do with Muvizu 3D animation software.

We'd like to thank all those at Raindance who have juggled their event planning (and the festival is one huge event in the independent filmmaking world so this was no trivial task) and bent over backwards to accommodate this competition deadline extension.

We would also point out to all of you who have already submitted your entries, frustrated by having to invent ingenious directorial tricks to overcome the limitations of fixed cameras, that entrants may submit as many clips as they wish.

Furthermore, if you update your software via the Muvizu site on August 31, you may load your .set files from your original work into the latest version of the software. This will allow you to rework your shots with moving cameras, the original character performances having been preserved. Render the film out again and submit as a new entry.

Happy, and more flexible, animating to you all.

The Muvizu team