Utilities

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Utilities

Anything that might make your 3DMMing experience better, faster, smoother. This is still being updated, and will have more tools for download soon.

3D Movie Maker
Down, down, down. Somehow this had a happy little virus attached to it, and we have no idea how it got there. A thousand apologies to everyone who downloaded this -- delete it immediately if you haven't already. We'll work on getting another version up soon.

3DMMAP (Travis Wells)
A program that maps basic 3DMM commands to buttons on your keyboard. You can assign which keys do what ('Ins' moves forward one frame, '+' adds a frame, the left arrow key moves an object one pixel to the left, etc.) and pause or turn it off with the F10 or F12 keys. It takes some getting used to, but if you can master it, animation can be done with a speed and precision that wouldn't be possible by hand. Of course, if you wanted, you could just map commands to help you move frames, open menus, and save without moving the mouse away from the object you're hand-animating as well. There are a lot of possibilities.

A new version of 3DMMAP, coded by Frankie Weindell has been released recently for XP/e3DMM/N3DMM support, and it will also work with any languange version of 3DMM. Unfortunately, not all of the extra scripts have been rewritten to conform to this yet.

3DMMAP version 2.7

Scripts

The Scripts directory in C:\Program Files\3DMMAP are the commands that tell each individual macro what to do. If you have some basic programming knowledge or a guide nearby, you can edit these to open up a whole new range of options. I'm working on putting together a 3DMMAP Script Editing Tutorial for the Academy, and I'll link to it here when it's done.

In addition, some external scripts have been written by other programmers. By placing these in the C:\Program Files\3DMMAP directory, new macro options become available when you open 3DMMAP, some of them extremely useful.

Wordupdown.zip -- Developed by Stefan, this drops down four spots in the 3D Words texture menu. Perfect for expansion pack textures, which take years and years to scroll through each time you want to change one.

SceneEd.zip -- The penultimate script editing tool, this will not only move an object in the desired direction with a 3DMMAP macro, but it will do it over a specified number of frames, making precise panning and zooming a cinch. Tricky to master, but the benefits can cut movie making time by 75% if you get really good at it. (Just remember that in 3DMM as in cinema, not all scenes pan or zoom throughout the course of a movie, and there are more kinds of camera tricks than steady movement. Use this to enhance your movies, rather than make them. This means you, Doughboy.)

DORAEMON (Frankie Weindell)
A theme-based version of 3DMM released in Japan, Frankie Weindell extracted the various actors, props, scenes, and sounds into the same files the normal version of the program uses. The installation method, which was rather spotty and confusing in 2002, has been updated recently, allowing this expansion to finally run on anyone's computer. While it's debatable how much these additions offer, not having this expansion cuts a viewer's movie library down considerably; JDR Revolutions, JDR Revival, Round Zero, Rouge, Yeti & Squidworth's Halloween Nightmare, and several other movies will not run if you don't have this installed. Alternate Vlarion 4 may be using it as well. ;)

3DMM Fixer

If you already have Doraemon installed using the old method, this little 66kb file will restructure the way it's set up automatically. Any movie that previously used Doraemon must be 'fixed' to adhere to this new standard, which is as simple as right clicking the .3mm file and selecting "Fix 3D Movie" once the fixer has been installed. As an added bonus, the Fix 3D Movie option can be used to make JDR Revolutions, The 3DMM Raspberry Awards, and other movies afflicted with the expansion pack glitch run correctly; no more moving files around to watch movies, and less danger if someone screws up and has any expansion pack installed incorrectly.

Frankie's Expansion (Frankie Weindell)
Arguably the most important add-on created for 3D Movie Maker, this allows you to use 50+ new textures on 3D Words and offers several new 2D backgrounds, three new 3D Word fonts and a few scenes ripped from Nickelodeon 3D Movie Maker, five actors from the Japanese version of 3DMM, and, er, the midis from the 3DMM Studio. Problems with installing this pack in the wrong directory have all but disappeared thanks to the fixer released recently, and the frequency with which it's being used in new movies is growing at an astonishing rate. By the end of 2004, if you don't have this, you're missing out on almost everything.