Setting Up a Texture As a Wall, Floor, or Ceiling Material

Wizard version

Try using the Tile/Texture wizard on the Wizards menu.

It prompts you to create a new addon, and choose what sort of texture you are making on the first screen.
Lets you browse for some textures (anywhere on your hard drive) on the second screen. The diffuse texture is the important one.
You can then name your new texture.
And the defaults on the last two pages are fine.

Then you would just need to log on as a publisher, select your new addon from the ‘Current Addon’ drop down, and publish your addon.

After that you can start moviestorm normally, and try out your new floor/ceiling/wall texture.

In depth version

Materials are the textures that Moviestorm uses for walls, floors and ceilings. Within Moviestorm, when painting a wall, floor, or ceiling the files in each Addon’s “Materials” folders are all called upon, then grouped together and presented to you as choices of wallpapers, grass types, concrete, tintable surfaces, etc.

In order to have your texture show up as one of those choices it must first be placed in the correct folder, registered by type (wall, floor, or ceiling), and then logged into a kind of texture directory called a Materials.materials file. It’s these directories which Moviestorm calls upon in order to build your list of options when painting a wall, floor, or ceiling.

Creating Textures for materials can be difficult as they should be tilable. Consult your image editor’s documentation.

Creating a Material

The following steps apply to wall, floor, and ceiling materials but as an example we’ll start with a floor.

Create the appropriate folder structure - If you haven’t already, create an Addon folder as described above in “Setting Up Shop”. In this folder, mimicking the structure of the Base01 Addon, create each folder within the next until you have YOUR_ADDON_NAME\Data\Materials\Floor\Ground.

Add a texture to your Addon - Following the guidelines in Texture Sizes and Performance, create and save any image in YOUR_ADDON_NAME\Data\Materials\Floor\Ground and name it something like “TestTexture_Diff” (diffuse). If you’re using a .dds image, also save a smaller 200x200 .jpg of the image with exactly the same name in exactly the same location.

Create a Materials.materials file - This file uses XML and keeps track of Materials registered within it. To create this file use a text editor such as Notepad. Avoid using Wordpad as it sometimes adds additional characters and will break the XML. Open your editor and, if otherwise, create a blank document. Save this as “Materials.materials” (case sensitive) in YOUR_ADDON_NAME\Data\Materials\Floor\Ground. Note: If running Microsoft Visa, with User Account Control activated, you will most likely be unable to create this file. If so, disable User Account Control following Method #4 from this page. Note: The necessary act of creating a blank Materials.materials file will temporarily break Moviestorm. When you try to paint a floor and the Materials.materials files are called upon, the blank file stops Moviestorm from compiling your list of options. This is visibly noticeable as the floor options menu comes up blank. Once you’ve registered a texture as a material, the Modder’s Workshop writes it’s XML into the new Materials.materials and everything works correctly once again.

Register your texture as a Material - In the Modshop, along the top tool bar, pull down the “Tile Editor” menu and choose “Tile Editor”. The dialog box in the top left is confusing as it incorrectly states where the folders below actually are. Ignore it. To the right of that are your choices of “Floor”, “Wall”, and “Ceiling”. The default is “Floor”. Below this and to the left is a list of all of the Moviestorm folders which contain a Materials.materials file. Highlight the first Addon\Base01. It lists a Material and displays it on the floor grid. Now, locate and highlight YOUR_ADDON_NAME\Data\Materials\Floor\Ground. An empty folder will list the Materials from the last folder you selected. They’re not actually in your Addon folder.

Moving down, “sounds like” has only recently begun functioning, and along with “tile size”, I have yet to do any experiments. (???) (This section needs expanding)

Next, we have 2 places titled “Name”. Only the first one works. Fill in a name for your Material.

Apparently,  of the 4 buttons down the side and the 3 ticker boxes across the top, “Tintable” is the only one which works in the “Tile Editor”. “Tintable”, allows you to tint the texture in the Set Workshop of Moviestorm.

Below the ticker boxes we have 4 dialog boxes; Diffuse, Specular, Emissive, and Normal. These are for different types of textures. The one you prepared and saved will be the Diffuse. 

Press the browse button on the right side of the Diffuse dialog box. Browse to and choose Floor>Ground>YOUR_TEXTURE. The texture’s file path is now written in the dialog box. Note: The Workshop’s browsing function will, in specific situations, incorrectly write this path as C:\Program Files\Moviestorm\Data\Materials\etc. When this happens, the texture will appear as light grey. Check the path to insure that it starts at Data\Materials\etc. and if not, delete everything before “Data”.

Press the “Preview” button in the bottom left corner. Your texture should now appear, tiled across the floor grid. Going back up to “Shininess”, play with this but “0” will many times just turn a texture black. The remaining ticker boxes are generally used for textures applied to props. Down again, to the right corner, press “Save current material”.

Login as a Publisher. In the Master Browser’s Addon folder, locate the Addon, untick “Requires a License” and publish it for use. Now in Moviestorm, when you paint a floor, you can choose this Material.

Note: There is a problem with thumbnails that are created for materials. For all types of materials (walls, floors, and ceilings), the diffuse texture is used as the thumbnail, however, .dds images do not work correctly at this time. If you used a .dds, and followed the instructions above, Moviestorm will read the small .jpg that you created as the material’s thumbnail instead.

Continue to Modshop Beginners Guide - 4. Importing Sketchup Models
Continue to Modshop Beginners Guide - 5. Importing Other Models

Getting A License

To obtain a publishers licence, you will need a Moviestorm Subscription.

To get a Modder’s Workshop License and enable the Workshop, send a private message to either Ben_S or Chris Ollis with the following details:

First name:
Last name:
Email address: (Unless stipulated they will use the email address you used to register with)

Publisher Name: (the name that will be used to generate your license)

You will have to wait for them to respond with your Publisher’s Password. This could take a few business days or, if over the weekend, longer. Make sure to check your Spam folder.

Continue to Modshop Beginners Guide - 1. Setting Up Shop

Problems with Performance

At this point in Moviestorm’s development, the majority of it’s performance issues come from either an overload on it’s resources or outdated graphic cards or graphic card drivers.

Performance Tips

Extreme slowdown - Like any visual software, Moviestorm has a limit on how much it can handle. Huge detailed sets, models with high resolution textures, and too many characters and animations will hit Moviestorm’s performance pretty hard. A few things to help manage this-

1) Disable fancy effects - When building a movie, go to Settings>Graphics and turn off Shaders. This will decrease the visual quality but will also drastically reduce the strain on Moviestorm. When everything is ready, turn Shaders back on and render the movie.

2) Disable unused assets - When building a movie, go to Settings>Addons and disable any addons that you are definitely not going to use. This keeps Moviestorm from loading files, and using RAM, for items that aren’t needed.

3) Lighten Moviestorm’s Load - Large detailed sets, long scenes, multiple characters, and multiple scenes within a movie will put a strain on Moviestorm’s performance. If your project is likely to cause performance issues, it may be better to plan accordingly and create multiple movies (without multiple scenes in them) and piece the renders together in an outside video editor.

4) Upgrade your RAM - Even 2GB of ram is probably the low end for running Moviestorm and any other intensive program simultaneously. Ram is cheap. Upgrade.

5) Increase the memory available to Moviestorm - Link - If your computer is above the minimum spec, you may want to increase the memory available to Moviestorm, so that it is less likely to run out of memory.

Outdated Graphics Cards or Drivers

Placed characters appear in the wrong place
Cannot select objects/characters/icons
Can’t place items on top of other items in Set Workshop
Constant crashing of Moviestorm

How to find out what graphics card you have (PC)
How to find out what graphics driver version you have (PC)

Distorted Screen - You can’t even navigate through the menus because Moviestorm’s screen is too big. Moviestorm requires a resolution of at least 1024x768, change your monitor settings.

Black Screen where the set should be - Either your graphics card will not run Moviestorm or you have extremely outdated drivers for it.

Tutorial Crashes - If your drivers are updated this could mean that your graphics card does not support the proper version of shaders. Turn off Shaders in the Settings>Graphics menu.

Crashes when trying to create a new movie - If your drivers are updated this could mean that your graphics card does not support the proper version of shaders. Turn off Shaders in the Settings>Graphics menu.

Character Shop crashes - If your drivers are updated this could mean that your graphics card does not support the proper version of shaders. Turn off “shaders” in the Settings>Graphics menu.

Crashing during set navigation - If your drivers are updated this could mean that your graphics card does not support the proper version of shaders. Turn off Shaders in the Settings>Graphics menu.

Applying a texture to a wall/door/floor doesn’t work correctly - If your drivers are updated this could mean that your graphics card does not support the proper version of shaders. Turn off Shaders in the Settings>Graphics menu.

Downloaded Addons don’t appear for you to install or once installed the assets do not appear within Moviestorm - Go to C:\Program Files\Moviestorm Release and you should see a link on the top bar of the File Explorer labeled Compatibility Files. Click on this. Anything in this file is not actually installed in Moviestorm. Delete these files. Restart Moviestorm and then re-install your addons.

Video does not play on a backdrop - Turn on Shaders in the Settings>Graphics menu. Update your graphics card drivers.

The Modder’s Workshop is a program created by Short Fuze to bring new content (props, animations, characters, costumes) into Moviestorm or alter existing content. Currently, users can only import non-interactive props.

Read each entry about the Workshop carefully before following its steps. Mistakes in the Modder’s Workshop may be small, but none go unnoticed and some are show-stoppers, keeping your model from working correctly or appearing at all.

To use the Modder’s Workshop, click Settings on Moviestorm’s front page, then Advanced Features.

To access the Modder’s Workshop you must have a Modder’s License. For now, getting one is only a matter of requesting one from Short Fuze. To learn how, read the first entry in the Modshop Beginner’s Guide, Getting A License.

Note: All Modder’s Workshop users must download and install the Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable Package (x86). This library is used for the new SketchUp importer. The Modder’s Workshop will no longer function without this library installed.

Download the ModdersWorkshop.addon file, and install it, using the ‘Install AddOn File’ button on the Get More Content panel.
You will probably need to restart Moviestorm after loading it for the first time. It may quit with a warning message saying ” No Licence!” Don’t worry, this is normal. This pack is only used by Modders Workshop and doesn’t affect the rest of Moviestorm.

Weather

Various weather effects such as rain and snow were introduced with the special effects pack. There are also controls for wind but these do not appear to affect things like smoke direction yet. Fog and mist are still not available but there are various filters planned which may help with these effects.

Audio/Voice Recordings, 3rd Party Usage

When saving 3rd party audio recordings for use with Moviestorm, it is best to save it as a 16 bit mono wav file*.
To import your voice file, when the “say…” menu comes up, click on the disk icon in the lower left portion of the menu box (import an audio file from your computer) and locate your file.

Outside noises (i.e., television, lawn mowers, the squeaky chair you are sitting on) will cause unwanted results, so it is best to do your recording in a quiet area.

To change the amount of mouth and lip movement during speech, make use of the slider bar on the “say…” menu.  The volume can also be effected in the slider bar above the “lip movement” slider bar.

*If special effects on the audio file are wanted, such as echoes or other distortions, it is best to use a file that is clear of echoes or modifications first (to keep the lip movement from getting confused), then add in a modified audio file while using a 3rd party video editor.

Video Tutorials: SketchUp

Importing a SketchUp Model - by davidwww

Making a Simple Fence Mod - by Fulkster

Welcome to the Moviestorm Wiki!

The Moviestorm wiki is an online open-content collaborative encyclopaedia of Moviestorm-related information, that is, a voluntary association of individuals working to develop a common resource of Moviestorm knowledge. The structure of the project will eventually allow any Moviestorm user to alter its content. Please be advised that nothing found here has necessarily been reviewed by people with the expertise required to provide you with complete, accurate or reliable information.

Please read the additional wiki Terms and Conditions which include a few disclaimers you may want to be aware of.

Note: Due to both the way in which this wiki lists its articles and how a user would most likely be searching for information, much of the wiki is organized in categories and subcategories. Although you can simply go directly to a subcategory, there is important information that you may miss if you don’t start at the top of a category.

As an example, if you’d like to read about Moviestorm and Blender, you should go to Moviestorm Modding, 3D Modeling, and then Blender.

Work in Progress 07/09

Moviestorm, divided into sections and described. Start at the top.

Making a Movie
Starting Moviestorm
New Movie
Set Workshop View
Character View
Director’s View
Camerawork View
Script Editor
Cutting Room View
Publisher’s View

Script Editor

The Script Editor is the only Moviestorm View that is completely optional. Whether you use it or not is entirely dependent on what you wish to achieve and how you work. Here, you can take notes about each scene or the movie as a whole, add scenes (use multiple sets), and adjust settings which effect the entire movie.

Overview

The default view of the Script Editor is set to Overview. This is an entire film at a glance.

1) Overview - To the right, you can write a blurb (a paragraph to get an audience interested) about your movie and an outline detailing it’s events.

2) Scene Panel - The list of scenes, in order from first to last, that appear in your movie.

3) Add Scene - You want your movie to cut from one location to another? Add a new scene. This will take you to the New Movie page where you can choose a set for the new scene. A very powerful tool, you can expand your movie well beyond a simple one room clip by adding new scenes. Note: Depending on your system and the sophistication of your scenes, this can be a strain on Moviestorm. See Lighten Moviestorm’s Load on the Problems with Performance page.

4) Notes - An additional page for notes.

5) Settings - Adjust settings that effect every scene in your movie.
      Allow Improvisations - Turning this off will keep your actors from scratching, sneezing, etc.
      Cel Shading - Turning this on will give Moviestorm a more hand drawn look.

Scenes

An in depth look at each scene in a movie.

6) Scenes -

7)