Cinematic Editor

Development Summer of Code
1

Hi !!
I am Mayank from New Delhi, India (GMT + 5:30). I’ll be coding the Cinematic Editor for jME so that we can kick ass of every other game engine out there when it comes to creating cut-scenes/trailers and intros. I have worked with 2d/3d Animation Softwares like 3dsMax, Maya, Flash, After Effects and Combustion. Picking up the good bits from their Timeline and Animation systems, here is a snapshot of what our cinematic editor would look like :

The Cinematic Editor will be composed of the following toolbars and elements :

Playback Control Toolbar: This toolbar will contain buttons to play/pause/stop/seek to next/prev frame/goto first/last frame of the clip
Clip Control Toolbar: The buttons in this toolbar will allow the user to save the cinematic clip to file (jME Binary Exporter), render clip as a video file, toggle physics/particle simulations on/off during clip playback and open a curve editor.
Editor Content Control Toolbar: This toolbar will show/hide the cinematic editor for the current scene. The user can start a new cinematic clip involving the spatials in the current scene/ edit an existing clip by loading it through the clip loader combo box.
Add/Remove Objects Toolbar: Every Object that takes part in the clip will be represented by a Cinematic Layer. Each layer will have keyframes to indicate the start or end of a cinematic event.
This toolbar will allow the user to add new Cinematic Layers (eg Audio/Sound/Motion Path/Transition layers).

Besides building a GUI that utilizes the existing cinematic API, I plan to add some cool features like transitions,custom actions, saving/loading clips to/from memory !!
My mentor is @nehon , who is an amazing and a very experienced graphics programmer and java developer. As of now, I’ll be maintaining the code on github. Feel free to drop in suggestions and feedback and help make the editor even better.

I’m really looking forward to a productive summer and an amazing end product
Regards
Mayank

12 Likes
2

Greetings mayank :wink:
Thanks for introducing yourself to the community.
It will be nice to give frequents heads up in here about the project so every one can follow us.

Also as a side note, i recommend using http://imgur.com/ to host images and link them on the forum.

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Fantastic! Watching rapidly =D

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@nehon: sure thing !
@erlend_sh : thanks for fixing the image and headings :smiley:

5

I would definitely love it! :d :mrgreen:

6

Hi, @mayank , @nehon

If the GSoC rule does not effect other contributions for the good of all, I will try to brings some pull request here and there in the github repository. :slight_smile:

For my framework i also make a sostiphicate media creater ( animation, cinematic… ) based in a timeline UI. So i will contribute the part that not depend in my fw for general usage.

In the mean time, if you guys don’t like help from outside, you can take a look at the Jaret timebar, which I based in to speed up your development progress.

http://jaret.de/timebars/

Cheers,

7

Idk how It can fit in GSoC. I’ts supposed to be the student project, even I won’t make any commit on the cinematic editor…
@erlend_sh is that possible?

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I will try to figure it out. To be safe I’d say stick to making pull requests, that way as long as they’re non-critical @mayank can simply leave them out for the duration of GSoC and then merge them in once the GSoC rules no longer apply.

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@atomix : Hi
Thanks for the interest !! :smiley: . I have read your post about your cinematic editor plugin on this page : http://hub.jmonkeyengine.org/forum/topic/soc-ideas-are-up-see-anything-you-like/ . It looks great !
As @erlend_sh states, I won’t merge the pull requests during GSoC unless the rules permit it, but you can always create them !. I will share the link to the official repo here once its up.