Microsoft 3D Movie Maker becomes open source

Microsoft 3D Movie Maker was originally released in 1995. It is or was software primarily intended for children, which allows one to place 3D objects in certain environments to create movies. And the 3D Movie Maker has now made a sort of comeback. Almost 30 years ago, the Microsoft Kids division released the 3D Movie Maker. The year of release was probably no coincidence because 1995 also saw the release of the Pixar hit Toy Story, which proved that computer-animated productions are the future of cartoons.

At that time, the Redmond company published the “appropriate” program that allowed the creation of simple animated films at home. But it basically stayed with this release, as the software was not pursued further. To this day: Microsoft Developer Division Community Manager Scott Hanselman has now announced that the code of the program will be released as open source. The 3D Movie Maker is now available as a (read-only) repository on GitHub (via Windows Central)

From application to open source

The story behind it, however, is rather special: the Redmond company isn’t publishing the code because the program was revived, but because someone asked for it. California programmer and self-proclaimed “hardware/software necromancer,” Foone Turing asked Microsoft in April to release the source code in order to “expand and extend” it.

At the same time, the 3D renderer Brender was released, which was used in games from the 1990s such as Carmageddon and FX Fighter. Hanselman explained why the 3D Movie Maker code is being made open source after all these years Ars Technica: “Because there has never been such an app. Even now, 25 years later, there is a community that is enthusiastic about this tool.” To this day, there are still enthusiasts posting content for the 3D Movie Maker, but Ars calls it “kindly ‘surreal’.”