As most of the packages made it out before the holidays and should hopefully arrive before the year ends (if you're in the US - I'm afraid overseas shipping will take a bit longer), the Kickstarter project will come officially to a close.

For those of you still interested in following the project, please point your browsers to the official Moviesandbox website here:

http://moviesandbox.net

And of course, you can still comment 2and let me know if everything arrived.

Happy Holidays!

Dear Kickstarters,

Moviesandbox Version 1.0 is finally out!

The proper release announcement is on the website: http://www.moviesandbox.net/?p=661

A modest but growing number of Video-Tutorials are on Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/album/256537 

Rudimentary (but growing) Documentation is on the wiki: http://wiki.moviesandbox.net/index.php?title=Main_Page

And you can leave your feedback on the forums here: http://forums.moviesandbox.net/viewforum.php?f=14

The nightly release cycles and updates will continue mid next-week, so do let me know if you are running into any problems. There is only so much testing I can do,but I am dedicated to fixing things as best as I can.

I am planning on doing a live-stream tutorial session this sunday afternoon, so keep an eye on the website for announcements! I will also be packing your rewards from tomorrow onwards, and will be updating the website with your backer information over the next coming days.

The splash screen backers are already included in this release, so please check if I spelled all of your names right. It's not going to stay a Version 1.0 for very long, so there's plenty of room for corrections...

Thank you all soooooooo much again for your support and your patience! And I will post a more fun thank you note once I have slept a little more.

Thank you all, f

That's right, a preview for all operating systems can now be downloaded! Since the term technical is thrown in for good measure, let me direct you to the more explanatory blog posts detailing the plan for the next two weeks.

You can get stuff here and read more here.

This technical test will be very helpful in figuring out how Moviesandbox will work out in the real world, what sort of computer configurations you have and what I have to take care of. It's not super-polished, but the main technical prerequisites are there. From here on it's no more big issues (apart from maybe the occasional Linux hickup).

Please give it a download after reading some of the disclaimer and go ahead and wildly click around, try to break it and let me know how things go so that I can plug the holes before the holidays.

I will be producing Documentation, obviously, on the weekend and try to start sending out rewards come Dec. 15th.

Also, please look at some renderer passes:

This is the basic boring color pass!

The dreaded normal generation pass

The much more pleasant lighting pass

And finally the lovely, but high-maintenance Post-Production Pass

Thanks!

Dear Backers,

I just sent out all the surveys for your backer rewards! Please let me know if you didn't receive yours and I'll go investigate...

I also ordered all the arduinos (Arduino UNOs), stickers, bend-sensors and nice paper for writing functions on. And I will vanish into crunch time to fix up all three versions of moviesandbox, package on a CD (or maybe it'll end up on a DVD) and documentation so that I can ship everything out by the end of the month.

Thanks for bearing with me for so long. Here is some documentation of what happened in Berlin last week:

Comments, Questions and words of encouragement are welcome!

Dear Kickstarters,

Moviesandbox is almost feature complete! I am currently in Berlin and doing a last set of hands-on user testing and feedback sessions with some puppeteers, set-builders and teachers for the Play '11 conference that is happening this weekend.

Here's a video of the latest (and last) major feature: Direct Kinect Puppeteering and Motion Capturing in Moviesandbox! (recording functionality is the last thing on the list).

After being back in Atlanta next week, I will update the Mac and Linux versions and all the tool programs (Kinect scanner, milkscanner, audio input, joystick input) and package everything up, order the arduino and spend my weekends writing the functions for backers.

I am very sorry I continuously run late but also excited to finally have all the features laid out and just focusing on bug-fixing, testing and documentation. It's very close and I am super thankful that you all have given me the extra time to get this right.

Please let me know your thoughts, comments and ideas.