Longboard: A Sketch Based Intelligent Storyboarding Tool for Creating Machinima
Arnav H. Jhala, Curtis Rawls, Samuel Munilla, R. Michael Young · 2008
Real-time 3D game environments provide a compelling medium for cinematic storytelling. Professional film-makers have started using them for pre-visualization. They provide a low-cost learning environment to stu-dents. Longboard is an intelligent storyboarding tool that provides content authors access to 3D graphical environments through an intuitive sketch based inter-face. Users can author scripts and visualize them on a game engine. Longboard provides a pen-based interface for authoring scenarios and sketching 2D storyboard frames that are rendered in 3D on a game engine. A hierarchical causal link planner Darshak encodes cin-ematic shots and idioms as plan operators and automat-ically completes unspecified shots from the user gener-ated scenario and executes script and story actions. A real-time geometric constraint solver written on the Un-real game engine is used for rendering the shots. Long-board is developed as a platform for integrating research in interactive storytelling, intelligent cinematography, and intelligent user interfaces for creative professionals. This paper describes the architecture and implementa-tion of Longboard.