Tools

IMP creates movies with a variety tools. This page provides a brief overview of the available tools that are commonly used. Every tool on this page is freely available(as in beer) and most are cross platform.

	POV-Ray - The Persistence of Vision Raytracer is a high-quality, totally free tool for creating stunning three-dimensional graphics. It is available in official versions for Windows, Mac OS/Mac OS X and i86 Linux. The source code is available for those wanting to do their own ports.
	Audacity - Audacity is a free audio editor. You can record sounds, play sounds, import and export WAV, AIFF, and MP3 files, and more. Use it to edit your sounds using Cut, Copy and Paste (with unlimited Undo), mix tracks together, or apply effects to your recordings. It also has a built-in amplitude envelope editor, a customizable spectrogram mode and a frequency analysis window for audio analysis applications. Built-in effects include Bass Boost, Wahwah, and Noise Removal, and it also supports VST plug-in effects. It is available for Windows, Mac OS 9/X and Linux/Unix.
	JPatch - JPatch is a 3D Modelling/Animation tool designed to model and animate "organic" shapes such as humans, animals, aliens, etc. It is a bezier-spline modeller and works with so-called "Coon's patches" - the same patches are used by the popular Windows freeware modellers sPatch and Hamapatch and the commercial program Animation Master (they are called Hash patches there). It is written entirely in Java. This means it should run on every platform that supports Java and Java 3D. Don't be afraid of "poor Java performance". If you've got a Pentium III 500MHz or something equivalent it's fast enough to model complex shapes with several thousend control points in realtime. Actually it's nearly as fast as sPatch and a lot faster than Hamapatch! It is free software (open source); you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License. JPatch is not a renderer (and never will be). Models can be exported as meshes of bicubic patches to POV-Ray and RenderMan renderers.
	Blender - Blender is the first and only fully integrated 3D graphics creation suite allowing modeling, animation, rendering, post-production, realtime interactive 3D and game creation and playback with cross-platform compatibility - all in one tidy, easily and free downloadable package!
	CinePaint - CinePaint is a free open source painting and image retouching program designed to work best with 35mm film and other high resolution high dynamic range images. It is the most popular open source tool in the motion picture industry -- used in 2 Fast 2 Furious, Scooby-Doo, Harry Potter, Stuart Little and other feature films. CinePaint is used for painting of background mattes and for frame-by-frame retouching of movies. CinePaint is available for Linux, Macintosh OS X, Windows, and other popular operating systems.
	TortoiseCVS - TortoiseCVS lets you work with files under CVS version control directly from Windows Explorer. It's freely available under the GPL. With TortoiseCVS you can directly check out modules, update, commit and see differences by right clicking on files and folders within Explorer. You can see the state of a file with overlays on top of the normal icons within Explorer. It even works from within the file open dialog. You can perform tagging, branching, merging and importing, and you can go directly to a browser web log (using ViewCVS or CVSWeb) on a particular file.