[CG-Animation LH Tools For 3DS Max
Kody Coste
I mention the Depsgraph because it is the primary thing holding back animation tools at the moment (the activation of the new replacement alone will significantly increase the possibilities with the existing tools).
well, to be fair to make animations (as in movies and such) you also need to do modeling and rendering, quel surprise! As an OSS development depends on coder interest and/or funds, so there you go. There is currently a focus on rendering and the viewport, and those are big projects to undertake. What do you propose could be done to improve this situation?
The work on the viewport right now is arguably more important than updating the animation tools at the moment. The animation tools are a little weak in some spots, but they are still usable in complex setups.
I was thinking more on posing tools, the fact that blender is seted to build your own rig and work with it is a good aproach for the top level of profesionals, but the top level of profesionals even dont use maya, use the studio software. So as you say
Dont forgeting for example that as a particular addon manuelab runs in their own objetives, now another diferent team is building crowd addon, but without character generator and disconected from the manuelab one. Thats and absurd development aproach blenderfundation would help to getin integration between decisive addons teams.
As far as I can tell there is possibly only one other serious fully featured 3D character animation app out there right now ? As in one that is also seeing rapid robust development for high level 3D character animation. Especially now that Softimage has been culled ?
Personally my focus has certainly shifted to Maya and Blender as the two solid character animation options for working with for the future. Possibly Houdini will be one to watch too. But right now for me. All the interesting stuff is happening around Blender and Maya on the character animation front.
With so many unique styles of characters and worlds in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Sony Pictures Animation and Sony Pictures Imageworks relied on its full arsenal of artists and innovative techniques to help craft the film.
Several new tools were created for Across the Spider-Verse, including ones aiding in inklines, brush strokes and frame rates. While these were aspects that had already been tackled to some degree on the first movie, the sequel posed many massive new challenges.
The first Spider-Verse and now its sequel take full advantage of varying animation frame rates. Sometimes animation is on 1s, sometimes 2s or 3s, right up to 6s. The Spider-Punk character Hobie even has different frame rates for different parts of his body and accessories (like his guitar).
But what comes with animating on different frame rates in Maya can add challenges down the line when scenes are published and move into CFX or need to be combined with Houdini simulations, for example. Allowances at these later stages need to be made for the varied frame rates in order to achieve the desired look in cloth sims or explosions.
Imageworks made several brush systems for the film. One of these, the Stroke System, was built inside Nuke and worked as a node-based tool that could render brushes in 3D space. Lasker says this tool, and the other brush tools mentioned below, came about after Imageworks saw the very painterly production art department concept explorations for the different world looks.
Curve System is another Imageworks Nuke tool that allowed artists to create hand-drawn strokes. It was used for very specific and deliberate detailed strokes that could be applied to animated imagery, whereas Stoke System [discussed above] was generally relied upon to distribute tens of thousands of strokes in a scene.
A tool called MaskToInk allowed Imageworks artists to render a simple mask as if it were made of wet ink. The tool then had mappable controls for where and how much ink should spread based on how wet or dry the surface is. Meanwhile, PigmentMerge is a tool that Imageworks used to composite via subtractive color mixing as if they were mixed pigments.
An existing digital painting tool called Rebelle made by Escape Motions was adapted by Imageworks within Houdini to help deliver non-photorealistic looks that simulated the movement of brushes and flow of paint. This was particularly useful in simulating watercolor and oil and acrylic looks, which were generated with Rebelle and then animated over time through Houdini.
Another SPA app was Oto, which allowed hours of recorded dialogue to be automatically transcribed with AI techniques, and deliver the audio files to individual lines. This reduced transcription times for assistant editors.
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First used in the 1986 film Flight of the Navigator, CGI (computer-generated imagery) is ubiquitous these days. Some of the biggest and best movies and TV programmes are made using it, including films like Toy Story, Shrek and Despicable Me, as well as TV shows such as Love Death + Robots, Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Jimmy Neutron. Also referred to as 3D animation, the global CGI animation industry is expected to be worth $33.78 billion by 2026. But what exactly is it and how does the CGI animation process work?
Put simply, CGI animation is the creation of animated visual content using computer software. The term most commonly refers to 3D computer graphics used to create characters, scenes and special effects in films and TV shows. That said, CGI animation is often relied upon for other content too, such as adverts, video games and art.
CGI is mainly created through algorithms that make complex fractal patterns, 2D pixel-based image editors that create vector shapes, and CGI animation software that can be used to animate pretty much anything. We look at the CGI animation process in more detail below.
Modelling is the process of building 3D objects that feature within an animation. This can be done from scratch using CGI animation software modelling tools or by importing 2D illustrations to turn into 3D shapes, like logos. In some cases, there will be existing CAD (computer-aided design) files to work with, but these often need refinement for use in animation and sometimes contain way more information than you actually need.
To be able to see what the viewer will see, you will need a camera in your 3D scene. You can choose a regular camera that moves freely or a target camera that is locked to aim at a particular point in your scene. There are a whole heap of different camera rigs that people have built for certain purposes, such as cranes and steadicams.
Not essential to all CGI (in fact, more of an offshoot if required), simulations are how you can create realistic liquid, fire, smoke, and other more abstract swirling effects. These animations can often be quite hard to achieve, however, though there is simulation-specific CGI animation software that can help. For example, RealFlow is often used in the movie industry to simulate fluids and other special effects, while Kameleon FireEx is a popular fire and gas simulation programme.
Thanks to the latest CG animation software and technologies, the animators were able to produce shots of volcano eruptions, meteor showers and electrical storms. The grooming and fur simulation tools also evolved, allowing for faster iterations and more complex scenes. Character rigging techniques enabled advanced control over the characters, which contributed to amazingly sophisticated animation.
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