AXYZ-Design Anima - animated crowd sim for arch viz

[duke2]

Looks bloody awesome. It's not antiquated like Max's Crowd system, and not over the top and out of reach like Massive.

http://www.axyz-design.com/anima/index.html

The only thing that's questionable is the licensing. The 3 license versions step up by bundling more credits (for the animated people), more workstation licenses, and more render licenses.

- 8 credits, 3 workstations, 5 rendernodes
- 13 credits, 5 workstations, 10 rendernodes
- 18 credits, 10 workstations, unlimited rendernodes

So what - if you're a 1 man shop the only option is the license with 3 workstation licenses? If I were them i'd restructure to the following:
- $400-$500 for 1 workstation, unlimited render nodes, 10 credits
- $200 per additional workstation (with bonus 5 credits)

ie. don't charge for render licenses, it's daft.

My only other question is whether you can use your own people by rigging them a certain way or something. Other than that, it looks really really cool.

Oh wait I also have another question - how much control do you have over the imported assets? Can you diddle with the shader so you give them random shirt colors, for example?

[m_hinks]

Downloading the demo now for some R&D, seems its the full product but restricted to 1 second of animation!! Not very generaous!

[mikeh]

for the price, it seems pretty cheap.
mh

[tricky]

Anybody using this in production? I'm awaiting for approval to use the AXYZ Forum (!!!) but until then, I thought I'd check out you lot.

We ran through the demo and it seemed pretty good. We've just invested in the premium package as we have a project in hand that calls for some animated people. We're having a few issues at the moment which I am hoping to get resolved with AXYZ as soon as possible (tight deadlines etc!).

The main issues so far are:-

1) No way of going to a plan view - a must-have for setting up paths easily.
2) Setting up for network rendering seems awkward and unintuitive. Anyone done this? It seems I have to share my C:drive on our network, then edit a text file which is copied to all the render nodes.
3) Main one so far - it seems you can't have the Anima people as an XREF Scene - it just locks up Max each time I try to do it! This is crucial for our project as we have a massive business park with many buildings. The whole project is managed using XREF Scenes.

[tammo]

I tried it and wasn't able to network render the scene.

A big issue is that if you import the anima scene into max moving the timeslider causes max to freeze for a long time.
In order to adjust some camera moves you would have to remove it and then import again.

And Since you cant import your camera move into anima it's alot of trial and error.

You render it out and discover that you fly through someone or notice some very strange behaviour of the characters.
I rendered as a layer without GI and was able to mask away some of the strangest people.

Another thing that's not so good is that if you want to fill an area with standing people, like for a party, you will have to rotate and move most of them by hand to build groups.

If you don't do that it looks crazy, like everyone is talking to himself with lots of expressive body movement.
Some other people will talk to a wall or to a plant.

To sum it up, it works for medium or long shots, but its still a lot of work to set up and the network rendering is broken.

[ruud3dv]

The biggest problem I have with it that it's not supported by RebusFarm at the moment. There are other renderfarms that do support it, but Rebus has a great price/Ghz and a very userfriendly plugin for controlling remote rendering.
There's no way to 'bake' the people in the scene except creating an animated proxy of it, but that results in VrayProxy files so huge it will take too long or use too much memory to work properly in a renderfarm.

tammo: To make the camera responsive again, you have to disable textures in the viewport, choose: View -> Show Materials in Viewport as -> Standard Display or Hardwares Display (not with Maps!).
At least this worked for me, with a complex scene and about 150 Axyz people imported from Anima.

Edit: still waiting on forum registration approval too..