very OT: anyone using aXYZ Anima?

[tricky]

I am really trying to get Anima to work for us but we are really struggling. I wondered if anyone on here is using Anima who might be able to assist? The Anima forums are very slow with very few users. We have taken a leap with the software but it is pretty painful to be honest. Very powerful but it feels like it is in really early beta stages of development.

[squeakybadger]

Yup, we have been using it from very early on. The forums are terrible so I wouldn't bother.

What's the problem? The hardest part in getting anima into the workflow is knowing what it likes to do and what it doesn't.

It is one picky bugger...

[tricky]

Yup, we have been using it from very early on. The forums are terrible so I wouldn't bother.

What's the problem? The hardest part in getting anima into the workflow is knowing what it likes to do and what it doesn't.

It is one picky bugger...

It certainly bloody is picky! The interface is a dogs dinner for a start.

We used it on a live job a few months back and just about managed to get it working. Since then, we haven't really touched it, but I've come back to it to try and push things a bit. Is it me, or when you use the one-and-only-modifier 'Cloner', the random animations it applies to the walk cycles tend to look bloody awful??? All the characters look like hunchbacks or something. I typically end up turning off the actions altogether!

[tricky]

Launched anima this morning and there was another update. Not sure what has changed (I haven't found an issues list anywhere), but it seems I can now scrub through the timeline OK and zoom all works (a bit) better than it did.

[squeakybadger]

Yes, cloner is the only modifier at the moment. Most of the animations are ok, just turn off 'salutations', that wavey one is awful

My method is to make standing groups dotted around, then have the walkers to fill in the gaps, it's less trouble that way.

[tricky]

At the minute I'm trying to get velocity channels working with them for post motion blur. Its a pain so far. They don't seem to work with velocity very well. I'm going to try converting to a vrayproxy first and see what happens.

I'm now assuming that you can't use a velocity channel on morphing geometry. Makes sense I guess.

[robdeja]

We've used AnimAAARRGGGHH! a couple of times. It caused all sorts of problems for us, from scenes which would crash the instant the Anima data imported (and then corrupt the file) to the fact that we couldn't network render through Deadline. The support was not great - the forum was dead and after emailing Diego about the Deadline problem, he never really seemed to do anything about it except fob me off.
I think some of the motions are just plain bizarre and even fundamentals such as some of the walk cycles not fitting the characters properly are quite serious issues for the software.

Autodesk Gepetto is looking very promising and will likely kill Anima when it's released.

[tricky]

Autodesk Gepetto is looking very promising and will likely kill Anima when it's released.

Yes - looking forward to this too. Seems quite a way off though. I just don't think the team behind Anima realise how useful Anima could be if they were to develop it quicker than they are. Its just painful trying to get an answer from them.

[wxyz]

Have people had luck gaming the xml file to create VRay shaders that are visible in Nitrous?

[DH]

Hey Tricky,

I was in touch with you a while ago about using anima. We purchased it and well, have had mixed success with it. I noticed one of the posts mentioned corrupt files. It happened to me but what i found out was you have to delete the axyz object from your scene and that will delete all other items associated with anima. If you delete some actors without deleting the main axyz object then that is when the file gets corrupt. What method are you using for rendering the characters? I typically run my calcs with primary being irradiance and secondary being lightcache, merge the anima objects in and render only those elements with brute force. Works fine most of the time but have noticed flickering on the anima objects in some scenes (using brute force as well as light cache on them). Perhaps my lightcache settings aren't high enough. Would like to get others' feedback on what rendering methods they are using.

cheers,
Rob