I have now spent two weeks testing and working with Anima in a customer project. My conclusion: I can’t afford to use it, because the process is too slow and requires too much iterations and this combination is killing me. Let me show an example:
I have crossing in a city, i.e two streets, four lanes in both, so totally eight lanes. Attached some screen captures to clarify it. I am working on an animation. Anima characters and cars, also custom branded cars that needs to fit into the the Anima traffic flow in 3ds max (no problem other than I need to tweak the Anima traffic back and forth to fine tune timings, so I need to make several adjustments both in Anima and 3d Max). Le’s see the time it takes to make one adjustment round:
Open the existing 3ds max file that contains already earlier version of the Anima scene to be corrected: opening time 5min 20s (if no Anima scene is in max file the opening time 2min 20s)
Open the Anima project and scene 2min 20s
Unlock Anima scene 1min 50s
Bake Anima scene after corrections 2min 30s
Import corrected scene back to 3ds max 11min
As you can see one correction round from the beginning total time is 23 min, and if all projects are open still 15 min. Everyone working on real project knows that it will easily take tens of of correction and fine tuning rounds. I think Chaos should have a serious look at how to improve Anima process and architecture. I can’t afford to use it in current shape (or none of my customers are ready to pay for the time I need to work with this).
One additional thing to add salt to the wounds. The control of vechicles is so limeted that they need constant adjustment and workarounds as they can make funny movents like u-turns, run over characters, turn against other cars etc. All this means that you need to make many iterations back and forth to fiddle with them.
Let me know if you have any ideas how to speed up the process. If there will be any further development in this respect I am happy to do some beta testing if needed.
Not an answer to your question but Tyflow has vehicle support now https://youtu.be/5qGs3ku8sSQ and an AI system for multi vehicle support apparently. Might be worth looking into in the future.
First of all, let me tell you that we truly appreciate your honest and detailed feedback. The information you shared here, along with the one you already shared in this previous thread, is the kind of information that helps us quickly notice that we have a workflow problem that needs to be resolved.
The most part of the extended waiting times you mentioned are probably caused by the collision background you are using. As we mentioned in that other thread where you exposed this for the first time, this issue was introduced in Anima 7, and we agree this is something that must be resolved even though it only starts to be noticeable when the background reaches an area of ~50.000 m². The Anima Dev team is working on a solution since we exposed the issue to them, right after we got your initial report and confirmed the behaviour you exposed.
From the internal analysis we did on the issue, we have identified several changes that have potential to dramatically reduce the impact this is having on the load/modification/sync times. We are already making progress in that direction, and there are more improvements waiting in its turn to get implemented before the new Anima update gets released.
About the weird vehicle behaviours you mentioned, we are aware they can happen sometimes, but it is very tricky to reproduce those issues consistently because of the significant internal complexity involved with the traffic simulation. Therefore, we would appreciate it if you could provide us some specific scene samples we could use to try to debug those issues.
At the same time, it would be helpful for us to test the scene load improvements we are working on by directly testing them using your scene. To be clear, we can replicate the extended load times with our own scenes. However, using your own scenes we could double-check that we are not missing anything in the process.
To avoid privacy issues, we encourage you to share these scenes with us by opening a ticket via the Chaos Help Center form.
