Please add color map support for Background objects in Anima. I needed this 5 years ago, but I need it again now that I’m trying to use the traffic system. All of my lane markings on my roads are textures, which I can’t see on the background mesh in Anima. This means I can’t place my street lanes properly, as I can’t see any of my lane markings without textures supported on the imported background mesh. It’s just all flat grey with a bit of ambient occlusion.
Also, please add presets for different kinds of navigation support, such as Maya controls, Blender, and 3ds Max styles. This would make things a lot more intuitive.
Hello @tavershima_shande
Thanks for sharing this feedback with us.
About using colors in the geometry background, we agree this would be very helpful in cases like the one you described, and is something our development team is planning to support in the near future.
About supporting different navigation schemes, this is already available here:
Awesome, that’s good to know colour map support is on the future roadmap. Oh yes, I found out afterwards, and after loading up Anima 5, that the navigation support is still included; I just overlooked it. Thanks for the image.
In addition, if it’s not already on the roadmap, I’d like to add a couple more wishlist items that would help very much with Unreal projects:
1) The road setup could be lane-network-based ( similar to this https://youtu.be/Y6EQjHyHVzc), where a user can define the start and end of lanes, then connect the end lane to the desired start of other lanes across intersections. This allows for real-world-like traffic networks that are designed to keep cars within specific lanes at key moments on the road and opens up the possibility for more complex and realistic traffic layouts and intersections. This mimics real-world traffic lane design.
2) Adding traffic creation and vehicles to the Anima Drop panel in Unreal. This would greatly streamline things, and creators could create within their scenes instead of needing to export a background mesh into Anima.
Again, thanks for the feedback, we appreciate it.
About allowing more complex lane networks, this is something we are also working on. However, keep in mind that one of the key design principles of Anima is to provide an easy and quick setup to populate 3D scenes. The sample you provided exposes a complex and very time consuming lane creation system that does not align with that principle. That said, we know we have a lot of room for improvements in our traffic system, and we are actively working on that topic already.
About adding traffic or other simulation tools directly in the UE plugin, that is also not aligned with our planning. We want to keep the simulation systems in the Anima Designer app and limit the use of the plugin tools only for applications not related to the creation/edition of the simulations. For example the Drop panel allows to use directly independent models from the library that do not interact with the environment. But the main goal of the plugin is to read/import the simulations created in the Designer. We follow this design pattern because it has proved to be the best way for our development team to keep up in a sustainable way with all the new versions of the host applications that are released periodically.
You’re welcome. It’s good to know the key design principles. My feedback comes from needing to design traffic systems for digital cities based on real-world locations, but not finding many solutions that allow me to simply do so. I’m all for simplicity without restricting creative vision, and believe that’s where the best, most intuitive tools shine. 4 years ago, I built a real-time traffic system using that Unreal blueprint tool. (It looks more complex than it is.) The main idea is to click to create a spline point at the beginning and end of each lane, then connect them in the intersections according to your desired lane paths. I also used Anima for the characters and was pleasantly surprised by the software. I was hoping I could use the Anima 6 vroom, traffic tools to replace what I created, but I seem to be having some blocking issues with the traffic tool so far when trying to populate my Unreal scene.
I might have to go back to that tool. That said, I am excited for the future releases and improvements to Anima.
Here’s a YouTube link to the city environment I created using Anima 5 and the traffic system I linked to earlier: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyahkaME67M
