I still have not find a way to recreate this workflow, not even with a simple small test scene. Animations do not play smoothly in 3dsmax, and when you try the live link with vantage, the animation it does not work in vantage. I baked the animations on anima and followed all the steps, but no luck. So, or I am missing something in the proces or this real time animation rendering feature does not work. My questions are:
1-Is real-time Anima playback in Vantage via Live Link currently supported, or does it require the vrscene export step?
2-I can not scrub the timeline as it happens on the video, it gets stuck, and while in live link, if I hit play on 3dsmax, it happens nothing. Any solution?
EDIT: Exporting vrscene it also does not work. The animation loads but the 4d characters simply float there and move freezed, like boxes moving.
I also tried to loading the anima scene into vantage, skiping 3dsmax, but it gives me Anima wrapper failed to load error.
EDIT_02: No worries, I just gave up, nothing really works. AI animation instead
I watched the video and I don’t think it shows Vantage live link playback of the Anima animation. They show animation preview in the 3dsmax viewport and a final rendered animation. Vantage is used to edit lighting, etc. in this case.
When you play the animation in the Vantage interactive viewport it doesn’t update deforming meshes (such as Anima 4D people) because this would greatly reduce framerate, almost certainly causing stuttering. So the meshes are updated only if you go to a fixed time (scrub the timeline), not when doing smooth playback. Of course the final render updates the meshes for every frame.
Which version of Vantage and Anima did you use? There are specific compatibility requirements, for example Anima 7 is only supported in Vantage 3.3.1+.
thanks for the reply, for what you are telling me these are my possible workflows:
1-Anima 4d characters and cars → bake animations → sync with the 3dsmax → live link with Vantage (without any animations, just to check lighting and materials) - > render animation in Vantage
2-Anima 4d characters and cars → bake animations → sync with the 3dsmax → export vrscene with animation → open in Vantage (still unable to see the animated objects, just freezed moving around) - > render in Vantage
3-Anima 4d characters and cars → bake animations → adding an Anima object in Vantage → rendering in Vantage (this one I can not try since I get that Anima wrapper failed to load error, but I guess it would bring nothing new, I would be unable to visualize the animated objects till final render, is that right?)
In the end, independent from the workflow looks like you can only visualize the animated objects in anima and then at final rendering, is that right?
I’ve also noticed that I’m unable to edit the materials on anything coming from Anima — all models come with the classic color, saturation, and contrast issues typical of a commercial asset library. Is there a way to correct the diffuse maps using an Output map and Color Correction in 3ds Max, so the colors fit properly into a linear workflow?
I am using the latest releases from everything, fresh installed, Vray 7 upt 4 hotfix 1 DR2, 3dsmax 2024, Anima 7, Vantage 3.3.1.
With that node you can directly load your Anima project, which produces way smaller files and is faster (not realtime yet). *
In 3ds Max currently, the Anima scenes are transfered to Vantage as normal meshes, which is not ideal as you’ve stated.
We aim to add transfer your Anima assets from 3ds Max to Vantage using this new “Anima Scene” node as soon as possible.
As a “workaround”* (which I admit is tedious a bit) you can create an “Anima Scene” node in Vantage, which should work better and animate when you scrub the timeline in Vantage.
thank you for the answer, yes, I already tried that, but it gives me the error: Anima wrapper failed to load error, when I choose the scene to load inside the project.
When I open the file again it loads the objects, but the animation is not there, then I try to load the scene again from the drop menu of the “anima scene” object and I get this error.
Another question: do you have any suggestion for this? —> “I’ve also noticed that I’m unable to edit the materials on anything coming from Anima — all models come with the classic color, saturation, and contrast issues typical of a commercial asset library. Is there a way to correct the diffuse maps using an Output map and Color Correction in 3ds Max, so the colors fit properly into a linear workflow?”
Oh, that error might be a bug on our side! It should be working!
Could you tell me what version of Anima you use? We support 6.3.0 or newer.
In addition could you past me the whole log? There might be useful information about that.
For editing materials, at this point we do not support that, however I’ll ping the team about it so that we can prioritize it.
These errors don’t seem to be easily reproducible. We’re still trying.
@Macker202 can you also post your debug_log.txt file? (from %APPDATA%/Chaos/Vantage, after the error reproduces because the file gets overwritten)
The two errors are different. “Failed to communicate” means the wrapper started, but later did not respond as expected. While “Anima did not load successfully” means the wrapper executable didn’t even start (“Failed to spawn”). Could it be an antivirus blocking it? Check if it blocked “vantage_anima_wrapper_7.0.0.exe”.
Kostadin is on vacation for the rest of this week, so it may take a while before we debug this.
