The Best At Character Animation, Bar-None!

#3

How can I simply transfer a character including animation to any other 3D software ?

#4

Vegan:

I have used XSI, Maya, Houdini and Blender, primarily. Though character animation is certainly included in each of these excellent products, and all of these are used in production environments, on a daily basis, they simply aren’t as easy and direct to use, have much steeper learning curves, require geometry of higher complexity for many objects, and, in my opinion, aren’t as nicely integrated into a friendly,ergonomic and time-and-frustration-saving character animation system as is found in Animation Master. And there is simply no comparison based upon price point, unless you include Blender, which, Ton openly admits, needs a complete re-write of its character animation toolset.

Houdini, currently has no simple way to re-use character “actions”. XSI has the toolset, but I find its implementation of them very complex, requiring the user not take his hands off the wheel or eyes off the road for even a second. Put another way, Animation Master is simpler, more direct, user-friendly, (more intuitive for artists), requires less technical savvy to produce similar results and, I believe, helps you get any character animation task done in less time, for less money - the ultimate in 3D economy, if you will.

Eventually, every animator realizes that the one thing working against him is time. The other thing that can severely limit his ability to produce is the level of frustration required to do any given task. When you start adding up all of the tasks that have a degree of frustration attached to them, pretty soon you find yourself in the boobie hatch or the bar, so to speak, and not producing very much animated content. As Martin, himself, has stated, ‘Animation Master gives you more time to tell more stories’, which, after all, is what we animators are striving to do, no? Oh, and did I mention the cost?

Sincerely,

Greg Smith

#5

So it is NOT possible to export character including animation to other 3D software !

#6

You can’t. Not simply, if at all.

#7

Yes, I knew this for version 10 (Ran13: in response to your post before your edit ;))
I have tried some demos of AM and I really like it. I use Max7’s CS4 and Motion Builder and AM could really simplify some tasks for me. I simply don’t understand why it is so hard to develop something that would make it possible to import AM character incl. their animation to other software. This would make it way more interesting to many people.

#8

TRick:

It is true that if Animation Master has a fault,(however, to me, a benefit), it is that of being a “self-contained” animation environment, except that footage generated with AM can be composited externally in the same way as any other footage from any other app. This, in itself, is an interesting topic, since most animation ends up in the compositing room, anyway. I fail to understand the need to have all programs “talk to each other”.

Every major 3D application on the market seeks to be an “end all, be all” kind of product. They would all like your sole patronage. None of them really want you to be bouncing back and forth from program to program. When they do allow it, the solution tends to be messy and time consuming and generally raises the frustration level of the animation process as a whole. Why do animators want to do this to themselves - the process is difficult enough, as it is? Why do so many 3D artists want to simulate an assembly line production workflow, (which is what exists in nearly every major animation studio)? To me, animation was supposed to be a liberating experience, allowing one to express themselves in specific ways. If all of the tools needed to do this exist in one application, then why would one seek to compicate the process? I think it is great that we have been provided with a thorough, comprehensive and liberating character animation environment - the kind Animation Master provides. It tries to stay out of your creative way.

Additionally, just how much money and time are we going to throw at this ambition of ours, anyway? How much does a carpenter have to spend on his tools before he feels qualified to build a house? Is it necessary for him to have a brand new truck, (in addition to all of the highest priced hammers and squares and levels and transits), to haul the tools around, so that, finally, he can get around to building that first house?

If I don’t need to add more machinery to my personal animation factory, why should I? The more complicated we make things, especially those involving the computer, the more headaches we a lining up for ourselves in the future. Hash has tried to keep it as simple as possible for the animator - what refreshment! What a boon!

If you are working at animation so that you can finally land that assembly line job, Animation Master is all you need to get there - just ask Victor Navone.

If, on the other hand, you are working day and night at animation so that you can tell that story that just has to be told, Animation Master is all you need, as well.

Sincerely,

Greg Smith

#9

Being neck deep in animating a film that is already 16 minutes long and looks to be about 40 minutes long, I can attest to the truth about animators coming to realize that TIME is their greatest limiter… And A:M’s pipeline has simply rocked so far for me.

But I WAS hoping this thread was about you claiming to BE the greatest character animator bar none… that woulda been cool! :wip:

And yeah, A:M has been all I needed- my own skills really have been the limiter, not A:M. Well, I mean it’s the only 3d app I’ve needed for my film- Paint Shop Pro, Premiere, Audition, After Effects, those things have all helped… Picked up old versions of the Adobe stuff for cheap (<$70 each) and audition was cheap enugh at the student price.

Ok, back to animating for me…

#10

Dearmad:

I like your moniker, “Rendering Monk”. That says it all about alot of us. What the heck are we playing at, anyway? Animation is no kind of life, really. But that doesn’t stop us, does it? And, that part about rendering - you know, I think the whole process is overrated. All the time people spend setting up renderings so they can achieve the photo-real, which they never do. And, why does an artist want everything to look like a photo? Weren’t most of us thoroughly entertained by the likes of Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd?

Sincerely,

Greg Smith

#11

Well, if your claims are true, AM sounds very cool. I used it back in '99 but moved on to messiah, Lightwave and Maya (at work). I do miss AM though. It was so straightforward. My biggest gripes with it were the splines causing rendering weirdnesses and the lack of fur. I know these things have supposedly been fixed/added. Care to comment on these two areas?

Thanks,

-Brian

#12

Well, I’m not heavy into realism, but I do like to ensure the look of my render is as I want it…

Dragonfollower,
I’m still using v8.5 and don’t really run into spline wierdness in rendering… so I don’t know what you’re talking about. The latest version of A:M has a nerw porcelein mat that is user adjustable, and generally a lot of the spline artifacting you may have had to be extra careful about has been improved from what I hear.

#13

On the subject of fur:

http://www.hash.com/stills/displayimage.php?album=2&pos=-694

#14

I must say that, as a freelance animator, A:M has made my business and lively hood possible. The simple fact is that I can compete with outsourced animation price-wise simply because I don’t need more than myself and perhaps one or two other animators to take a project from start to finish and none of us are programmers. We come in at a fair amount less than other animators with a shorter turn around.

And before anyone berates me for low-balling my competition, if they could turn projects over as fast as I could they could lower their rates as well, that’s really where it is. I have an on occasion use Maya, when required by a contract situation (ie existing models provided in .ma format) but my rates in that software are considerably higher, lowering my ability to compete, all based on the time it takes me to complete a project.

I’m sure a good deal of the speed issue is that I know A:M like the back of my hand, but I also believe that my ability to learn it so well stems from it’s clean and intuitive animation interface and toolset.

-David Rogers

#15

Simply, not true. SESI has quietly developed an extremely powerful set of tools for character animation, really any animation, over the last few years. It has two major features that no other software has specificly in this regard to reusing animation; takes and CHOPs. With takes, you can iterate animation within a single file, merge animation variations, embed variations into assets, and selectively render varitions of animation. Not just character animation either. If it’s a parameter that can be keyed (which is almost all of them) or a parameter that can be changed, it can be used in a take. CHOPs will allow you to blend, filter, animation on any channel type, not just character animation and audio as well. You can rapidly build a library of cycles and blend or switch through them based on triggers or events, and due to the nature of Houdini, be able to go back at any point in the project adding new takes, modify old takes or add completely new cycles.

In addition, to these features you can retime animation in the flipbook, and the sheer flexibility and power of it’s channel editor is staggering even when comapred to dedicated animation tools. You should really take the time to look into it if you are serious about animation.

You say one of the biggest factors an animator works against is time. FOr that reason alone Houdini should be seriously considered. The program is structured in such a way as to make reusing and repurposing old assets and animation transparent. There are digital assets (characters tools, shader, libraries, animation. cameras, output drivers, effects anything can be an asset) which can be modified and updated across an entire project, or stored within your daily set of tools so they are always at your disposal, right down to simple copy and paste fuctionality. Can you, for instance, launch two sessions of Hash simultaneously, and copy and paste assets or entire shots from one ot the other? I’ll grant you that other packages are simpler or easier to learn, but Houdini really is the most straightfoward and the initial investment of time upfront building assets is easily offset by Houdini’s ability to recycle and repurpose old work.

#16

Yes, Houdini is a very powerful procedural animation package. :slight_smile: i’m not an expert in it by any means and I’m sure that no one was attempting to belittle it’s capabilities. mr. bruce there is just hitting the ‘wow’ stage of A:M (happens to most of us at one point or another :slight_smile: ).

When we talk amongst ourselves here in the Hash forum of cgtalk we like to wax poetic about the capacity of our little app, much like you do about Houdini, no offense I hope.

A:M can indeed take any animation channel and apply it to any object with a copy and paste, or a simple import, I find most of the time that I don’t use this functionality even though it’s been one of the strengths of the software for a long time now. Its ability to layer and mix portions of animations has been with the software since at least v3 (possibly earlier but my memory gets fuzzy after all these years.)

With that I think it’s probably time to close this conversation before anyone gets a feeling hurt or flames start to fly. :slight_smile: I’d prefer not to lock the thread so I hope we can all be grown ups and just move on to other topics.

-David

#17

You can export characters as a 3DS file or you could and probably still can with a plug-in from Arthur Walasek…as an obj file…best to build your model as all 4 point patches.

You can export action files as bvh files.

So, yes, you can export characters and animation.

You can also render the animation in A:M with an alpha channel and composite all with whatever you’ve created in another program. But that takes more organization and planning than some want to attempt.

Kevin

#18

MCronin:

I know that there are ways to re-use animation within Houdini, but how easy is this for the non-technical director to achieve? I mean, re-use, in the way that both Animation Master and XSI re-use it, (by encapsulating a character’s motion into a clip, which, in turn becomes a reusable source and stored in a library somewhere). I mean storing all of the a character’s motion within a single clip source. Now, I’d really like to hear you share the short version for accomplishing such a thing using Houdini, the channel editor and CHOPS. Or, just point me to the tutorial, anywhere, that covers this technique. (I’ve spent many hours searching for just such an item). If you could post this method here, and allow some of us to try it, I would then like to run a survey and find out how many who read your description or followed this tutorial could actually duplicate the process and the result. In addition, I would like to know just how long it takes everyone to do so. Houdini offers a screaming free deal with regards to even their top of the line product, (not for commercial use, of course), and the Houdini suite of programs takes very little time to download, so I think my request is a reasonable one.

Believe me, I have spent more than a few hours trying to get a handle on Houdini’s CHOPs, and to do the same thing that takes only a few moments in Animation Master, (creating a short animation and encapsulating all of the character movement in the “Action” object, dragging and dropping the “Action” into the timeline). Honestly, creating a CHOPs network that accomplishes the same simple task performed in Animation Master would take many, many times more moments to achieve within the Houdini CHOPs paradigm, and I have been unable to find any example, explained and demonstrated, showing character “action” reuability, even using the new “Takes” in version 7. I’d love to look at it if it exists. These are really the points I am trying to make. I am not attempting to offend anyone, just stating the facts as I have experienced them and waiting for a demonstration to the contrary.

I know the good people at SideFX are working on making character animation simpler and more powerful, and I like the Houdini package, in general, but, not only is it many times more expensive, it is many times more difficult to achieve the same kind of finished character animation, as can be achieved by even a novice, with the Animation Master program. Now, if you want to systemically, fractally model a tornado or typhoon or tidal wave, etc, believable enough to be viewed on the 70mm screen and scare an audience into shock, then Houdini is definitely the application of choice. I don’t think I would choose it to create classic style cartoon animation, however, where it pays in enormous dividends to be able to re-use animation in the simple way that Animation Master allows.

Sincerely,

Greg Smith

#19

I’ll grant you there is a lack of Houdini information available but it’s not rocket science and certainly no where near as difficult as you seem to make it out to be.

To create clips or bclips, go into CHOPs, place a fetch CHOP, point it at the object you want to get animation from, filter the channels you want ( you can get all channels, created channels; those which are keyed, channels that are non constant; those keyed and those with expressions, or selectively grab discrete channels. When you have the channels you want, right click the CHOP and save the clip. Alrenatively you can do it in the textport or with a script in about 2 seconds. I don’t think that’s anymore complicated than any other software, plus it’s much more flexible.

To create a take, open the take panel, click the add take button and drag and drop an object or set of parameters into the take. You can selectively add or remove parameters from the take once it’s created. To save a take, just right click it and selct the save option you desire. Again dead simple, I don’t know how they could have made it easier. The hardest part about it is selecting what channels and parameters you want to include in a take or a clip because Houdini doesn’t hide anything from you where as other animation programs put a ton of constraints on what the user has access to and what the user can key.

To mix animation and export it back to object, you only need 4 CHOPs. two file CHOPs to load the clips (two is a simple example you could load a whole library of clips if you like), a CHOP to combine them (interpolate will suffice) and an export CHOP to send the animation back to the object. I know setting up these 4 CHOPs can take literally minutes of your time, but the nice thing is you only have to do it once. Once you have built a suitable animation mixer, you can save it as a new CHOP so in the future you only have to place your animation custom animation mixer CHOP, rather than rebuild that little network. The really nice thing, is that you can extend your animation mixer as needed, adding features as neccessity warrants. You can easily put something together in a short period of time that’s much more robust than the animation mixers available in other software. Granted it’s not going to have a cute little interface full of icons you can click on, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be difficult to use or understand. I’ve seen someone put together e rough but fairly complete crowd animation system in CHOPs in 2 days. Granted he’s a bright guy and what he did was basicly a proof of concept, but it worked and he was able to roll it into a complete crowd system in pretty short order. Anyone who takes the time to learn the software can put together a simple animation mixer. This type of functionality is the reason why Houdini’s price is, I think justified. There is no other software out there that will let you sit down and roll your own crowd simulator or animation mixer to the level that Houdini does in a such a short matter of time.

I understand that some people just can’t deal with Houdini because it’s so alien to other software packages. Animation Master is the right tool for you but I don’t think you can emphaticly call it the best character tool available, it’s completely subjective. For me Houdini has every other piece of software outclassed as far as animation tools are concerned but I understand some people just want simple, complete, canned solutions and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Having people take some sort of challenge to prove the superiority of Hash’s animation mixer is a bit silly. I wouldn’t expect to be able to sit down in front of Hash and understand the ins and outs of it;s animation mixer in a matter of minutes, and it isn’t going to happen for anyone with Houdini. I literally used Houdini on and off for five months before it started to make any sort of sense to me. There’s this wierd process that goes along with learning Houdini that I think most proficient Houdini users refer to as the “pin drop”. You fumble around with the software for an extended period of time, for me it was two weeks of forcing myself to poke around in Houdini for 10 hours a day, and then suddenly there’s this moment of clarity where the whole package comes into focus. It’s gestalt. Once you learn one aspect or even one tool and fully grasp what Houdini is doing suddenly the rest of it falls into place because everything in Houdini works basicly the same way. Sure you then have to play with tools to figure out what they are useful for in and of themselves, but you will seemingly innately know how to use everything in the package.

#20

MCronin:

I don’t think I follow your example, entirely. I also don’t think the routine you describe to create a “mixer” very easy to follow, and I’ve never found that term “mixer” suitably explained amongst the Houdini community. I know what the channel editor is, I know what the CHOPs editor is, but what and where is the mixer - is it not just CHOPs itself? Or is it “that little network”? I’m confused already. Did anyone else entirely follow the example? I know you know what you mean, but I’m afraid most everyone else does not. I find this kind of explaination very common throughout the Houdini community. It seems nobody has the time to sit down and explain things in simple, step-by-step terms, they’re just too busy making fortunes being technical directors and such. And, there’s nothing wrong with that, either. They know that they know, and that is good enough.

If folks want Houdini to become a household name, I think, since it is so simple, as you have stated, and not rocket science, someone will have to graphically illustrate these simple proceedures which, in Animation Master, are already graphically simple to understand and use.

This strikes on an important point. Who uses the software and what do most of them attempt to do with it? Also, how is their thinking oriented? If the software is aimed at people who not only are used to thinking in abstractions, but prefer to think in abstractions, (like flow charts, mathematical expressions, programmatic scripts, acronyms, etc. - i.e. symbols of things which stand for other things), then those users, when asked to explain how to use the software, will resort to applying those abstractions in their explaination, if you follow me.

My perception is that, Houdini, from the start, was designed by people who think abstractively for those who prefer to think abstractively - technical directors, scriptors, programmers. This is fine, since it is pretty hard to simulate natural phenomenon and photo-real special effects without these kinds of abstractions - unless, however, you happened to be a really good artist and animator who would attempt to tackle the same problem visually and audibly. Given a problem, some people will attempt to solve it by means of abstraction, and others will attempt to solve it visually, instinctively. Some people prefer to think and problem solve in terms they encounter every day in the “real” world - i.e. visually, audibly, graphically - a picture is worth a thousand words, sort of thing. These would be, generally, the artists among us - most of whom, from their youth, did not go out of their way to take extra math classes, nor did they have an instinctive inclination to understand or explain things by means of the flow chart. These people also, by nature, tend to have a repulsion to acronyms and “secret” code, if you will. It is dispositional at its core. Simplicity in execution would also be something preferred by this kind of person - rather than complexity with infinite possibilities. This must be why many artists still love the pencil and the brush more than they love the computer and the keyboard.

Still, as artists, many are being forced to use the still alien technology of the computer and keyboard. But, they will be naturally inclined toward a solution that is most familiar to them - a graphical solution which tries to stay out of the way, just like the pencil does or the brush. I think you will find that among the artists who are using Houdini for character animation, most of them have been given, by the technical directors, a much simpler, yet powerful set of tools that reside at the object level of the program and hide any hint of CHOPs and the “mixer” from them. And this lies at the heart of our discussion. With Houdini, simple tools which encapsulate complex functionality must be created first, before the common artist can feel comfortable using them, and directly accomplish the task at hand. In Animation Master, the same, and often-times more useful, complex functionality has already been encapsulated into a set of easy-to-use tools that allow the artist to get a job done quickly. One program costs the user $299 and the other one costs the user $1999 or more. (If you need fur and hair, for example). One program requires 10 months, 10 hours per day to get a handle on, the other requires a few hours per day for a few weekends in a row to start producing impressive content. Given the nature and financial position of the average artist, which program might you predict he would choose over the other? It is with regard to these aspects that I refer to Animation Master as “The best at character animation bar-none.” And, Houdini is a great tool for those it was designed for, as well.

Sincerely,

Greg Smith

#21

My primary use for A:M used to be game development. Therefore compositing is out of the question. My renderer is the HL2 engine, or the Doom3 engine, or the Nebula Device or the Torque engine, or whatever my latest project uses. I’m not a programmer, but I’ve been told by programmers that the A:M SDK makes it difficult to get at the bone data for some reason, so I have had little luck in getting custom tools made to get my work out of A:M, especially on the animation side of things.

With all the different game engine formats I require from time to time, a valuable conversion tool for me was MilkShape3D. Milkshape has a BVH importer, but bvh’s coming out of A:M do nothing but create “star trek transporter accidents” out of my animations. I’ve tried limiting my rigs to straight forward rigid binding (no weighted CP’s, no fancy constraint systems) and FK, I’ve tried baking the actions before export…you name it, I’ve tried it. No joy…

I moved on.

#22

THe feature of exporting bvh is listed but It doesn’t work well at all. There is a breakdown in eithr the exporting or the Baking of the action beforehand that makes the file pretty much useless. I put a bug report into hashover a month ago with nothing to show for it.