‘You’ve got the interface for this, a timeline interface similar to a video editing program, where you can take these banks of animation data – what we call actions – that you take from your libraries and you stack them up. Then I can vary it over time because it’s completely independent of the time I can vary it over different characters because it’s independent to the geometry and it allows me to create essentially a lot more animation and a lot more characters in a very small period of time.’ I’ve got all this data, I want to apply this to these six characters, and this move to these 12 characters. ‘What this allows, for example, is things like crowd animation. ‘So, Sumatra has the ability to take animation data and map it between two completely distinct hierarchies. It can be the same model, it can be a copy of that model, it can be a completely different model. I can strip off and save into essentially libraries of animation and then apply across another model. So I have a walk, I have a run, I have a jump, I have a wave, I have the head shaking, I’ve got the fingers wiggling. What I can do is strip that data off, then apply more data and strip that off him and build up libraries of motions for my character. ‘I have, for example, a humanoid character with a whole bunch of animation data. This is a concept of abstracting animation data away from the timeline and even away from the geometry itself. ‘What we’ve added is a second group that we call, vaguely, high-level animation tools. We’ve taken the best ideas from Softimage 3D and extended them with some new ui tools to get through that work faster.
This is all the bits about setting up a character, ik and envelope weights and key framing and expressions and constraints and all the things you need to do to have a workable character for whatever your piece is. ‘One is low-level animation, and this is what we’ve excelled at in the past. ‘We divide the animation tools up into two broad categories. And this allows me to iterate hundreds of times in the same amount of time as it used to take one.’ So as I change that surface material, or the light color, or the camera position, it updates in my view instantaneously. So this is full-resolution, full-screen, full-effects, final-quality rendering as you’re working. ‘Sumatra introduces really interactive realtime rendering. A texture, a camera position, anything that you want to do, it’s a several-minute process at the very least to see what that change looks like. Then you make a change to a material and then run a preview. ‘You make a change to a lighting and then you run a preview to see what it looks like.
‘Preview rendering is something that you do at the end and it’s a very repetitive process. ‘There are a couple of things in Sumatra that we’re doing to enable this.’ To make a tool that can create the high-quality work you need in the same amount of time that you’re now spending but produce that much more work. ‘The goal with Sumatra is to try and meet those needs. ‘So, our customers have a lot more work that they need to do, but they don’t necessarily have any more time to do it in. And it gets extended also to the video game market, where new consoles are a lot more powerful and therefore the quality and quantity of artwork that you can put into a game is growing. Looking at what our customers are doing now, the quantity of work that they need to do to be successful is growing exponentially, whether it be in film and the amount of computer graphics in every frame of film, or television commercials, or bumpers and trailers. ‘the thing that we’re looking at with Sumatra is productivity. Here’s are excerpts from that conversation: Playback spoke with Chris Johnston, 3D product manager at Softimage, and asked him to describe the new product. The product, already in beta testing, with a third version coming out this month, is the successor to the company’s Softimage 3D, considered the standard in character animation in film and video. Montreal-based Softimage, a subsidiary of production technology giant Avid, will release its new 3D animation package, code-named Sumatra, at the end of March.
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