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.

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.

Playback spoke with Chris Johnston, 3D product manager at Softimage, and asked him to describe the new product. Here’s are excerpts from that conversation:

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‘the thing that we’re looking at with Sumatra is productivity. 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. 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.

‘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.

‘The goal with Sumatra is to try and meet those needs. 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.

‘There are a couple of things in Sumatra that we’re doing to enable this.’

Interactive rendering

‘Preview rendering is something that you do at the end and it’s a very repetitive process.

‘You make a change to a lighting and then you run a preview to see what it looks like. Then you make a change to a material and then run a preview. 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.

‘Sumatra introduces really interactive realtime rendering. So this is full-resolution, full-screen, full-effects, final-quality rendering as you’re working. So as I change that surface material, or the light color, or the camera position, it updates in my view instantaneously. And this allows me to iterate hundreds of times in the same amount of time as it used to take one.’

The tools

‘We divide the animation tools up into two broad categories.

‘One is low-level animation, and this is what we’ve excelled at in the past. 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. We’ve taken the best ideas from Softimage 3D and extended them with some new ui tools to get through that work faster.

‘What we’ve added is a second group that we call, vaguely, high-level animation tools. This is a concept of abstracting animation data away from the timeline and even away from the geometry itself.

‘I have, for example, a humanoid character with a whole bunch of animation data. 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. 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.

‘I’ve got all the stuff that I’ve done. I can strip off and save into essentially libraries of animation and then apply across another model. It can be the same model, it can be a copy of that model, it can be a completely different model.

‘So, Sumatra has the ability to take animation data and map it between two completely distinct hierarchies.

‘What this allows, for example, is things like crowd animation. I’ve got all this data, I want to apply this to these six characters, and [apply] this move to these 12 characters. 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.’

Non-linear animation

‘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.

‘So not only can I have a walk and a jump, but I can blend the two together, so I have something between a walk and a jump. I can make new animation, a third piece of data from the original two that I had.

‘The one way I imagine this being used, if you have a large animation shop where you’ve got a whole bunch of animators working on the little details of every character. It’s not a very efficient organization because everybody has to do a lot of work. I imagine this as moving almost towards what you see in cel animation, where you’ve got a master animator who does the key frames and lower-level animators who do the in-between frames. With nonlinear animation, you can have a master animator who’s creating all these wonderful nuances of human and animal motion. Then you’ve got lower-level – and for the studio that means lower-paid – animators who are taking all this data and sequencing it together into the final piece.

Macros

Everything you do in a package is logged to a command history. So I can take the last six commands I did, for example, and just drag them onto the tool bar and make a button out of it. So now if I have a task that’s repetitive…I can just click this button. [If] I want to rotate this character 90 degrees to the left and move him to this position and color him blue, all I have to do is select all of them and now hit this button I created. I just have to do it once.’