Dave Geldart is cg animation supervisor at Toronto’s Spin Entertainment, which specializes in cg animation, special effects and compositing for film, television and new media.

High-end 3D computer animation has always been a marriage of the artistic and the technical. Will it become more artist-driven as graphic interfaces improve? Doubtful. A special effect is only ‘special’ the first time you see it. After that you’ve got to do something bigger/better/different, which usually means going beyond the buttons.

Selecting a 3D program can be tricky business. You want your artists to feel at home, but the techies need room to play too. It’s tough to go only by a solution’s feature list since programs with the same features can work quite differently depending on how they are implemented. With so many factors involved, it can become as emotional an issue as the endless Mac vs. pc debate.

So who wants what? The artists want a nice gui (Graphic User Interface) where it’s easy to point, click and pull points. They don’t want to see any of that math stuff reminiscent of the time they got 59 in Grade 11 Trig. The techies have to ‘get under the hood,’ so they’d like a scripting language along with the ability to pepper those nasty math expressions around.

Oh yes, they’d also like a totally configurable user interface so they can pop up their own custom set of buttons and sliders so those artist types won’t go breaking things.

So what’s out there? The two I’ve personally worked with are Side Effects’ Houdini and Alias|Wavefront’s Maya. But there’s plenty more: 3ds max, NewTek LightWave 3D, Softimage|xsi, Electric Image, Martin Hash’s Animation Master, and the freeware Blender from the Netherlands, among others.

Maya has become very popular, particularly for use in character animation. Houdini is often considered effects-oriented, with a great deal of technical flexibility. The most popular package overall in terms of user base is Discreet’s 3ds max. Widely adopted for both characters and effects, it has until recently been regarded as somewhat of a ‘semi-pro’ package, but is now being more widely adopted by high-end users. It integrates some procedural modeling concepts and offers many third-party plug-ins.

LightWave is favored for the quality of its rendering and its integration of a great-looking and unique volumetric cloud/explosion rendering option called Hypervoxels. Although good things have been said about the new Softimage|xsi, Avid’s subsidiary has an uphill battle to regain its user base due to the software’s late release. Electric Image is unusual in that it’s a Mac-based offering, and has been noted for its rendering quality and speed. Moving lower on the price scale we have Martin Hash’s Animation Master for a couple hundred bucks on your pc and Blender freeware, which runs on just about everything but Mac (for now).

Bear in mind, however, that great effects work has been done on the ‘character’ packages, and great characters on the ‘effects’ programs. Manufacturers are furiously working away on new features at this very moment, so none of this is carved in stone.

In addition to the above-mentioned gui and technical concerns, there is a plethora of other issues that come into play in selecting a program. These include:

• Rendering capabilities (quality, speed, multiprocessing, etc.)

• Quality of character animation tools

• Multi-user integration (allowing several animators to combine their work)

• Size of user base (the more people who can use it the better)

• Data management (How long does it take to open and save files, how big do they grow, how much ram does it consume?)

• Quality of support and documentation

• Overall flexibility

• Openness (Can it read and write data from other systems?)

• Stability (How buggy is it? How often does it crash?)

• Price (base cost plus options and ongoing support)

Of course, it’s next to impossible to properly evaluate all this based on a demo or even a short stint using the program. It can be useful to chat with artists and techies who are already using it – if you ask the right questions. Ideally you should talk to people who have had extensive experience with more than one program.

And remember, this can be an emotional issue – be prepared to hear a wide range of opinions. Try to get to the facts behind the feelings.

So much for Vulcan logic. •

-www.spinpro.com