In the world of 3D animation, the century’s turn is particularly poignant. Most of the techniques pioneered in the field have come only in the last four years and therefore will more easily fit in as innovations of the 2000s than the 1900s.

Whether it is cinema, tv, video games or the Web, the role of 3D animation is becoming greater with each new innovation.

Three groundbreaking 3D animation software manufacturers, Softimage, Alias|Wavefront and Side Effects – all, incidentally, launched in Canada – are leading the charge. Few movies or commercials make it out of post without some sort of touch-up from one of their software packages.

But where exactly is it leading us?

For one, by the wonders of 3D, we are moving ever closer to an odd kind of control over nature itself. Through advanced animation software applications, the business is moving toward creating life on-screen indiscernible from the real thing.

‘I think in general the goal for 3D animation is ultimate believability,’ says Chris Johnston, 3D product manager at Softimage. ‘That is the holy grail.’

Johnston uses the term ‘believability’ rather than ‘photorealism’ because they are different concepts: just because it looks real doesn’t mean we actually believe it’s real. ‘We might not be able to describe it, but as audience members we can identify exactly what is correct and what is incorrect in a human motion, or even a natural motion like trees blowing in the wind or a horse running.’

While the technology is not quite there yet, Johnston says it is coming, probably within a few short years.

The major packages, Maya, Houdini and Softimage’s new product – due out later this year and code-named Sumatra – have all been built with an open architecture which keeps such advancements in mind. It leaves the software ready for any eventuality.

You might say, open architecture is the foundation to believability.

Alias|Wavefront will have a major release of Maya 3.0 later this year. With each new version of the software, a new character application has been addressed, from skin, to fur, to cloth. It was Maya’s advanced Cloth simulation that animators used to dress Stuart Little.

‘There have been examples of cloth-type animation solutions in the past, but generally they have all used what are known as spring-based soft body techniques to generate the motion. The result of that is you get very rubbery, or silky looking fabric., says Maya product manager Chris Ford.

‘Cloth uses a completely different algorithm which enables you to get medium stiffness fabrics.’

Move to the Web

While animation moves closer and closer to reality, it is also finding new applications in the virtual world as well. One of these is in gaming.

Side Effects, for example, recently announced its entry as a middleware developer, applying its particle engine and motion engine, based on Houdini technology, to PlayStation 2 games. Softimage, meanwhile, has long been involved in gaming, and Alias| Wavefront has also begun developing tools in Maya for the gaming market.

While the gaming industry has great growth potential, Kim Davidson, president and coo of Side Effects, sees the Web as the next great frontier for 3D animation. He says Side Effects will begin developing for Web content creation, and probably participating on some level, within the next year.

‘You know it’s coming and you don’t need too many indicators,’ he says.

Davidson says as more and more broadcasters and commercial producers are forced to the Web because their clients demand a presence, the types of equipment they use will have to keep pace.

‘You’re seeing new players coming on the scene to create content, you’re seeing more money coming into content, and you’re seeing more sophisticated technology to play the content.’

Davidson believes Web creators ‘are having to do standard stuff with what we’d consider bad tools….We’re going to start focusing some of our attention to better, suitable, maybe smaller Web-based tools, but particularly as it addresses 3D animation.’

Back to the artists

On the functionality side, each new generation of software demonstrates an increased emphasis on procedurally driven animation effects.

One of the benefits to these programs is that they are ever more rapidly putting animation back into the hands of the artists, who, with little technical background, can apply their skills and visions to 3D animation.

That is exactly the goal for Maya’s Paint Effects, says Ford.

Paint Effects allows an artist to paint on a 2D canvas or in a 3D space ‘on or between objects,’ resulting in an easy way to create trees, grass, lightning or hair, any dynamic or particle-derived construction.

‘So when you render it,’ Ford says, ‘you can actually fly through it. The orientation of the rendered image is always correct in relation to the observer.

‘In no sense are you flying through a series of 2D plains. You’re actually flying through and within a 3D environment even though the actual paradigm by which you paint is in 2D.’

The system also allows you to use a rendering technique that generates massive amounts of detail. ‘The thinking is, like in an entire forest, for example, if it were made of polygons, it would take hours to render. In Paint Effects, these frames normally take minutes, literally, because of the rendering process which is used to generate those effects,’

Paint Effects is one very good example of how a developer can easily build an entirely new type of technology into the existing structure of the software’s code if the program architecture is as open as possible.

Another example of this is a technology called Vex, which Side Effects has included in its Houdini 4.0 – currently in beta testing and due out early this year.

Vex is a system that allows animators to simply write, in a few lines, codes that would otherwise take a c++ programmer hundreds of lines to create.

For example, Vex allows an animator to create a shader, a procedural texture that dictates the look of certain objects like floor boards, in about 10 to 20 lines. Creating the same shader in Pixar’s RenderMan – the high-end industry standard – can take up to 100 lines, Davidson says.

But its abilities go well beyond those of a shader. ‘As easily as you can write a shader…you can write a particle system, that’s all yours, in the Vex language, or you can write a composite operator in the Vex language,’ he explains.

‘This allows people a nice way of getting new looks, new effects, new surfaces without being a c++ programmer or without putting 500 operators together or standing on their heads going in and out of packages.’

Over at Softimage, Johnston says that by simplifying the process, 3D software developers are paving the way to a creative hierarchy that more closely mirrors cel animation, where they have a core of full-time master animators and a staff of lower-paid junior animators.

That, he says, would be a great improvement over the current system that sees production companies hire 100 top animators for a production and then fire them once the production wraps. ‘It’s really a tumultuous marketplace to work and to hire. And it’s a business model that I don’t know necessarily works,’ he says.

‘If their financial model can change a little bit, they can actually take on more because they can produce more work and therefore afford to keep a full-time staff, but not every person on staff is a highly paid individual.

‘I do think it’s something that we’re moving towards.’