Survival Guide

I agree with Colonel Klink -
"If the 3DS Max examples for set pieces such as vehicles (autos, boats, planes, helicopters), characters with the emotions, door and window animations, etc, I'm sure there are talented people within the Antics3D community that could create new content.
As a 3D modeler who has made content for a couple of games, and contracted to create models for a commercial 3D application, I had considered purchasing Iclone before buying Antics3D. What endeared me to Iclone was that I could create content to give away or sell.
Now if people at Antics could provide the necessary examples as mentioned above I am willing work with folks who wish to keep Antics alive.
While I accept there would be no improvements to Antics apart from bug issues, as Antics have stated, the application as it stands can still produce decent animated video. But if we can add more diversified content, particularly characters, then I'm sure we can continue using Antics3D for years to come.
For the Antics3D community to survive then I suggest that:1. Antics3D make available the necessary 3D animation examples and information so that the community can continue developing content that doesnt require invisible original Antics models.2. Release a character animation tool so that the community can create their own animations that will fit seamlessy with the suppled content.3. Allow interested parties who wish to continue making content to do so using the above supplied Antics3D technologies in much the same way Iclone does with their user base."

And also with Infocentral - "I too would like to continue using this product but I agree we need the information to create content. This is really crucial with character development technology. While I can create these easily in Modo or Lightwave, I need to know a bit more on how to rig then and set them up for use as Antics characters with the motions attached.Please, please before leaving us, release the SDK for creating content in Antics??? "

In my view,
We've got the keys to the car just need to get under the bonnet.

Antics did release 3DS max examples very early in the piece. I have had success in getting the mannequinn style characters into Antics.

I'd love to get a fully rigged character and some documentation on how to export it to Antics. If anyone gets a max version of an existing Character please let me know.

ammo

IJ 4, Pre-viz: Jungle Chase

And this too.

IJ 4, Pre-viz: Area 51 Escape

A little Indy, to keep your focus

preViz Reel

Sheldon Whittaker previz reel

Showcase - Pineapple Pictures

Revenge from Pineapple Pictures on Vimeo.
Kate Fosk and Michael R. Joyce

It's just a flesh wound!

 So I'm thinking, it'd be cool to have the content library shipped over to this blog, that way we can just go about our daily chores. Also whilst we're at it, why not have the application downloadable from here as well. In that way at least the community can continue to grow.  If the application user base grows then the chances of 3rd party interest may also be viable.

Antics Custom Character Content for Sale? Scene Systems, Free-D

--------------PRESS RELEASE-------------------------
Antics Technologies will no longer offer Antics3D after November 28th, 2008.
Existing license of Antics3D is permanent.

Antics Technologies has reached an agreement to license the Antics3D Core Technology to Free-D Pictures, a production house for children’s animated films. For reconstruction, pre-visualization and training uses, Antics3D has been licensed by Scene Systems Ltd.

We want to extend the wide range of services our new companies will offer to you for your current and upcoming projects to show the high-quality animations and rapid turnaround times we can deliver.

Sales of Antics3D through Antics Technologies were not generating enough returns.
Antics3D has a user base of 20,000 customers, about 1,000 of whom have acquired the professional version, the revenue simply doesn’t cover the very high cost of development and content.

We will continue to provide support for Antics3D through June 5th, 2009
You can continue to download all of the available Antics3D Content from the Antics3D website.
We will shortly release v5.1, which will deliver a number of enhancements and updates to v5.0. After this, the only public releases will be for critical bug fixes.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

This is the news from Antics I recieved today.  Unless the new owners of the core licence, continue to develop Antics as a product, the next version (V5.1) may need the final one.

I wonder if an enterprising 3d artist or an establish character creation company (like Quidam) would like to add 20,000 to their client list? The opportunity to sell character content has now been presented. I would be happy to use this blog to market this service.

I do not know what the new owners will be offering us in terms of Antics content/characters.


Antics is a solid toolkit, even without further development it's a good solution for a whole range of clients. 21,000 users think so.

Time will tell, Tony, time will tell.

Antics Academy

Thing best thing about a pencil, is that it's compatible with all forms of paper! So as a tool for creating a storyboard it's always going to be king! However, as a tool to create moving storyboards, well Antics is now royalty. It's a fun and creative kingdom we live in.

An ever growing sector of the Antics community is the Machinima group. Traditionally Machinimals would express a creative concept using the 3d engine of their favorite computer game. Short clips were made featuring scenes and characters derived from the game world.

This artform has produced some wonderfully imaginative and brilliantly written works.

It's great appeal is that it opens up animation to anyone with a computer and a little creative flair and you can create pieces very quickly. Of course people were limited to staging stories in some other artist's world, using some other artist's characters but that was also the appeal.It's a bit like a movie spoof. The gag's are funny because you are already familiar with the backstory.

Then along comes Antics. As more and more of us study at the Antics Academy we are being given a much wider choice of stories to tell, and ways to express them.

Take this clip , here the artist has followed through with a creative presentation of a subject that is very close to him. It's an interesting showcase as it mixes game scenes with Antics scenes. It's also worth noting, it's the first clip by this artist. Aside from some framing and sound elements I think it's great. Thanks to Michael Stitt for the clip.

FYI here is my favorite clip. by JAYDEE. It's made with the SIM'S but it's the one that got me in search of a product like Antics and to start making my own stuff.

Oh and if you get a chance drop by my son's blog, he'd be wrapped if some comments are left.

Give your characters a Second Life!

Starting to compile a new list of "wouldn't be great if"... here's one.

WIBGI .... there was a "youtube" setting.

also I found these Second Life animations bvh

they can be a lot of fun for your Antics characters.

new version - new tips

A couple of quick tips. Having the emotions feature is so cool and getting the eyes to move around a little just adds even more to the performance. The way forward is to roll out the "lookat" command and have your character lookat at dummy axis. Send the dummy axis on a little romp around a path and you'll be set. Note; if you activate the Display/Targets mode you'll see the eyes are looking at the centre of the bounding box (of the dummy axis). This means the eyes won't actually look at the dummy axis, but rather off to one side. So, take the dummy and scale it right down. Reducing the dummy axis size also reduces the bounding box and gets the target much close to the center of the axis. Remember you can also tweak the scale of the path and the duration of the move to obtain some different eye movements. One more tip, I found that when it came to render, there was a real twitchy action in the blinks. It did seem related to the amount of emotions active in the timeline, but still, it wasn't much chop. Anyway if you set your render to 12fps the twitching gets sorted out.

T.

Oh btw click on the image to see my little test clip, then check out this cool clip as well.

Deeper into v5.

An important asset that the Antics v5 development team exhibit is the ability to listen. It is a real credit to them and it is what makes being part of this maturing market such fun and satisfying.
I've been following the forum for a while now and it's quite clear that the Antics dudes have been taking all the feedback to heart. Just look at the new forum!
V5 is full of concepts which have derived from your comments and suggestions. Not to take anything away from the innovative and creative core design at the heart of Antics. Take this example in V5. Now when you save a pose it now prompts you with the name of the selected item so you can type in a description to it. This is helps you organise your poses better. In the prior release, a pose was simply called "pose..(#)".
Let me know what you guys like/dislike about v5.
T.

V5 first look

First impressions,

The first thing that struck me with V5 is the new design for the gui. There's a
fresh coat of paint over the whole work area and the icons have all been updated with new coloured icons. The tooolbar sets have been designed to remove clutter, and are set to autodock. Shift click rotates the toolbar 90 degrees, and Ctrl click lets you float it. By default the Project and construct windows, come up without the transform, display or cameras toolbars, with the Direct windows giving you all toolbars. You can alter these layouts simply by selecting View/Toolbars/ and choosing which toolbar you require to be on or off.Many of the icons have a new design and holding your mouse over the icon will reveal the name. Some the operations have been consolidated in the one button. Some have been removed, (like snapshot).A new tool is the edit object tool, (it's a hammer/wrench icon), this allows you to adjust the height/width of primitive at any time using a gestural action, very handy.The Camera controls are the same but also with a new set of icons, The selection of skeleton joints has been carried over from the prior version also. As before you select the character then click on the TAB key on your keyboard to enter the pose mode. You'll find the PIN operation is now invoked as an option once you have selected an appropriate joint. Right click on any object in the scene and you'll find some new options in the list. "Direct commands" lets you choose an operation. For a character, it's here where you get one way to direct a lookat or eyeball command. (you can choose from a list of items currently in the set) Another way to direct your character is with a new Context- Sensitive feature. And it relly works well, selecting the direct icon and choosing your character puts you in a direct mode, now when you hover over things in your set, the icon changes depending upon what is available to you, these can be lookat, goto, pick up, put down, that sort of thing. Antics V5 comes with a quick start project which is a fast way of trying out the latest features. Perhaps the most exciting new feature is the implementation of Emotions to Antics V5. They have achieved this throught the use of two new "smart" characters which are in the Characters/Emotional folder. There is a male and female model and they look good. The have a certain "sims"-ness to them, they appear to have a higher poly count, (especially around the face). Strangely, they are about 80% of the scale of all your current characters which may be a issue! (try placing them closer to cam to offset this). Also the lookat commands are set to the forehead rather than the eyes. (may be related issue). There are a number of ways to use the emotion modes. I suspect the faces contain blend shapes which warp and distort the mesh to give the appearance of expressions. The emotion can be set as a personality of the character, this'll means the character will retain the mood. You can choose from Aggresive, Average, Cheerful, Confident, Implusive, Shy, Sorrowful, Submissive andUptight.

These are all very cool. All the while the character will blink randomly, which adds so much life. But this is just one part of the new feature.The other important aspect is best used in the direct
mode. Selecting the character and then choosing the set emotion mode (by clicking the emotion icon, or by right clicking and choosing "change emotion") will bring up a new set emotion window. In this window you'll see a your characters face and you can load in a preset emotion from a drop down menu. These are different again to the personality choices. When you Apply the emotion it'll run for a set time and that'll give you an element in the timeline which you can adjust. Opening up the advance features tab gives you the option to really tweak the expression. Saving the emotion adds it to the drop down list.

V5 - Dial in that smile!

As you've probably heard Antics' latest version, V5, has just been released and it looks like the team have hit a home run!
There's some info  on the website, which among other features describes how  
you can add expressions!

They say you use the emotion tool and then click on one of our predefined expressions to instantly add emotion and then you can use fine-grained controls to edit facial expressions intuitively, adding or taking away degrees of happiness, sadness, anger, and so on. To really hone in on the exact expression you need, and convey a truly subtle emotion.

I totally agree. The smile on my face gets bigger every time I think about those sliders!
Full review coming soon.
 

New Antics Website, logo and V5 coming... Is it xmas already?

Wow the guys in the steam room have really been chucking in the timber. The new website for Antics looks very slick and now has that search feature we've been looking for, what a great resource for users. I'll cover off the V5 news just as soon as it's released. How exciting, emotions on our characters! And what do you think of the new logo. I guess they'll change the watermark in the new version also!

Also checkout the latest Machinima Podcast called The Overcast. This week Ricky talks to Brad Kolacinski from Antics3d about the latest improvements to the Antics program in version 4, including a much improved lighting system and a new pricing structure, and he gives us a taste of what to expect in version 5 (FACIAL EXPRESSIONS!) (here's the link they released)

http://theovercast.com/overcast-038/

I'm home for my (once a month) weekend with the family right now, but when I get back to Adelaide I'll post some more.....

T.

Panning a light

Here's a trick Antics user "Knownic" came up with for controlling a light,
add a light to a set then get a free camera to look through at where you want the light to fall , then attach the lamp to the camera, you can then pan and tilt the camera and see where the light is acting... you can also get it to target a moving item....

good one.

Project - Spiral Stairs

So for the past few days I've been attempting to work out a way to get a character to walk down a spiral staircase. As you may know Antics allows you to simply point and click your way to stairway heaven, so long as you use the Antics stairs. If you do wish to import a set of stairs from Sketchup you'll have to take some further steps to get the action to work. The workflow goes like this: Import your staircase. Count the steps. Create an antics staircase with equal steps. You'll probably have to scale the imported asset to match. If you're lucky you'll be able to align the stairs so that the character appears to walk on the imported one. Most probably, the imported stairs will be taller or longer. You can overcome this by moving the staircase whilst the character is ascending/descending. The probem though, is that you cannot simply move the staircase alone, if you do so then the character won't know where the stair starts/stops. So you move the room that contains the whole lot.

Ok, so that's how the straight line setup works, but what if I want to use a spiral staircase? Well, as I found out, this required much more head stratching! I tried lots of things, camera key- framing, poses, linking to axial billboards.... The problem was how to build the rotation into the setup, given that the rotation needs to be relative to a character who is moving.I sorted this problem out by moving the staircase/room in "z" and "x" axis. This gave me the illusion of the character walking the wrong way up an escalator. That is, the character is doing the stepping action but not actually moving in any direction. The idea was then to get the whole room to move around a centre pivot and float down the centre pole of my spiral staircase. O.K. if you followed that you've done very well. The problem was, it was a nightmare to setup!! I think it worked once but there were plenty of errors and it was really unreliable.
So I abandoned the idea of using the stepping action and set about just using a walking action. I built a long corridor of a room, one that would allow my character to take the same amount of a steps as I had in the spiral staircase. I then moved the room, so she just walked on the spot (like a treadmill). Then I had this setup move through a series of poses to get the rotation and z position correct. A lot of work, but it turned out ok. here

Cambridge Film Festival - 2 films short listed!

Wow, I 've just read two of my ANTICS films made the shortlist to screen at this year's Cambridge Film Festival.
They are "Looking Back" which is in the Synthetic Cinema session,
and "Folie a Duex" which is in the Dreams and Shadows session.
Antics also makes an appearance with "Right Guard" by Eric Kmetz and "Pawn Trailer" by V.W. Scheich. (Sorry if I missed someone).
We share the screen with work from Phil Rice (aka Overman) and Tom Jantol, not to mention Hugh Hancock and Lit Fuze and Frank L Fox. These guys are all from the Machinima scene, where Antics is the new kid on the block.
Fingers crossed.

(prays to Peter Rasmussen)

ANTICS v10 - Absolutely Fabulous

A little while back Ricky Grove chatted with Brad about Antics3d. It makes for some interesting listening and it got me thinking.....
When you're learning Antics (or any other app) it's great to get an idea of where the product has evolved from and where they are heading. Because there is so much out there in terms of solutions, it's hard to know where to invest your time. So learning about the software's plans for the future and checking out the path they are taking, helps sus out whether the product suits your current needs and aids in forecasting what your needs may be in the future. Aside from the feature set Antics offers, a strong appeal for me is the way Antics are responding to feedback from everyday users. We asked for lighting, we got it, needed more characters, got it, needed a better cam system and an easy way to get more assets in, got it. Soon we'll get emotions and that's a direct result of community feedback I'm sure. These are positive points. But lets not forget the reason we like Antics. The innovation and simplicity of creating 3d content in a world where you once needed an entire team to create stuff. We like the innovative, imaginiative way they took the 3d game engine out of the game box and put it into our creative toolset.
So here's a thought, inject some wild and crazy thoughts into the discussion. Let this community know what you think would be the most unlikeliest, yet Absolutely Fabulous new feature of Antics v10. Let's keep the innovative going. Build upon your own investment in learning this app. We know they're listening.

Oh BTW, found this earlier.....


It's from a blog for Moviestorm development
Check it out.

MACHINIMASH OR ANIMASH

Cute iclone clip, nice demo of a simple idea excuted well. By MassiPG. Obivously Antics would have made this easier to create. The use of a full sound mix helps so much. Why not try your own rebuild of a favorite clip. Should we call them MachiniMash or Animash.
T.

HULK - PREVIZ PLF

Here's another cool previz comparison clip from the gurus at Pixel Lliberation Front. - enjoy