This page provides information about the ambient actors in Chaos Anima.
What are the Ambient Actors?
We have improved our static models by adding them to a new automatic rig algorithm that generates subtle movements to simulate realistic idle animations on models that previously caught the eye for being absolutely static. All our Ready-Posed library will be gradually updated to become Ambient. Yes, that means that if you already own a model as Ready posed, you will automatically get it as Ambient too as soon as we finish its conversion.
Procedural Animations
The main goal of the Ambient models is to take advantage of the high detail that all the Posed models have, but make them blend nicely in any kind of animations.
To achieve that, we have developed a new technology that creates them in 2 steps:
- The model is analyzed to identify the different parts of their body and also which ones have some liberty to be moved.
- A simplified rig and skin are applied to the actor adapted to the results of the analysis.
After that pre-process is finished the models are saved as Ambient and then anima® detects them and will start applying a set of procedural animations to them to simulate idle movements, like for example:
- Breath
- Look around
- Change the weight of the body from one foot to the other and back
- Make visual contact with surrounding models (either Ambient, Rigged, or Posed)
- Move around some prop they might be holding (a phone, a map, a newspaper, a cup of wine, etc.)
The idea behind all the Ambient workflow is that you can simply drag and drop them into your scenes also in cases where you want to make animated videos, spending the minimum time possible in the setup and taking advantage of the huge amount of models we have in our large library of Ready-Posed models (+1000 and counting!).