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Using anima® and Anima and its plugins you can quickly and easily populate your 3D scenes using metropoly®Library assets. Also, the plugin for 3ds Max optimizes memory usage, improves viewport performance, and adapts to the needs of the user by automatically generating native materials for the actors for all the supported render engines, including V-Ray,  Corona,  Octane, Redshift, Arnold, Fstorm, and more.

Also, thanks to the anima® Anima plugin, 3dsMax gets full support for the amazing 4D Digital Human models produced by AXYZ design, which use the most advanced State-Of-The-Art volumetric Art volumetric video technology.

There are 2 complementary workflows that can be used with anima®Anima in 3dsMax3ds Max:

• Import and synchronize your simulation from anima®Anima into your 3dsMax scene using the alive™ Alive Synchronization workflow.
• Drop models directly into the scene using the animaDrop® panelAnima Drop.

You can learn more about both workflows in the links below:

• The alive™Alive Synchronization plugin synchronizationThe animaDrop® panel
• Anima Drop

In this article, you will learn more details about all the features that both workflows enable in 3dsMax3ds Max thanks to the anima®Anima plugin.

3. The Select Scene menu opens with a dropdown list showing all the available anima® Anima scenes in the project. Choose the one you wish to load and click Open.
You can also click on the circles to select multiple scenes to merge them in one 3DS 3ds Max scene.

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4. After that, the Material Adapter dialog will be openedopens. This dialog will let lets you choose different material templates for the models:-

• • Regular (default): Hyper-realistic textures extracted from real actors using photogrammetry methods.
  • Plaster: Sculpture-like matte white texture for stylized results.
  • White/Transparent: Semi-Opaque materials for stylized results.

After selecting the option of your choice, click Apply Materials to start the native shader generation for your current render engine.

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It is possible to establish different texture resolutions for the actors at a project level. It can be done in the anima® Anima Designer application, in the menu option Project > Settings.

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That will show the following dialog, where you will be able to choose the texture quality you want to use in all the scenes of that project.

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The texture quality options can also be set when creating a new Drop Project directly from the AXYZ design menu options Anima menu > Anima Drop.

Which reveals the following dialogwindow.

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Each one of the options available in the Rendert texture quality dropdown corresponds to the following square sizes in pixels.

Notice that these values represent the maximum quality size of the texture but, depending on the type of model the size can be lower than that.

For example, the Ready-Posed models use unique texture for the whole model and it does get up to the maximum 4k texture size when using the “Insane” quality mode.

On the other hand, the Rigged models use multiple textures for different parts of the body (the head alone is using a 2k texture), so they don’t have a 4k texture available because they can provide even more quality using multiple textures of a lower size.

Also, the 4D models have a max resolution of 2k because they use animated textures, which means that they use a different texture image for each frame of their animation.

The anima® Anima plugin allows you to choose from a number of built-in non-photorealistic materials for your characters. To use this feature when you import a character, just make sure that you select them from the drop-down list when the Material Adapter menu opens. Please see the previous procedure for more detailed information about this technique. However, if you wish to change a previously loaded scene to use stylized materials, follow these steps.

1. Select the anima® Anima Scene object for the characters you’d like to change. For a quick way to locate the scene object just select a character, go to the Modify Panel and click Select Parent.

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2. With the Scene Object selected click Rebuild Materials to open the Material Adapter

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3. Pick a new material type from the drop-down list.

4. Click Apply Materials to apply the preset.

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The anima® Anima plugin for 3ds Max allows you to change the playback speed of animations. This is ideal for creating slow motion and high-speed effects, or simply to subtly adjust the scene. To use this feature:

1. Select theanima® Anima Sceneobject for the characters you wish to edit.
2. Open theModify Panel.
3. Adjust the Playback Speed value or slider. Values less than 100% slow down the animation and values greater than 100% speed it up.

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You can fine-tune animation by offsetting it along the timeline. To use this feature:

1. Select
an anima® Scene object
2. an Anima Scene object.
3. Open
the 
4. the Modify Panel.
5. Adjust
the 
6. the Time Offset
 parameter
7.  parameter. Negative values move the animation backward in time, positive values move it forwards.

Anima Project Controller

When you open an anima® Anima project in 3ds Max an anima® Anima Project Controller object ($animaProject001) is created to manage the plugins features. This object has as direct childs children the anima® Anima Scene Controllers (one per scene loaded), which themselves have as childs children all the individual characters included in each scene.

Both the Project and Scene controllers are represented in the viewports by a symbol in the form of the anima® Anima logo. The Project one is bigger than the Scene ones, and it is placed in the max 3ds Max scene origin.

To control many aspects of the display and playback of the characters, select the scene controller and open the Modify panel to access the following settings:

Project – The

Anima project associated with the scene controller. Click on the ellipsis (…) to change the project.

Reload – Reloads the

Anima project and opens the Select Scene window. You can use this to either open a different scene, replacing the existing characters or update the scene after making changes to it in

Anima standalone.

Rebuild Material – Opens the Material Adapter window allowing you to regenerate the materials. You can use this to rebuild the materials with appropriate shaders if you change to a different renderer, or if you’d like to swap the photoreal materials for one of the alternative options.

Browse Scenes – Allows you to select other scenes to merge them with the current scene in 3DSMax, but remember that the collisions won´t be recalculated.

Select Actors – Click to select all the characters associated with this scene.

Unlock Transform – Lets you translate, rotate and scale the whole

Anima scene, (it

doesn't work for individual actors).

Icon Size – Controls the size of the

Anima icon in the viewport, measured in scene units.

Viewport Settings – Controls the number of characters that can be displayed in Full Mesh mode. If there are more characters in the scene than this value then the additional characters display as a simplified arrow. This is to keep viewport playback responsive but it doesn’t affect the render. You can also display or hide the textures

in the viewports.

Since anima® Anima 5 we introduced an important change in the structure of the imported scenes into 3dsMax® and Cinema4D® 3ds Max and Cinema 4D. A new scene helper is created for each anima® Anima scene that is loaded, and all actors in that scene are placed in the scene with respect to the local coordinate system of that helper object. Also, the actors from that scene appear in the hierarchy as children of the scene helpers.

It always has been possible to apply position and rotation transform modifications to the anima® Anima actors directly from the plugins by using the "unlock transform" parameter. But now, you will be able to modify also the scale and do it on each one of your scenes, independently.

Although this seems to be a simple change, it has huge implications and opens a whole new range of possibilities that were not possible in previous versions of anima®Anima. For example, now you can make one of the scenes follow the animation of a vehicle while the other scene keeps its relative position. This would be a typical situation in a project that takes place in a train station. You now can create 2 different scenes, one populating the train and another one populating the people on the platform, and then attach the scene helper from the Train Scene and make it follow the same animation that the actual Train object has in your 3D scene.

Also, with the new scene helpers, you take profit from the free transform manipulation possibilities that the new scene helpers bring by scaling or even mirroring entire scenes.

To manually change the display mode of an individual character, select them and open theModifypanel.

1. Parent
Displays the anima® Anima Project file to which this character is associated.

2. Draw as arrow
Turn this option on to display the character in the viewports as an arrow mesh. Does not affect rendering.