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Using the Anima Drop, you can access all your 3D Human assets and start populating your projects directly from3ds Max, Cinema 4D,Maya,orUnreal Engine with a simple and intuitive interface.

With this panel, you can access all the assets from your library and start populating your scenes with a quick and simple drag and drop gesture (in 3ds Max) or selecting them and clicking the SEND button (in Cinema 4D , Maya or Unreal Engine).

All the demo and purchased Ready-Posed models are free to use without render limitations in Anima. 

Here you can see a video that showcases how to use this panel in 3ds Max. As you will see, the behavior of the tool is identical to the same feature available in Anima standalone.

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Please notice that this video was made using Anima 3.5, so you might notice some differences between the Anima Drop panel shown and the one available in Anima 5. However, despite minor differences that are explained below in this article (see the section “New in version 5″), the main idea of the workflow is exactly the same.

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In Cinema 4D , Maya, and Unreal Engine the tool works almost the same, the only thing different is the placement process because none of these applications allow a direct interaction in the 3D viewport from an external application.

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Here you have an example of how this panel works inside Unreal Engine, but keep in mind that the process in Maya and Cinema 4D is exactly the same:

  1. Drag & Drop the models into the app
  2. Place the models using the transformation tools available by default in that application.
  3. (Optional) Change the material of the actor mesh with any other material from all the variations generated by our plugin.
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Where is Anima Drop?

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You will find the panel on all the 3D apps that we support with our native Anima plugins. In 3ds Max, you will find it in the Anima menu, here:

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In Cinema 4D, it is also placed in the Anima menu, but this time you will find that one as a submenu inside the Extensions menu:

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In Maya you will also find it in the Anima menu:
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Finally, in Unreal Engine you will find it under the Edit menu > Anima Chaos submenu.

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The Anima Drop panel supports all the models that are not dependent on the simulation engine:

  • 4D models
  • Ambient models
  • Posed models

You can directly download and drop any of those types of actors from the Drop panel to the your 3D scene, without leaving your DCC app (3dsMax, Cinema4D, or Unreal Engine).

The other types of actors (Rigged and 4D walking) need to be animated by the neural engine, adapting to the environment and to the other actors of the scene. For that reason, they need to be added and animated in the Anima Designer application first, before sending them to the DCC app (using Alive or importing the scene directly using the plugin).

Download Directly From the Panel

The Anima Drop panel has been greatly improved to become a powerful autonomous tool. Now you can download models directly from the panel (no need to open the Anima Designer to download anymore).

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New Drop Project

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Now, when Anima Drop is used for the first time, a dialog appears to create a new Drop project, give it a name, choose a path location for it, and select the texture quality that you want to use. After that, you can start using the panel and dropping models from the library into your 3D scene.

This new Drop project is actually a completely standard Anima project, the only difference is that it is created without any scene inside, but it is using the same folder structure and the same resources that are used in standard projects. That means that now you can open a Drop project from Anima standalone, create a scene there, and start animating right away. And you can even do that using the Alive connection, by simply opening Anima standalone or clickingSync project in the Anima object of your scene.

Another nice feature that we plan to add to the Anima Drop thanks to this new integration is the ability to access the 4D models directly from the Anima Drop® panel on all the plugins (currently it is already available on Unreal Engine).

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Anima Drop supports all the types of models that don’t use the simulation capabilities of our neural engine because their animation does not need to be adapted to a geometry background. In other words, all the types of models except the Rigged and 4D walking can be used directly from the Anima Drop panel: 4D models, Ambient, and Posed.

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In Unreal Engine, both 4D Animated and Ready-Posed were already supported since Anima 4.x.x. The Ambient models are not supported yet in UE. In Maya, only Posed models are supported.

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Full Control of Transform Manipulations (animation, mirror, etc.)

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Modify Texture Quality

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As you have seen in the previous section, the texture quality can be defined when you create the new Drop project. However, you can also modify it later if you need to, by opening the project in the Anima standalone application and changing theRender texture qualitysetting there.

That can be done by following these steps:

1. Open Anima and load the Drop project (if you have it also opened in Max, Anima will automatically ask you if you want to open it).
If alive™ Alive Synchronization is not enabled at that moment, you can browse to where you created the Drop project using this option from the welcome screen:

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Or directly going to the Anima Menu > Project > Open.

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2. Browse the folder where you created the Drop project and open it.

3. If you already have created an Anima scene in this project, open it. You can use any scene because we will modify the texture setting for the whole project.
If you don’t have a scene yet, you can create one by using the Open Scene dialog, by clicking here:

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4. Drop any model you want into your scene, any model would do because we will remove it at the end of the process.

5. Save your scene in Anima.

6. Now that one scene from your project is loaded, you have access to the Project Settings dialog. To open it, select the following option from the Project File menu:

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7. Then the following dialog will appear, where you can change the quality of the textures to whatever you may need:

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8. At this moment, change the texture quality of your project to whatever you want (for example to “High”).

9. If you go back to the original Drop scene in 3dsMax and reload it, you will see that the size of the textures has been modified accordingly:

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Texture Variations on Dropped Actors

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Now you can access the texture variations available for each actor by directly selecting the actor dropped and modifying its variation here.

As the project created by the new Anima Drop panel is a standard Anima project, the textures of the models will be placed in the same folder where all the textures are, that is in the “texture_cache” subfolder of the project.

In Unreal Engine the textures will also be stored in the ProjectIntermediateDir, which means the folder named “Intermediate” that can be found in the root folder of your current active project.

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Convert Drop to Scene

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It is possible to convert the Drop content added to a scene on the DCC app into a standard Anima scene that can be editable from the Anima Designer standalone application. The process is very simple, just click the following button available in the root anima object from your DCC app.

This can become handy for example when you start populating your scene with Posed, Ambient or 4D models using Anima Drop®Drop, but at some point you realize that you will also need to add Rigged or 4D walking models, which can only be used from the main Anima Designer app.

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Using Anima Drop in a Real Scenario

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