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Using Anima and its plugins you can quickly and easily populate your 3D scenes using 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 plugin, 3dsMax gets full support for the amazing 4D Digital Human models, which use the most advanced State-Of-The-Art volumetric video technology.

There are 2 complementary workflows that can be used with Anima in 3ds Max:

• Import and synchronize your simulation from Anima into your 3dsMax scene using the Anima Alive Synchronizationworkflow.
• Drop models directly into the scene using Anima Drop.

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

• The Anima Alive Synchronization plugin
• Anima Drop

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

Alternatively, you can use the Import anima project option from the AXYZ design Anima menu:

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.

Displaying hundreds or thousands of animated characters can be taxing for your viewports. To make sure you never see a slow-down the Anima plugin allows you to display characters as arrows when their number exceeds a set threshold. To do use this feature:

1. Select an an Anima Scene object.
2. Open the Modify Panel.
3. Adjust the Display Value. This represents the number of characters to display in full mesh mode.

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.

In scenes containing vehicles, you can set how they are interpreted in 3ds Max by the renderer of choice - as a mesh, or as a proxy. It is useful to specify this option when using V-Ray GPU or Redshift, as they don't interpret it automatically in render time.