The animaDrop Panel

Using the animaDrop® panel, you can access all your 3D Human assets and start populating your projects directly from 3ds Max®, Cinema 4D®, Maya®, or Unreal 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® LITE. This means that everybody can use the animaDrop® panel for FREE with those types of models by only installing the LITE version and downloading the demo and purchased models from the user account.

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

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.

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.

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 AXYZ design menu, here:

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

In Maya you will also find it in the AXYZ design menu:

Finally, in Unreal Engine you will find it under the Edit menu > AXYZ design submenu.

When the animaDrop® panel was introduced in anima® 3.5 it was warmly welcomed by users, especially the ones that usually make only static renders.

However, we always felt that it was strange and counterintuitive to have a totally independent workflow on this tool, with no connection at all with anima®, apart from the common installation. It did not make sense that after dropping the models you did not have access to interesting features available on anima® like selecting the texture variation of the model or being able to regenerate your shaders to adapt them to your selected Render Engine. So we decided to make a step forward toward a reconnection between both tools and included those features in version 4 too.

Then, since the introduction of the new and highly acclaimed types of models (4D Digital Humans and Ambient) on anima® 4, we have been frequently requested to include those in the animaDrop® panel too. Well, we listened, and we are proud to say that you can now access those types of models too from the brand new animaDrop® panel.

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).

Now, when the animaDrop® panel 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 clicking Sync project in the anima® object of your scene.

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

Since version 5, the animaDrop® panel 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 animaDrop® panel: 4D models, Ambient, and Posed.

One of the benefits of using the anima® Drop panel is that you can manipulate the transforms of the actors individually, using the standard tools of your 3D application.

This opens the possibility of changing the position, rotation, and scale of each actor more comfortably using the tools and the interface of your own 3D application. But more importantly, this also allows you to use a whole new range of tools from your own 3D software related to the manipulation of those transforms, like, for example, linking actors to animated objects of your scene (very useful on vehicles or elevators), or getting a mirror animated version of the 4D models.

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 the Render texture quality setting 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™ is not enabled at that moment, you can browse to where you created the Drop project using this option from the welcome screen:

Or directly going to the anima® Menu > Project > Open.

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:

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 menu:

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

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:

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 animaDrop® 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.

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 animaDrop®, 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.

This video tutorial demonstrates how the FREE version anima® LITE can be used to add 3d people to an interior architectural visualization project using the animaDrop® panel directly inside 3ds Max®.

The complete workflow is shown, from the preparation of the model in 3ds max®, the addition of 3d people with the animaDrop® panel, the creation of a Motion Blur effect, the rendering process, and the final work of post-production using a dedicated mask for the 3D models created with anima®.