With anima® you will be able to render crowd simulations directly inside Maya® using our plugin specially designed to manage a large number of 3D characters in an efficient way. The anima® plugin for Maya® optimizes memory usage and gives you the flexibility to use your preferred renderer, automatically adapting the shaders of the models to the Render Engine that you have selected in your scene. At this moment we already support Arnold®, V-Ray®, Redshift®, Octane®, and the default Maya® renderers.

When an anima® project is imported into Maya® the anima® plugin will generate all the actors contained your simulation and also an anima® Scene Controller that will let you manage all the parameters of the plugin from the Attribute Editor, and also will let you communicate with the anima® standalone application using our alive™ connection.

Once installed, the plugin should appear in the list of plugins available inside Maya® but it must be enabled manually to be completely installed and initialized, as it happens with all the other plugins in this software.

That can be done by opening the Plug-in Manager dialog from:

And then enabling both checkboxes, one to initialize the plugin now, and the other one to tell Maya to initialize the plugin automatically every time the application is started:

After that, you should see the AXYZ design menu appear.

To load, manage, and render an anima® scene into Maya® is really simple, just follow these steps:

1. Go to the "AXYZ design" menu and click on "Import Anima project"

2. Under File Type select anima® project (*.aniproj) and then browse to the location of your anima® project. Select it and Click Open.

3. The Select Scene menu opens with a dropdown list showing all the available anima® scenes in the project. You can also click on the circles to select multiple scenes to merge them in one Maya® scene.

4. Select the Texture Quality of your actors:

Which correspond to the following square sizes in pixels:

5. Once the scenes and the texture quality are selected, click Open.

6. If some of the scenes opened have been baked already, you will be shown the following message:

To avoid seeing it again, just bake the scenes using the process described here: Bake Animations

7. Then the Material Adapter dialog opens:

This dialog tells you which Render Engine has been detected and it lets you choose one of the 3 available shader templates. Choose the default option (Regular config) to generate photorealistic shaders for each actor and then click on Apply Material.Then the plugin will generate and apply the selected material preset adapted to your renderer to each of the actors in the scenes loaded.

After that, the anima® project will be ready to use in your Maya® scene. You can access all the options related to the plugin, by selecting the anima:sceneController object, and all the actors will be grouped under the anima:animaActorsRoot transform object.

To keep things organized in the Outliner, both anima:sceneController and anima:animaActorsRoot are parented to a common anima:animaSceneRoot object.

All the objects created by anima® use "anima:" as the root namespace and each actor uses the anima® scene name as its second namespace.

The anima® plugin allows you to choose 2 built-in non-photorealistic materials for your characters. To use them just select them from the drop-down list when the Material Adapter menu opens (See step 7 from the previous procedure).

At any moment, you can easily regenerate all the materials applied to your actors using the "Rebuild Materials" button in the anima:sceneController. You might need to do that to change a previously loaded scene to use a different material preset, or to update the shaders to a different Render Engine, or to fix some kind of material corruption that may happen sometimes if you modify the source anima® scene after loading the same scene in Maya®.

Once the "Rebuild Materials" is pressed, the material adapter dialog will appear again:

Bellow, you can see a sample using each template: Regular config, Plaster, and White/Transparent (V-Ray):

You may want to delete or hide some actors that you don't want to see in your render for composition reasons. You can do that right away by selecting each particular actor in Maya:

...and deleting it (shortcut 'Del'), or hiding it (shortcut 'H').

The anima:sceneController object is locked and cannot be easily deleted from the scene because it is linked to multiple events and removing it without taking care of the linked callbacks could cause instabilities that might end up crashing Maya®. However, if you want to delete it, you can completely remove the all the actors and clear your scene from using any anima® related files, by selecting the "Clear Anima project" option from the AXYZ design menu.

Another feature of the anima® plugin for Maya® is that it allows you to change the playback speed of the animations you have simulated for each scene of your anima® project. This is ideal for creating slow-motion and high-speed time-lapse effects, or simply to subtly adjust the scene to a particular time span you might need. To use this feature, follow this process:

1. select the anima:sceneController object and go to the Attribute Editor.
2. Select the scenes you want to modify.
3. Adjust the Playback Speed value. Values lower than 100% will slow down the animation and higher values will speed it up.

You can set different values for each scene. That will let you generate interesting effects like this one, where the little girl is slowed down while the rest of the scene has sped up:

In the same way that you can modify the playback speed, you can also modify the Time Offset (in seconds) where you want your scene to start. Negative values move the animation backward in time, positive values move it forwards.

This feature can be used, for example, to optimize long 3D animations in Maya®  where you only need to see an anima® scene for a few seconds. So, if your Maya® scene is 20 seconds long, but there are only 5 seconds of people that kick in at the second 15 of the animation, you could simulate in anima® only 5 seconds and put an offset of -15s there.

Please notice that the Offset time will always be considered in seconds, so you will need to make the conversion between Frames and Seconds manually. In the example before, having a scene configured at 30 FPS, the anima® scene would need to start at frame 450 (15s*30fps = 450f), so we would set a value of -15 in the Time Offset.

Displaying hundreds, or thousands of animated characters can be taxing for the viewports. To optimize the response of your 3D application, you can display characters as simple arrows when their number is higher than an arbitrary value that you can define using the Display section:

1. select the anima:sceneController object and go to the Attribute Editor.
2. Go to the Display section.
3. Adjust the Display Value. This represents the maximum number of characters to display in full mesh mode. The rest of the actors will be shown as simple green arrows.

When using Motion Blur with some render engines you may get corrupted meshes in some apparently random frames on the 4D models. This happens because the render engine is taking the mesh from different frames to apply the Motion Blur algorithms on it, expecting that it will keep the same topology on all of them. As the 4D models change their topology multiple times along their animation range, when this happens, the MB algorithm breaks resulting in corrupted meshes on the final render.

To solve this problem, you just need to enable the following parameter in the anima® plugin whenever you want to use Motion Blur in your scene. This parameter ensures the mesh compatibility on all the frames participating in the Motion Blur for each particular image, avoiding any issues.

To avoid any issues with the textures or the animation of the anima® models, we highly recommend to set the Evaluation mode to DG in the Maya Preferences, in the Settings / Animation section: