Using 3ds Max Plugin

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 workflow.
• Drop models directly into the scene using Anima Drop.

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

• Anima Alive Synchronization
• 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.

Open a Scene

Loading, controlling, and rendering an Anima scene into 3ds Max is really simple, just follow these steps:

1. Go to File Menu and click on Import:

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

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. 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 Max scene.

4. After that, the Material Adapter dialog opens. This dialog 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.

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

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.

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

Which reveals the following window.

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.

To delete individual actors, select an Actor and press the Delete key.

To delete all actors, select the animaProject001 object, which is the root Anima node for all the actors and scenes, and then press the Delete key.

The 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 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.

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

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

4. Click Apply Materials to apply the preset.

The 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 the Anima Scene object for the characters you wish to edit.
2. Open the Modify 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.

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 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.

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

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

Anima Project Controller

When you open an Anima project in 3ds Max an Anima Project Controller object ($animaProject001) is created to manage the plugins features. This object has as direct children the Anima Scene Controllers (one per scene loaded), which themselves have as 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 logo. The Project one is bigger than the Scene ones, and it is placed in the 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.

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.

Playback Speed – Controls the animation speed. Use value less than 100% to play back animations in slow motion or greater than 100% to speed them up.

Time Offset – Offsets start and end point of the animation. Measured in seconds.

About – Displays information about your version of the Anima plugin for 3ds Max. You may be asked for this if you contact support.

Since Anima 5 we introduced an important change in the structure of the imported scenes into 3ds Max and Cinema 4D. A new scene helper is created for each 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 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. 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 the Modify panel.

1. Parent
Displays the 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.

Xref Scenes

We highly recommend to not use Anima scenes inside 3dsMax Xref scene files.

The Anima plugin for 3dsMax uses extreme optimizations that let it handle a huge number of actors and animations. This system has a great number of pros (you can easily manage thousands of actors with Anima almost in realtime, 3dsMax cannot do that even with a fraction of that number) and only one limitation: there can only be one object of this type inside the whole 3dsMax scene loaded in memory (and that includes the Xref files).

That’s one of the reasons why we designed Anima as a project-based software. Each project can have multiple scenes and within the same project, you can share resources that can be used for any of the project’s scenes (backgrounds, custom actors, custom animations, etc).

When you load an Anima project from 3dsMax, our plugin connects your 3dsMax scene with one or multiple Anima scenes of the project. Initially is just one, but you can later load more scenes of the same project using the Anima Scene Controller.

This way you can load an arbitrary number of Anima scenes inside the same 3dsMax file, they only need to be part of the same Anima project. That lets you use a similar workflow that is often used in 3dsMax with Xref files, where you slice the project in several parts (Xref files in 3dsMax, scenes in Anima) that are referenced from another centralized base file (the main file in 3dsMax, the project in Anima).

So, the suggested workflow in large projects with multiple Xrefs is to build one Anima project and with one scene for each Xref. While you are working on each Xref you can import and the Anima scene in there to quickly go back and forth and check the results of your work inside the Anima app. Then, when you finish, remove the Anima Scene Controller from that Xref and instead load the Anima scene directly from Anima Scene Controller on the main 3dsMax file.

Just keep in mind that it can only be one Anima project loaded and that it must be imported in the main 3dsMax file (it cannot be in a 3dsMax referenced file).

We also recommend to not use Anima scenes inside 3ds Max Xref objects for the same reasons that we exposed about the Xrefs Scenes.

However, you can use Xrefs Objects as background geometry and send them to Anima using the Alive Synchronization connection. This can be useful in some cases when a team of artists is working in different parts of a big scene and you want to keep updated with the latest available backgrounds the members of the team that are using Anima. As soon as they detect any background modification, they can simply send the same list of objects inside that will already be in their Background section of the plugin and Alive Synchronization will update it inside Anima.