EIAS Animator 7.0

Render your project on time

When it is time to apply surface materials and textures, light your scenes, and animate your models, no program delivers like the Electric Image Animation System. It was created from the ground up to have the workflow and the quality you need to get your projects done on time and under budget!

EIAS' Animator has been used in hundreds of Hollywood blockbusters since 1991, when it was first introduced. With the rapid improvement of computer technology and other revolutionary changes in the software market, our newest version, EIAS 7.0, is available for only $349 (upgrade from v6.6). Comparable applications can cost several thousand dollars.

Millions of Polygons

EIAS' Animator delivers the essentials better than any other product. Most animators agree that there are critical sections in a 3D program that are most important to successful design. Most notably: texturing and materials, lights, deformations, function curve editor, character animation, and the ability to handle MILLIONS of polygons.

As 3D technology continues to push the envelope, what is becoming clearly apparent, is the need for an application to handle millions of polygons. Not only does the user need to texture and light these scenes, but also animate in an openGL view without the applications simply giving up. No other application on the market brings this amount of power to the user for any price.

Electric Image Animation System has been used by many of the largest Architecture firms in the world because of its incredible ability to handle over 10 million polygons in a single scene. Most programs would simply crash or freeze with this number of polygons, but EIAS will bring you the stability you need to get your project done flawlessly.

New Animator 7.0 Features

Dynamics (Physics Engine)

Dynamics (Physics Engine), created by ramjac Software, is a high-performance physics system for simulating rigid body dynamics. It is based on the full-featured, stable, mature Open Dynamics Engine. The system is ideal for simulating articulated rigid body systems. Examples include falling objects, legged creatures, and stacks (or collections) of objects. There is a hard body collision detection engine built into the system for accurate and fast body-to-body collisions. Set-up is easy and solutions are computed very quickly allowing real-time preview in Animator and no impact on Rendering time. Dynamics works entirely within Animator, creating its own animation channels and writing its data to the Camera control file. This makes Dynamics fully compatible with Renderama.

HDR Support

Animator and Camera now allow .hdr files to be used wherever textures are supported. You can use the whole range of the HDR image or clamp it to any desired value and/or modulate/adjust it as you need.

Xpressionist 3.5

Xpressionist 3.5 is included with EIAS 7.0. It enables the user to script every animatable parameter that is available in the EIAS Animator. Uses range from basic object parameter linking-like advanced constraints or set driven keys to the creation of custom interfaces, controller objects for your animation needs or custom programming of entire animation software modules for the most demanding animation and simulation needs. It uses ENOCH as an expression language. ENOCH was designed as a flavour of C and was designed to be easy to understand an to learn. As a unique feature in the industry Xpressionist offers direct compiling of ENOCH scripts. The animator can bypass the bottleneck of a file translation of his script by the interpreter of Xpressionist, but instead compile an executable program, that will do the same task in a fraction of the time other systems require. That allows for the programming of custom runtime applications and makes Xpressionist a complete and full featured software development environment. Xpressionist comes with an additional Plugin "Kontrolleur". Kontrolleur gives users a basic but fully customizable interface to drive their scripted animation. Xpressionist 3.5 also offers an SDK for 3rd party plugin developers, who want to use or better communicate with Xpressionist. Xpresssionist gets used all over the world in day to day animation production. Click here for some free Xpressionist scripts.

More Animator Features

Shaders

You will never run out of possibilities with EIAS 6.6. Here are a few of over 60 procedural shaders that are included in the shipment of EIAS: The NPR Lite shader is a non-photorealistic shader that give your objects a pen and ink or charcoal drawing look. The shader comes with a variety of material presets. The Lonelywave shader can create ripples and bumps on the surface of an object.

The Simplewave shader displaces geometry and includes reactive controls. The SpKiller Shader allows you to prevent specular highlights from appearing on the back side of transparent objects for a more realistic ray traced effect.

A Gradient shader with up to twelve color keys is included. This shader has a variety of detailed controls and a very nice interface. Finally reactive versions of the BumpyNoise, Crumple, Eroded, FractalNoise and Rust shaders have been created. These shaders allow you to control where and how the shaders are applied using another texture map or vertex colors.

Noise Factory Shader

Noise Factory is a new 3D noise shader with an interactive graphing control. It allows you to shape the noise interactively by sculpting a curve in the GUI. The shader includes support for both traditional (Perlin) noise and cellular noise. It is a very flexible tool for adding bump or color patterns.

Deformations

Circular Wave II, Runwave and Magnets. Circular Wave II and Runwave can be combined to create simple ocean water effects. Circular Wave II has controls to fade by distance and to smooth the waves. Runwave is a noise style deformation system that displaces geometry. Magnet deforms are a variation of the existing bones deformation system. Magnets can be used to pull and push on geometry to create muscle and other character effects. As well as all the regular deformations you will expect in an animation package.

You can turn on or off individual deformations or deformation regions for each object in your project. This greatly simplifies the task of creating complex deforms that require many regions. You can just turn on the part of the deform you are currently working on temporarily eliminating the rest. You can also copy and paste deformations from group to group This feature was greatly desired by customers that were creating different objects that all had to deform similarly.

Light Gels

You can apply a texture map to Illuminators in Animator to automatically color the lighting based on the map. This feature allows better light color and intensity matching between background plates and the objects in your scene. Lightprobe images can be applied to the Illuminators as well. The deep color format will be converted to 24-bit color by Camera, but you can use the existing libraries of probes on the Internet. The Display Image window in Animator can be used to select an exposure level in a lightprobe. This gives you the ability to control the exposure if you don't want to leave it up to Camera.

FBX Support

EIAS 6.6 supports the FBX file format. EIAS can import FBX polygon meshes, NURB surfaces, patches, nulls, skeletons, cameras and lights along with their associated animation channels. Non-polygon geometry entities (patches and NURB surfaces) are automatically converted to polygons and saved to a FACT file. You can select different 'Takes' from the FBX file, and selectively control which entity types are imported. Geometry import includes both normals and UVs.

Improved Open GL

OpenGL drawing is much faster than before. With some graphic cards it is three times faster. On one card tested it was six times faster. On every machine the improvement makes a big difference to the overall user experience. The underlying drawing engine in the Electric Image Animation System underwent a major rewrite to make this possible. Selection sets of lights can be used to control the number of lights that are used by the drawing engine at one time. This improves drawing performance IN ADDITION to the aforementioned OpenGL improvement.

Mr. Nitro2 plugin

An enhanced version of the original explosion plug-in. You can extrude the elements that explode to create chunks of material. Strength maps can be used to control the behavior of the explosion and separate timing controls are provided so the explosion can run forwards and backwards in the same animation.

Contextual Menus

A comprehensive series of contextual menus have been added to the Project window. These menus enhance the workflow, make excellent use of selection sets, and reduce the amount of mouse movement required to use the tools in that window. Also, now all of the View windows support contextual menus. These menus have variable contents based on what kind of object is clicked on.

Contextual Menus for Non-Object Clicking

A contextual menu in the Project and View windows when you click in the window but not on an object. This menu has been added to aid in selecting objects in the scene.

UV Texture Normalize

The Group Info window, Shading tab now contains a check box to normalize the UV space to a 0-1 range. This, in combination with Transporter, should eliminate the need, in most cases, to use 3rd party applications for bringing in .obj and other files with UV maps.

Multiple Undos

Animator supports multiple undo (8 level by default). There is a preference that allows you to change the number of undo steps that are stored – up to 256.

Replace Texture Buttons

A “Rep” button has been added to all tabs of the Material Info window so that textures can be replaced without opening up the texture controls. This button has also been added in the Camera roto, light gel, and light projection windows.

Path Dragging

You can drag sections of paths or complete paths around in the View windows. Select a group of keyframes in the Project window, hold down the Command key (Ctrl key on PC) and drag the curve in any of the view windows. The section of the curve between the selected keys will move as a unit. A quick and easy way to reposition your animations from one part of the world to another!