LogInThe Basefount Technology team has offered a comprehensive overview of Animcraft 4.1 and Miarmy UE 1.1, a couple of great tools for animation and game development.
Intro
Basefount Technology is a development studio dedicated to creating tools for the animation and game industries, with a focus on enhancing the ease of use and efficiency while upholding high quality standards. The company's product lineup includes Animcraft and Miarmy UE, a couple of great tools that recently got updated with the release of Animcraft 4.1 and Miarmy UE 1.1.
Today, let's delve into an overview of these two products and explore the new features introduced in their latest releases.
What Is Animcraft
Animcraft (AC) is a smart and collaborative animation and game resources library and productivity toolkit. It defines an industrial quality standard that enables universal sharing of animation, characters, and facial expression data. Built around these standards, it provides a comprehensive and efficient toolchain such as rigging, weighting, simulation, and motion capture tools
Animcraft Structure and relationship with DCC/Engine, all orange parts belong to Animcraft:
Motions Reuse
From Library, one-click imports animations to biped characters, regardless of their figures, rigging, or skeletal structure. It supports Maya, 3ds Max, FBX, Unreal Engine, Unity, Human IK, Blender, and Cinema4D, with a wide range of import options, like mirroring, speed, and frame rate control.
Rigs Conversion
It can convert rigs among different software and characters. Maya rigs and FBX characters can be converted to 3ds Max Biped. FBX or 3ds Max rigs can also be converted to Maya Advanced Skeleton and Human IK rigs. Structures, weights, and motions will remain well.
Unreal Engine Library
You can export resources like VFX, scenes, materials, Blueprints, from Unreal Engine and store them in the Animcraft UE library. All of them can be real-time visualized and navigated in Animcraft without opening UE. Then, you can reuse them across different projects.
Dragon Breath Ribbon
It is an out-of-the-box secondary animation tool for simulating accessories or ribbons that contains plenty of features like automatic idle breathing, inertia, collision avoidance, wind, gravity, and seamless looping. Available in both Maya and 3ds Max and main software.
Game-Standard Easy & Flexible Facial Rigging System
Both 3ds Max and Maya offer a facial rigging and weighting system that can comprehensively address the facial animation needs in game development. It's able to directly convert facial rigs between Maya and 3ds Max. Additionally, an iPhone App can be used to capture facial motions in Maya.
Facial Mocap
With facial animation re-targeting tools, we can quickly and easily use the Animcraft iPhone or iPad App to capture our facial performances in real-time and import them into 3ds Max, Maya, or Unreal Engine on any digital characters.
Highly Precision Facial Rigging System
Animcraft also has an advanced facial rigging solution that allows for the flexible defining of bone numbers and meets diverse qualities in games and animations. It also provides a smart weighting tool that can assign facial weights automatically and also includes shaping tools that are suitable for various rigging.
MetaHuman Editor
Animcraft supports one-click generation of all blendshapes, automatic bones positioning, skin weighting, DNA file generating, and rigging for character models with the same topology as MetaHuman standard. You can also read DNA files, query all facial expressions and blendshapes, and make modifications, etc.
Animation Editor
You can quickly create character animations with motion clips in the library, with the non-linear editor. You can also use rig controller, animation layer, time slider, keyframe, and other tools to edit in-library motions.
Recently, the latest version of the software, Animcraft 4.1, was officially released. You can follow this link and check out the video attached below to learn more about the release and get started with the application.
What Is Miarmy UE
Miarmy UE is a new and native solution for crowd simulation in Unreal Engine. It allows users to build the logical brain for crowd agents without any blueprint or programming. With perception contents, animation, physics, real-time rendering, and other infrastructure in Unreal Engine, you can drive your digital characters to perform various autonomous behaviors.
Additionally, the crowds are simulated in runtime mode and can interact with players and environments, also can be cached and inserted into Sequencer for animation production.
Miarmy UE Highlight Features
Placement Layout and Formation Control
With some simple parameters, you can plan how the characters will be placed. Give the characters the initial positions, orientations, and overall distribution, all of which can be controlled and randomized. The placement node can be used as formation control target and achieving formation animation.
Easy Logic Control
Without using Blueprints or programming, just with natural language commands and logical node settings, you can quickly generate a brain for each character type. When you spawn the crowds in the scene, they can make decisions based on different environments and perform autonomous behaviors.
Vertex Animation
Quick tool for vertex animation creation, work with placement nodes for rapid placing.
Diverse Perception Elements
Various perception contents can be placed in levels as environments, such as a point, a square or circular area, a road, etc. The agent logical brain can be triggered and take action based on these environments as plan, such as following the road or playing specific motion in an area.
Motions Editing
With UE Animation Blueprint, we can control the transition frame and speed between motions and tweak the transition result. We can use this to fine-tune and achieve a smooth and natural transition between any two motions.
Rigid Body, Cloth Simulation, and LODs
With UE's PhysX system, we can add rigid body dynamics and cloth to the agents, so that we can create physical crowd effects such as the characters falling to the ground, being hit, or the cloak. At the same time, we can also detach the limbs from the character. All Agents can apply LOD to determine the simulation details.
Simulation & Cache
The simulation happens in the game engine at run-time, and the agents are able to interact with Blueprints or programs-controlled characters or players. A cache can be generated during simulation, and it can be inserted in the sequencer for animation production and rendering.
Real-Time Rendering & Shaders Settings
Using UE's powerful rendering engine, crowd agents can be directly rendered in real-time with the highest quality, what you see is what you get. Randomized materials also make characters look different, which is flexible and diverse.
Blueprint Library
Tailored for users who want to customize blueprints and store them as a preset or users who want to simplify the Blueprint building. Also, we will continuously provide a library of common behavior blueprint presets, packaged for intuitive parameter adjustment on nodes.
Miarmy UE is a relatively new software and is currently in the free beta stage. You can learn more about it by clicking this link.