Animate Your Character
Basefount Animcraft (Abbr. AC) allows stable motion transfer between any bipedal (and quadrupedal coming soon) characters based on keyframe and controllers, regardless of the variations in the skeletal hierarchy, rigs, figures and, 3D applications.
Animations will become visible, manageable and reusable assets that accelerate your animation production.
3 Steps to Animate It
A Turn-key and Smart Solution
STEP 1
Extract animation assets from any character in a variety of DCC software to Animcraft.
Supports FBX, BVH, skeletal or control rig in 3ds Max and Maya
STEP 2
Manage, process, and preview your general assets in Animcraft 3D library
STEP3
Import animation to arbitrary characters in variety DCC applications from Animcraft.
Supports FBX, skeletal or control rig in MAX and MAYA, UE4 & Unity
Basefount Animcraft Feature Highlights
Preview Character and Animation in 3D Viewport
Animcraft comes with 3D viewport and tools, supports hi-res model display, animation playback, blendshape, and PBR shader preview. And it has all popular 3D formats reader, writer, and convertor. Currently, it supports MAX, FBX, SBS, BVH (and USD, HDA are coming soon).
Retarget Toolkit for Skeletal Mesh Character
Any skeletal mesh character (FBX/BVH) can be inspected in the 3D scene and retargeted with independent mapping tools, then the animation can be easily extracted from FBX or mocap character and stored into the smart library. Use the Merge tool to blend any character and any animation as your wish.
Maya and Max Seamless Integration
A complete set of retargeting plugins for 3ds Max and Maya plus the companion toolkit allows us smoothly export and import animation based on the controllers between Animcraft and Maya and 3ds Max. Additionally, powerful IK and automation tools make motion transfer more convenient and accurate.
Rig Convertor & Pipeline Exchanger
Any Skeletal Mesh Characters like FBX/BVH or Maya Rigged Characters can be converted to 3DS Max Biped Characters. Reversely, it can generate Maya Advanced Skeleton or Human IK rig from Skeletal Mesh FBX or 3DS Max Bones characters. Any conversion keeps skin weights, animations, and keyframes.
Unity & Unreal Integration
With turnkey toolset, any animation in Animcraft library can be directly sent to the characters to game engine as the animation assets, no matter what skeleton hierarchy is. Also, characters in the library can be exported as FBX and send to the engine. It now supports Unreal Engine 4 and Unity 3D.
Smarter Assets Management
Intuitive character and animation assets management include preview, sharing, tag and search features. Deploy assets into future projects with a fast and collaberative manner. And use assets to inspire or train new staffs, build the value of your team in a long term.
START TO BUILD YOUR 3D ANIMATION ASSETS
Why Animcraft
- More Advanced Workflow – Search, use and manage character and motion resources efficiently. Smooth teamwork follows.
- Efficiency Is Key – Free your animators from repeated works, so that they could spend time creating beautiful animations.
- Break the Barrier – Leave the technical hurdles to us, and let your TD/TAs focus on innovation and developments.
- Re-create Value – Animations become valuable assets for future teams and projects. Hard-earned experiences are now tangible.
Description
BUILD YOUR 3D ANIMATION ASSETS
Turn animations into long-term assets and fast deploy them into variety projects
Animcraft comes with smart character and motion library, character retargeting tool for importing and exporting, 3D features and real-time viewport, comprehensive formats reader, writer and converter.
Collect Animation
Export animation from everywhere
Collect your animation data arbitrarily from multiple software and any biped characters, no matter what their rigs, skeleton or figures, one-click create and upload assets with 3d preview. Currently supports Maya, 3DS Max, FBX, BVH, Mixamo.
Use Animation
Send animation to every rig
One-click to import animation data from Animcraft to your bipedal character in various software and platforms, no matter what type of rigs, skeleton or figures. Supports arbitrary Maya rigs, 3ds Max Biped/CS/Bones, Skeletal Mesh (FBX), UE4, Unity and Human IK at the moment.
Retargeting
Comprehensive Motion Transfer Tools
Animcraft has a full set of sophisticated retargeting toolsets, from independent versions to plugins, build for mapping variety types of biped and quadruped characters and rigs, Template feature allows us to reuse the mapping data once mapping a type of character. Now it supports Maya, 3ds Max, Unreal, Unity, Human IK.
Visualization
3D Viewport and GIF Renderer
Inspect your characters and animations in PBR-enabled 3D viewport with animation playback and timeline control. Besides, render GIF cover for your asset in real-time without opening any other DCC applications.
INDUSTRIAL STANDARD
Support popular DCC software and follow industrial standards. Seamless integration to your current pipeline.
Infrastructure
Versatile 3D Inspectors and Tools
Inspect skeleton structure, bone attributes and scene elements in 3D character editor. Manipulate and retarget the bones with build-in mapping tools. Extract motions from animated FBX or BVH. Support popular 3D format conversion like FBX BVH, GLTF etc.
Game Engine
Unity and Unreal Engine Integration
With turnkey toolset, any animation in Animcraft library can be directly sent to the characters to game engine as the animation assets, no matter what skeleton hierarchy is. Also, characters in the library can be exported as FBX and send to the engine. It now supports Unreal Engine 4 and Unity 3D.
3DS Max Integration
Full toolkit for working with Biped, CAT, Bones
Biped, CAT, and Bones are all able to be retargeted and imported/exported between 3ds Max and Animcraft. Rig converter can transform every other rigs and animation into 3ds Max Biped for game development. For your best experience, all tools are written in Max API instead of scripts.
Maya Engaged
Rigged Character Motion Transfer & Human IK
A full bunch of retargeting plugins and UIs for Maya plus the companion scripts allow us smoothly export and import animation based on the controllers and keyframes between Animcraft and Maya. Additionally, powerful IK and automation tools make motion transfer more convenient and accurate.
Upgrade your workflow, Today
Revaluation
Resource Management Kit
All mapped character and animation can be arbitrarily merged together, we can export the merged skeletal mesh to FBX or send them into DCC applications. Also, we can do some little fix on these animated characters and fix animation flaws before exporting.
Rig Tools
Convert and generate variety rigs
Any Skeletal Mesh Characters like FBX/BVH or Maya Rigged Characters can be converted to 3DS Max Biped Characters. Or it can generate Maya Advanced Skeleton or Human IK rig from Skeletal Mesh FBX or 3DS Max Bones characters. All conversion keeps skin weights and animation.
Assets Import Toolkit
It is crucial to extract assets accurately and efficiently from your massive data to the library. We dedicated provide plenty of tools for this upload job, from 3D format readers to background batch tools, task managers, plugins and scripts.
Mocap Data Extraction
Any motion capture skeletal character (FBX/BVH) can be inspected in the 3D scene and retargeted with build-in mapping tools, then the motion can be easily extracted from it and stored into the smart library. Mange and deploy them in future productions.
Animation Merger and Editor
Intuitive character and animation assets management include preview, sharing, tag, and search features. Deploy assets into future projects in a fast and collaborative manner. And use assets to inspire or train new staff, build the value of your team in the long term.
System Requirements
Operation System
- Windows 10 1903 or higher version
- Windows 11
Warning – Windows 10 1809 or lower versions have some issues. Some features may not work properly.
Autodesk Maya
- Maya 2016 (to be obsoleted)
- Maya 2017 (to be obsoleted)
- Maya 2018
- Maya 2019
- Maya 2020
- Maya 2022
Autodesk 3ds Max
- 3ds Max 2016 (to be obsoleted)
- 3ds Max 2017 (to be obsoleted)
- 3ds Max 2018
- 3ds Max 2019
- 3ds Max 2020
- 3ds Max 2021
- 3ds Max 2022
Blender
- 2.81
- 2.82
- 2.83
Cinema 4D
- R20
- R21
- R22
Unreal Engine
- Unreal Engine 4.23
- Unreal Engine 4.24
- Unreal Engine 4.25
- Unreal Engine 4.26
- Unreal Engine 4.27
- Unreal Engine 5
Unity 3D
- Unity 2017
- Unity 2018
- Unity 2019
- Unity 2020
- Unity 2021
- Unity 2022
Change Log
Version 3.2
New Features
- Upgraded Advanced facial rigging system
- Metahuman Rig editing toolkit
- 3ds Max audio to lip animation (Omniverse Audio2Face based)
- 3ds Max facial to morpher
- Support for Blender
- Facial rigging tool & real-time facial capture upgrade
Version 2.1.5
Upgraded Dragon Breath Ribbon
Since its first release in version 2.0, the ribbon system has received good feedback from users. Based on the new requests and suggestions, we’ve upgraded and optimized this module in the new version.
- Better UI, the whole system is more stable, and the tutorial has been re-recorded.
- More accurate collision detection, supporting terrain collision.
- The inertial system is more accurate and the result is better.
- Force of wind and gravity.
- Improvement of the blending effect of external force and dragon’s breath automatic animation.
Dragon Breath Ribbon 3ds MAX Version
Based on the independent core of the Dragon Breath Ribbon, we have migrated the entire ribbon system to 3ds Max, and all features are available so that you can directly work in Max, for FBX or BIP including simulating, collision, automatic animation, etc.
Motion Editor
Animcraft’s general motion resources are defined by a dedicated internal format (.acd)
If you want to make some simple modifications to this kind of data quickly, you can now directly open the motion through the motion editor for FK animation.
Make some keyframe animation on top of the layer, and then save it directly. In most cases, there is no need to send the animation back to the 3D software for modification again.
Optimization and Improvement of the Non-linear Animation Scene Editor
In this update, we have fixed nearly 100 bugs in the scene editor to improve efficiency and user experience.
- Better to use and much stable now.
- Supports single-character non-linear animation editing, FK keyframes, animation layers, and other functions.
- The scene editing and motion editor also adds real-time and frame-by-frame playback switching.
- Bringing a new set of tutorials.
- (Coming soon) the editing feature of the IK controller and different partial animations will be in the near release.
Batch ADV Rigs Resource Extractor
If the team has some amount of sleeping Maya files that have been rigged by Advanced Skeleton, they can now be automatically exported to FBX in batch mode, and then batch import into the Animcraft resource library. The entire process is automated and batch operations can help the company collect some deposited assets.
Compatibility Extension:
Support 3ds Max 2022, Maya 2022, UE-5 and UE4.27
Other bugs fixing and improvements
- Fix the FBX re-target bug of the fingers (there were some problems if they were too straight before)
- Some display issues in the mapping window
- Fix the problem of group node display
- Fixed and made it support when Perforce and other version control systems modified the file permissions to read-only.
Version 2.0
With the release of Animcraft 2.0, we’re excited to announce that the entire facial system is ready for duty! You will have completed experience of character animation with both body and facial libraries and tools available. We’ve rewritten the entire animation editor and brought a new non-linear and non-destructive editor. You can now easier to edit your facial and body motion data and use them to create animation.
The 1st release of Animcraft 2.0 in the year 2021, briefly has the following new features:
- A facial animation system and a full toolchain in each stage have been introduced. Modules from facial expressions library, real-time display, facial re-targeting. motion capture, to the bridge tools in Maya, 3ds Max UE, and Unity3d, are already.
- Animation editor now has non-linear and non-destructive editing feature that allows you not even edit the exist animation clips but also use them to create a new animation, support both facial and body track, and is able to work with character re-targeting
- iPhone and iPad app for body and facial motion capturing with auto optimizers. You can capture your motion data anytime and use it anywhere, such as retarget it to any characters or re-build a rig for it.
- A pipeline toolkit for converting Maya rig to 3ds Max Character Studio rig, and converting back to Maya rig with animation data. 3ds Max Animator can work with Maya rig without losing quality.
- Bunch of bug fixing and UX improvements.
The Completed Facial Animation Toolchain
In Animcraft 2.0, we’re providing a full bunch of facial tools including from facial mocap app, 3d preview, library, retarget, animation, to the rig and import/export plug-ins of 3ds Max, Maya, UE, and Unity. And more special, if you rig your face with Animcraft plug-ins in 3ds Max or Maya, your animation can be automatically retargeted between any 2 face rigs even in different software. It supports both blendshape and bones workflow.
Let’s explore all the facial system features below:
Real-Time Face Motion Capture
You can now download an app from Apple AppStore and apply facial motion capture with Animcraft main window. Expression data will be converted to general data and stored in Facial Animation Library for further use.
3D General Facial Motion Preview
A GPU-based 3D preview in Animcraft main window can display any facial motion data smoothly on a general digital actor. You can high efficiently preview, organize and store them without any issue.
Retargeting to Others FBX Character
Like the body motion, facial animation can be stored as the general assets (.ace files), then can be transferred and re-targeted to other FBX characters in the Animcraft character library. Preview the merged result in 3d Windows.
Retargeting to Maya Facial Rig
With the Animcraft for Maya plugin, you can map the Maya facial control rig and then retarget the facial motion data in the library directly to the rig controllers, achieving facial motion transfer for example from a human to an Orc.
A Fully-featured Facial Control Rig System for Maya and 3ds Max
Similar to the Advanced Skeleton Facial Rigging System in Maya and Bony Face System in 3ds Max, Animcraft provided a completed set of tools that allow you to rig a facial model from scratch both in 3ds Max and Maya. The tools include features like template points positioning, control rig building, secondary controllers, control panel, etc.
The more special thing is that if you build the facial rig with the Animcraft plugin (either in Maya or 3ds Max), you will have one-click and full precise ability to retarget facial motions among all other characters (which rigged using Animcraft plugin) in various software like Maya, 3ds Max, Animcraft Main Window, and game engines like Unreal, and Unity.
Editable Facial Clips
You can now use the facial animation data as clips and insert them into the latest non-linear motion editor (To be introduced in the below section). The facial animation sequence can be created by concatenating different facial clips in different tracks and blending different facial parts in different clips.
Game Engine Support
The retargeted facial animation data can be exported to the same character in Unreal Engine and Unity 3D. If you choose the Animcraft plugin to build a facial rig and make animations, the rest of the works can be finished with several clicks.
Version 1.1.5
Release Date: 2-8-2021
What’s new?
- Improved 3D viewport and experience.
- Fuzzy selection by mouse pointer with some pixel.
- More precise manipulator
- Marquee selection tool in scene editor
- Outliner hierarchy display
- More accurate attribute in channel boxes.
- Better experience for mouse and keyboard layout
- Tags Feature Rewrite
- The new Tag module has its own database now.
- It will be much faster than before.
- Fixed around 50 bugs
- Make it more stable and smooth.
Coming Soon
Basefount has been working very hard on Version 2.0 recently and it will be coming in early April 2021.
Version 1.1.4 – 1-12-2001
Improved and finished physical simulation toolkit
In Animcraft 1.1, we brought NVIDIA PhysX based physical simulation module in beta. And this time all UI, simulation workflow, and playback tools have been completed. You can now simulate some parts of the character and save the result as FBX.
- Physical simulation setup indicator in 3d viewport, dynamic parts, collision parts, and global parameters setup UI.
- Simulate start from a specific bone and chain.
- Simulate end and prevent subtree from simulating.
- Combine some dynamic parts to stimulate them like a whole rigid body.
- Collision capsule adding and editing.
- Servo Force Drive in dynamic joints.
Better Spine Palm Retargeting
Using the bone chain, average plane and swing aim constrain algorithm. Animcraft now has more detailed arbitrary vertebra number spine bone retargeting, which made Animcraft on a par with Human IK in this area.
Palm Bone Constrain
There is some very subtle hand animation on palm bones. From Animcraft 1.1.4 we’ll bring it into the retargeting system. Then you can make the animation with palm rotations on the character’s hands. Read More. Additionally, these features can be applied to any characters in 3ds Max, Maya, and FBX.
Enhanced 3D viewport
- Camera animation supported.
- Self-illuminated shader supported.
More Productivity Batch Tools
- Batch render as a folder
- Batch merge and export FBXs (Usually used to import UE)
- 3ds Max Batch FBX to Biped Rig
Bridge Plugins Upgrade
The APIs in Max 2021 and UE 4.26 have changed to Python 3 binding, after some refractory and adjusting, Animcraft supports them in this version.
- Support Unreal Engine 4.26
- Support 3ds Max 2021
Upgraded Resource Library
As a sub-system of Animcraft, the resource library will be upgraded each time when new release. This time it brings the new features including:
- Manage arbitrary resources by creating slots and put contents into the packages, then you can set cover image and slideshow for each resource.
- Support PSD direct preview.
- An easier and faster Resources path setup experience
- More Sorting methods are added.
- Image anti-alias bug fixed. Many issues resolved.
- Resource package and slideshow.
New Animation resources
Around 300 new animation clips come along with the new version, all of them has copyright and can be used unlimited and freely including commercial purpose.
Version 1.1.2
- Fixed 150+ bugs
- Precise arbitrary Spine Retargeting (Beta). To be released next version.
- GUP Based Blendshape with arbitrary number of target mesh (upgrade in threejs source code)
Version 1.1.1
Release Date: 10-29-2020
What’s New
The Animcraft 1.1 brings the new features in animation tools and improvements in user experience. While improving the features and refining workflows for existing tools. we have further expanded the toolset to include editing for FBX animation. Scene Editor, BridgeIK Rig, Animation Layer, Time and Keyframes Control now work together to enable character rigging and animation editing.
In this release, we have added support for another 3 animation platforms, which include Maxon Cinema 4D Blender and MMD. Animcraft can now work with most of popular software in the industry.
Animation and Scene Editor
Using the new scene editor, you can now load character with motions and author the data in the scene, then, send the result animation to any character in DCC software and game engines, or export it as FBX.
Animation Layer and Animation Concatnation Upgrade
We integrated the animation concatnation feature into the scene editor for creating the animation layer, and users can edit and add key frame based on it. This can be used to modify some animation in original FBX.
Time Control
With the time control tools you can now edit the animation much easier, Features include a new time slider, time block, frame rate, key frames control, and related UI in scene editor.
BridgeIK Rig System
BridgeIK is an FK/IK controller-based fully functional rig system, it can be automatically built from an animated character, then you can edit the animation with the rig and keyframe control.
History Undo Queue
Both in mapping window and scene editor, you can now use Ctrl+Z to undo the operations.
Viewport Navigation Upgrade
There are also improvements to several aspects of 3d viewport such as xray joint tool, TRS manipulator, Focus and Zoom-in, the overall user experience has been improved a lot.
6 Extra Import Animation Features
The new release enable users to utilize animation data with more parameters. You can now easily change the animation speed, frame rate, cycle number, also reverse, mirror, in-place the animations.
Partial Animation Import
A visual guided partial animation import tool can be quite useful if you only want to assign animation to some choosen parts of a character.
PhysX Based Dynamic Simulation (Beta)
The new PhysX based dynamic simulation system enables user to calculate the physical movement of character accessories.
Character Weapon Mapping Tools
We’ve added the weapon part into the mapping window, you can now map and retarget weapon and store the weapon animation into the library.
MMD Support (Need 3rd-Party Plugin)
The integration of MMD format allow users to drag and drop any PMD and PMX characters and animations into the 3D viewport and import them into the library. (3rd-party plugin is required, see document)
Blendshape Support
With the MMD support, the blendshape infrastructure are also added into the new release, the MMD facial animation now can be inspected as well.
Blender Support
Now Animcraft entirely supports Blender, users can import the animations to a Blender rigged character with the retarget features.
Cinema 4D Support
The Cinema4D support enables you to import animations from the library to a rigged character inCinema4D too.
Real-time Body and Finger Pose Library
this new release brings a real-time and intuitive body and finger pose library. You can quickly back and forth input and output the pose data between character and library.
Better FBX and Mapping Tools
Our FBX and mapping control tools are improved to enable even more precise and intuitive user experience.
a. Improved mapping and std-pose template
b. Record more bones in torso and shoulder to enable more precise control
Polished FBX and GLTF Importer
Our 3d viewport now is able to load almost all different FBX files which were exported from all different DCC software, also work with the GLTF from sketchfab.com. And this will be continued to upgrad in the later releases.
Resource Library Privilege Manage
New breed library structure allows you to define the user priviledge and control the library accessibility. With SQLite caching and privilege mangement, you can now easily achieve smooth team works without deploying, maintaincing and upgrading local servers and database.
Multimedia Library
Users can now import any videos and images (include GIF) into the new multimedia library, for quick referencing and sharing them within a team.
FAQs
Tutorials
Basefount Animcraft Tutorials #gettingstarted
Basefount Animcraft is a new animation sharing and editing 3d software. These 3 tutorials will help you get started using Animcraft in either 3ds Max or Maya.
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