v5.x AXYZ Design anima Pro

Our software has been designed to run on a wide range of hardware and software configurations, although performance levels will vary depending on the processing speed, graphics card, and memory of the system. Below you can see a list of the minimum specifications:

• Intel® i5 or AMD FX processor or better.
• Microsoft Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10, or Windows 11 (all 64 bit).
• 8GB of RAM (32 GB recommended).
• 10 GB of available hard disk space.
• DirectX® 10 or OpenGL® capable graphics card with 1Gb VRAM (8 Gb recommended).
• An internet connection is mandatory with the Subscription license and highly recommended with perpetual licenses.

In case you have any doubts, we highly recommend you to download and try out the free LITE version. You can use the FREE version anima® Lite to create still renderings and animations, even commercially.

When used only with Ready-Posed assets (static) has no limitations, and with animated models (4D, Ambient, and Rigged) it has the following limitations:

1. You can render 5 different default animated actors for each scene.
2. You can render 1 different custom imported animated actor for each scene.
3. You can render 4 seconds of animation (100 frames at 25 fps).
4. You cannot render an anima® LITE scene in an online Render Farm service.

All the paid versions ( anima® ALL, anima® PRO, and anima® Render Node) have no limitations and are fully compatible with all the types of models included in the metropoly® library (Ready-Posed, Ambient, Rigged, and 4D Digital Humans).

Compatibility

• Autodesk 3ds Max® 2016 – 2024
• Autodesk Maya® 2018 – 2024
• Maxon Cinema 4D® R17 – R26, 2024
• Epic Unreal Engine® 4.27, 5.1, 5.2 & 5.3

anima 5.2

NEW FEATURES:

• Pixotope® Plugin: Added support for the Pixotope virtual production package.
• 3ds Max® Plugin: Significantly enhanced performance during material rebuilding in very large scenes.
• 3ds Max® Plugin: Improved V-Ray and Arnold material handling.
• Unreal Engine® Plugin: Introduced support for versions UE 5.2 and UE 5.3.
• Cinema4D® Plugin: Implemented support for C4D 2024.
• Maya® Plugin: Integrated support for 2024 in the command-line deployment tool.

BUG FIXING:

• anima®: Resolved issues within the bone matcher tool.
• anima®: Addressed a crash occurring when using alive™.
• anima®: Mitigated a potential crash during the interface redraw of the root object.
• 3ds Max® Plugin: Resolved an issue preventing users from creating a drop scene more than once within the same project.
• 3ds Max® Plugin: Fixed a crash that occurs when opening a scene via command line.
• 3ds Max® Plugin: Addressed issues experienced when cancelling the drop in Max using any button other than the right mouse button.
• 3ds Max® Plugin: Fixed issues occurring when Drop models are downloaded and dropped into Max simultaneously.
• 3ds Max® Plugin: Corrected the application of material conversion to non-loaded drop characters.
• Cinema4D® Plugin: Resolved issues with using dropped characters that share the same model but are in different phases.
• Cinema4D® Plugin: Fixed potential crash when loading a c4d file that contains a aniproj that has been modified externally.
• Unreal Engine® Plugin: Fixed a potential crash that may occur when reimporting the same scene.

anima 5.1

AXYZ design S.R.L. is proud to present anima® 5.1. The latest version of anima® brings many improvements and compatibility with the latest versions of 3ds Max, Maya, Cinema 4D, and Unreal Engine 5.1

• anima®: It is now possible to duplicate and modify subscription assets however you like! Simply duplicate the asset in your project and start editing it as normal. Keep in mind, however, the original asset must be installed and available to keep using the modified resource. Only the changes you applied are saved to the file stored in your project’s libraries.
• anima®: New animated thumbnails will now be displayed for assets from the online store! Simply hover the mouse over one of them and it should play a short animation if a preview is available. This should allow you to see more easily what kind of animation the product you’re about to download has.
• anima®: You can now select the size of the thumbnails in the actor panel. Simply right-click and select the size you want or you can even use the Control key and the Mouse wheel to adjust it.
• anima®: The search engine from the online store has been integrated into the actor panel! You can now type different terms and get search suggestions to more easily find what you’re looking for. This should be very helpful for anima All users to filter and find the asset they need.
• anima®: It’s now possible to configure the time it takes for actors to be teleported to the start of a path when they reach the end by using the new reset time slider.
• anima®: The sign-in dialog now has a new toggle to show or hide the user’s password to help look for typing errors.
• anima® Plugins: The plugins can now display a special model to indicate an access error has occurred when reading from 4D resources when the source of the project itself is unable to be reached. This should be helpful in determining if rendering errors have occurred due to networking issues.
• anima® Plugins: Project packing performance has been improved by skipping unnecessary duplication of the resource cache when preparing the projects to be sent to render farms.
• anima® Commandline License: Extra information has been added to the device list function.
• 3ds Max® Plugin: Duplicated drop characters can be a copy instead of an instance only and they can be converted to anima® scene.
• 3ds Max® Plugin: Improved compatibility of the 4D models with Chaos Vantage (V-Ray 6.10.06 or newer required).
• 3ds Max® Plugin: Added support for 3dsMax 2024.
• Maya® Plugin: Added support for Maya 2024.

anima 5.0.2

The latest version of anima brings many improvements and compatibility with the latest versions of 3ds Max, Maya, Cinema 4D, and Unreal Engine 5.1

NEW FEATURES IN 5.0.2:

• anima®: User configuration has been moved from the “My Documents” directory to “%LOCALAPPDATA%/anima”. This should provide higher compatibility with systems that use this directory with protection or synchronization software that could cause problems during runtime. However, anima will keep suggesting creating the default Projects and Purchases directory under “My Documents” just like always for the users who wish to take advantage of that functionality.
• anima®: The visual scene tree has been revamped completely internally to provide a much faster response time and decrease loading times significantly on projects with large amounts of actors.
• anima® Commandline License: Two new actions are now available for anima all administrators. It’s now possible to retrieve the active list of devices and export it to a JSON or CSV file. You can also delete devices registered to an anima all subscription.
• Unreal Engine® Plugin: Added support for Unreal Engine® 5.1

anima 5.0.0 – Release Oct. 3, 2022

New Features

• anima®: Brand new crowd simulation engine powered by a neural network that has been trained with thousands of hours of motion capture data! Actors will now show much more realistic behavior when interacting with each other and when traveling across different types of surfaces. A wide variety of improvements have been made to the simulator across the board.
• anima®: Walking 4D actors are now available! Enjoy the benefits of volumetric captures that can loop seamlessly and walk over any path you wish on your scene. These characters can also avoid each other to prevent collisions. Use these actors to their full potential by bringing them closer to your camera and showcasing their realistic motions and clothing deformations.
• anima®: You can now make any path a closed loop. This will prevent actors from teleporting at the edges of the path, which can be useful depending on the needs of your project.
• anima®: Numerous optimizations have been made across the board to the application, reducing loading times drastically for anima ALL users or just users with lots of purchased models.
• anima®: The dock visibility buttons and the workspace settings have been merged into a single panel next to the account button.
• anima®: The camera list that can be opened inside a scene now supports scrolling if there are a lot of cameras to choose from.
• anima®: A new lightweight IPC service has been introduced to enhance the communication between anima and supported plugins. This also has the benefit of supporting multiple anima instances being connected to different anima plugins at the same time.
• anima®: The resource cache “Read from file” option has been extended with various improvements to allow working with plugins or multiple users in a network without running into file access errors. The resource cache will now write to a temporary file any changes it wishes to save if the file is not available for modification and the changes will be merged the next time the file can be opened for writing. This should allow users to work on the same project that another application is currently rendering from without having to rely on the “Keep in RAM” feature.
• anima®: The background importer has been improved to automatically detect duplicate meshes to reduce the size of the background files significantly if the source geometry does not feature instancing. This should result in a significant optimization for any backgrounds that feature heavily duplicated geometry.
• anima®: You can now edit the visual scale of actors. You can also edit their orientation values directly instead of using the single Y axis rotation that is available on the simple rotation mode. Please note that some file formats or applications might not support non-uniform scaling correctly when modifying this property in rigged characters.
• anima®:  The configuration file behavior has been improved and all changes a user makes will be instantly saved whenever an option is changed. The changes will also be visible instantly in other applications that support changing these preferences. This allows multiple anima applications to be used without overwriting each other’s preferences when quitting.
• anima® Plugins: The anima® Drop panel has been upgraded to support a wide array of features in the same way anima does. It is now possible to browse and download new actors directly from the panel without having to go to anima to install them. You can even activate your anima ALL subscription directly from this panel without ever using the application, which makes it very convenient when used with compatible plugins.
• 3ds Max® Plugin and Cinema4D® Plugin: It is now possible to drag and drop ambient and 4D actors directly using the anima® Drop panel. The plugin will now create a hidden scene so it is possible to work with anima® Drop in a similar way to anima. You can convert this hidden scene to a regular anima scene at any point if you wish to do more extensive modifications to it.
• 3ds Max® Plugin and Cinema4D® Plugin: The plugin will now create parent objects for each scene that was imported from an anima Project, as it already happened before in Maya®, allowing for easy movement of the scenes and quick browsing of their elements.
• 3ds Max® Plugin: The plugin now supports dropping and placing actors and updating them automatically once they are installed, just like in anima. A placeholder arrow mesh will be shown while the product is being downloaded.

BUG FIXING:

• anima®: Fixed an error where anima would unnecessarily load other resources used in the project even if the scenes were not opened when saving a scene for the first time.
• anima®: Fixed an error where locked ready-posed and stream actors would save useless information on the frame blocks when baking the animation.
• anima®: The registry key for the user’s configuration has been changed. The installer will migrate any relevant variables from ‘anima 2’ to just ‘anima’.
• anima®: Improved the behavior of automatic reconnections for anima ALL users after suspending the system while the application was running or disconnections during extensive sessions.
• anima®: Fixed an error where 4D characters would be unable to continue playback if they encountered a file reading error during streaming. The application will now reattempt to open the stream in these cases.
• anima®: Various minor user interface issues to improve the general experience.
• anima®: Fixed an error where actors would slightly reposition themselves after being dragged and dropped inside the viewport.
• anima® Plugins: Fixed an error where Plugins with different versions than anima could be used together, leading to undefined behavior. The plugins will now check properly and show an initialization error if the version of the Plugin and the version of anima have API differences that make them incompatible.
• anima® Plugins: Fixed an error where the Plugin would not attempt to re-authenticate correctly to the anima ALL service if the session was disconnected.
• anima® Plugins: The render farm packing functionality will now prompt for an error if the required resources for rendering are somehow missing from the resource cache, preventing incorrect submissions and render processes from being launched.
• Maya® Plugin: Fixed the texture issues on 4D models when using V-Ray to render animated sequences.
• Unreal Engine® Plugin: The materials created by the importer have been improved and will be less prone to compatibility errors between Unreal Engine versions.
• Unreal Engine® Plugin: Fixed various issues that could appear when re-importing scenes from anima. The naming scheme used by the importer should now be more consistent and less prone to errors.

KNOWN ISSUES:

• anima® and Unreal Engine® Plugins: If you see black textures on the 4D models, it means that you are using an old version of your GPU driver. The issue will disappear after you update your driver.
• 3ds Max® Plugin: The 4D models might be shown with heavy deformation artifacts only in the 3D viewport when using the IPR (interactive render) on multiple renderers, but this is only a cosmetic problem as it does not affect the final render and is automatically corrected when the IPR stops.
  In Corona, this problem is also visible in the interactive render, but this has been confirmed by the Corona developers to be caused by a bug on their side that they plan to fix in a future version.
  In Redshift, after an interactive render is made the mesh on the 4D models becomes unstable, but it can be fixed again by rendering a production render. This happens because Redshift does not notify correctly at the end of the interactive render, so we have already reported this issue to the Redshift developers.
• 3ds Max® Plugin:  When using Corona in interactive mode and 4D models, having the Maxscript MacroRecorder enabled may cause a crash if the current frame is changed by moving the timeline. This issue only happens with Corona and has been already reported to ChaosGroup, the other renderers work fine in the same situation.
• Cinema4D® Plugin: The 4D models cannot be used with Motion Blur on Cinema4D® due to an incompatibility with the architecture of this application. When 4D models are rendered with MB enabled, they appear to lose the mapping of the textures on some frames. The problem is caused by a missing feature in the Cinema 4D SDK that is present in all the other platforms we support. We have reported this issue to Maxon and asked them to add this feature in order to enable Motion Blur compatibility.
• Cinema4D® Plugin: V-Ray 5 may render some frames as corrupted meshes on the 4D models when the Motion Blur is enabled. This is an error caused by V-Ray ignoring the MotionBlur tags in the actors and must be fixed by ChaosGroup, it is not caused by anima®.
• Maya® Plugin: The renderers supported on Maya® are Arnold, Redshift, and V-ray.
• Maya® Plugin: V-ray renderer does not support motion blur on 4D models.
• Maya® Plugin: The viewport must be set in DG Evaluation mode to correctly display the animation of the models. Serial and Parallel modes can cause mesh corruption on 4D models and break the animation on the Rigged models.
• Unreal Engine® Plugin: In version 4.27, the textures of the 4D models might disappear when using the STANDALONE GAME feature. This is a retro-compatibility bug that was introduced by Epic and can be fixed by recompiling and resaving the base material again (“Anima4D_material“, no modifications needed).

anima 4.5.5 – Release 12/5/2022

NEW FEATURES:

• 3ds Max® Plugin: Added 3DS Max 2023 support.
• Cinema4D® Plugin: Added Cinema 4D R26 support.
• Unreal Engine® Plugin: Added Unreal Engine 5.0.1 support (Early Access and Preview versions are no longer supported).

BUG FIXING:

• anima® Plugins: Fixed a very rare crash that could happen under certain circumstances when building the internal resource list.
• Unreal Engine® Plugin: Fixed an issue where importing actors with skeleton animations would take a significantly longer time compared to previous Unreal Engine versions.
• Unreal Engine® Plugin: Fixed an issue where textures for anima actors would be imported as virtual textures incorrectly, breaking their material in the process.
• Unreal Engine® Plugin: Packaging projects is now supported on Unreal Engine 5 too.

KNOWN ISSUES:

• anima® and Unreal Engine® Plugins: If you see black textures on the 4D models, it means that you are using an old version of your GPU driver. The issue will disappear after you update your driver.
• 3ds Max® Plugin: The 4D models might be shown with heavy deformation artifacts only in the 3D viewport when using the IPR (interactive render) on multiple renderers, but this is only a cosmetic problem as it does not affect the final render and is automatically corrected when the IPR stops.
  In Corona, this problem is also visible in the interactive render, but this has been confirmed by the Corona developers to be caused by a bug on their side that they plan to fix in a future version.
  In Redshift, after an interactive render is made the mesh on the 4D models becomes unstable, but it can be fixed again by rendering a production render. This happens because Redshift does not notify correctly the end of the interactive render, so we have already reported this issue to the Redshift developers.
• 3ds Max® Plugin: The models from a subscription that are used from the Quick Drop panel are rendered as a degraded mesh in production renders made with V-Ray GPU (V-Ray standard works fine). This issue has been fixed in the V-Ray 5 update 2 (5.20.00).
• 3ds Max® Plugin:  When using Corona in interactive mode and 4D models, having the Maxscript MacroRecorder enabled may cause a crash if the current frame is changed by moving the timeline. This issue only happens with Corona and has been already reported to ChaosGroup, the other renderers work fine in the same situation.
• Cinema4D® Plugin: The 4D models cannot be used with Motion Blur on Cinema4D® due to an incompatibility with the architecture of this application. When 4D models are rendered with MB enabled, they appear to lose the mapping on the textures on some frames. The problem is caused by a missing feature in the Cinema 4D SDK that is present in all the other platforms we support. We have reported this issue to Maxon and asked them to add this feature in order to enable Motion Blur compatibility.
• Cinema4D® Plugin: V-Ray 5 may render some frames as corrupted meshes on the 4D models when the Motion Blur is enabled. This is an error caused by V-Ray ignoring the MotionBlur tags in the actors and must be fixed by ChaosGroup, it is not caused by anima®.
• Maya® Plugin: The renderers supported on Maya® are Arnold, Redshift, and V-ray.
• Maya® Plugin: The texture of the 4D models is not correctly updated when rendering sequences with V-Ray. We are in contact with ChaosGroup to find a clean solution for this but, meanwhile, we have a workaround available that can solve this problem too. Please contact our Support Team to get it.
• Maya® Plugin: V-ray renderer does not support motion blur on 4D models.
• Maya® Plugin: The viewport must be set in DG Evaluation mode to correctly display the animation of the models. Serial and Parallel modes can cause mesh corruption on 4D models and break the animation on the Rigged models.
• Unreal Engine® Plugin: In version 4.27, the textures of the 4D models might disappear when using the STANDALONE GAME feature. This is a retro-compatibility bug that was introduced by Epic and can be fixed by recompiling and resaving the base material again (“Anima4D_material“, no modifications needed).

anima® 4.5.4 – Release | 09 March 2022

NEW FEATURES:

• anima® License Tool: A new command-line interface license tool has been added to the installer. This tool can be used to administer, activate or remove an anima PRO or ALL license from a device without needing to use the application. This tool should prove useful for system administrators or users who wish to activate anima on headless systems like render nodes.
• anima®: Multiple improvements to the filtering functionality and the consistency of the names displayed in the actor and clip libraries. The search filter will no longer include irrelevant information such as asset descriptions.
• anima®: The installer now supports more options when used from a command line.
• anima® Plugin: The velocity channel of the 4D actor will now be filled out correctly so compatible renderers can use that information to create a motion blur effect.
• anima® ALL: A new “render node” mode has been added for anima® ALL. It is now possible to render scenes from any of the pre-authorized devices from a subscription account without taking up a seat as long as the rendering is done on an instance of your 3D app that does not have a UI.
• Unreal Engine® Plugin: Added support for Unreal Engine® 5.0.0 Preview 2.

Bug Fixing:

• anima®: Fixed an error where the application would crash when trying to read corrupted asset files under certain circumstances.
• anima®: Fixed an issue where the application would crash when trying to update a corrupted resource cache in certain conditions.
• anima®: Fixed an error where an incorrect error message would be logged when a resource index didn’t exist.
• anima® Plugins: Fixed an error where a project extracted from a pack of a version previous to 4.5.0 would not open correctly when opening the .anipack file directly.
• anima® Plugins: Fixed an issue where the resource index would not be properly updated when opening a project, so any new assets that were installed while running would not show up correctly.
• 3ds Max® Plugin: Fixed an error where creating escalators could fail under certain circumstances.
• 3ds Max® Plugin: Fixed an error where the error message that appears when attempting to open a scene that doesn’t work correctly would not show up correctly in the message log of a network render.
• 3ds Max® Plugin: Fixed an error where the error message that appears when attempting to open multiple anima projects at the same time would not show up correctly in the message log of a network render.
• Cinema4D® Plugin: Fixed an error where the textures of some models were not properly restored from the anipacks generated using the anima® API script interface.
• Unreal Engine® Plugin: Fixed an error where the application would refuse to import the project if some assets that weren’t critical to the scene couldn’t be found.
• Unreal Engine® Plugin: Fixed an issue where the project would not be closed properly in memory after importing it.

Known Issues:

• anima® and Unreal Engine® Plugins: If you see black textures on the 4D models, it usually happens when the computer has installed an old version of the GPU driver, it should disappear after a proper update. An alternative workaround is to set the 4D texture decoding from GPU to CPU in the preferences of the anima® standalone app or in the Unreal Engine settings, in the anima® section.
• 3ds Max® Plugin: The 4D models might be shown with heavy deformation artifacts only in the 3D viewport when using the IPR (interactive render) on multiple renderers, but this is only a cosmetic problem as it does not affect the final render and is automatically corrected when the IPR stops.
  In Corona, this problem is also visible in the interactive render, but this has been confirmed by the Corona developers to be caused by a bug on their side that they plan to fix in a future version.
  In Redshift, after an interactive render is made the mesh on the 4D models becomes unstable, but it can be fixed again by rendering a production render. This happens because Redshift does not notify correctly the end of the interactive render, so we have already reported this issue to the Redshift developers.
• 3ds Max® Plugin: The models from a subscription that are used from the Quick Drop panel are rendered as a degraded mesh in production renders made with V-Ray GPU (V-Ray standard works fine). This issue has been fixed in the V-Ray 5 update 2 (5.20.00).
• 3ds Max® Plugin:  When using Corona in interactive mode and 4D models, having the Maxscript MacroRecorder enabled may cause a crash if the current frame is changed by moving the timeline. This issue only happens with Corona and has been already reported to ChaosGroup, the other renderers work fine in the same situation.
• Cinema4D® Plugin: The 4D models cannot be used with Motion Blur on Cinema4D® due to an incompatibility with the architecture of this application. When 4D models are rendered with MB enabled, they appear to lose the mapping on the textures on some frames. The problem is caused by a missing feature in the Cinema 4D SDK that is present in all the other platforms we support. We have reported this issue to Maxon and asked them to add this feature in order to enable Motion Blur compatibility.
• Cinema4D® Plugin: V-Ray 5 may render some frames as corrupted meshes on the 4D models when the Motion Blur is enabled. This is an error caused by V-Ray ignoring the MotionBlur tags in the actors and must be fixed by ChaosGroup, it is not caused by anima®.
• Maya® Plugin: The renderers supported on Maya® are Arnold, Redshift, and V-ray.
• Maya® Plugin: The texture of the 4D models is not correctly updated when rendering sequences with V-Ray. We are in contact with ChaosGroup to find a clean solution for this but, meanwhile, we have a workaround available that can solve this problem too. Please contact our Support Team to get it.
• Maya® Plugin: V-ray renderer does not support motion blur on 4D models.
• Maya® Plugin: The viewport must be set in DG Evaluation mode to correctly display the animation of the models. Serial and Parallel modes can cause mesh corruption on 4D models and break the animation on the Rigged models.
• Unreal Engine® Plugin: The support for version 5.0.0 Preview 2 is in the beta stage, keep in mind that it is not production-ready yet. For example, at this moment it is not possible to build packages in UE5 when the anima® plugin is enabled, that is why the plugin is disabled by default in this version. However, if you enable it in the project plugins section of UE, everything except the build package process should work as expected.
• Unreal Engine® Plugin: In version 4.27, the textures of the 4D models might disappear when using the STANDALONE GAME feature. This is a retro-compatibility bug that was introduced by Epic and can be fixed by recompiling and resaving the base material again (“Anima4D_material“, no modifications needed).

anima 4.5.2

anima® Stand-Alone:

▪ IMPORTANT Fixed an error where exporting a project with a resource cache bigger than 4 GB would cause the resulting .anipack file to be corrupted. This is a critical fix that should be applied as soon as possible if you wish to submit your projects to a render farm.
▪ Fixed an issue where updating a scene using anima alive without automatic updates could cause the application to get stuck on a waiting cycle.
▪ Fixed an error where locking and unlocking a scene repeatedly while connected with alive could cause the resulting frames to be erased, display visual glitches, or even freeze the anima plugin being used.
▪ Fixed an error where the application was unable to recreate the resource cache if it was corrupted for some reason. A prompt will now appear to confirm this operation if it’s required to save the project.
▪ Fixed an error where switching to the library editing mode could cause a freeze if a scene with a big amount of baked frames was loaded.
▪ Fixed an error where attempting to bake a scene with no actors would result in a freeze.

anima® Plugins:

▪ Fixed an issue where the last modified time of a scene would not be updated correctly when using anima alive, leading to an incorrect warning on the plugins.

3ds Max® Plugin:

▪ Multiple improvements have been made to the Quick Drop panel to provide a better and more stable experience when using it.
▪ Fixed an issue where the models from the subscription were not visible in production renders when using Redshift.

Cinema4D® Plugin:

▪ A new option for displaying all actors as full meshes instead of arrows is now available.

anima 4.1.1 Update

NEW FEATURES:

• anima®: Selecting CPU or GPU video decoding is now available when booting on safe mode for the first time.
• anima®: Minidump debug information is now stored in my documents folder (useful for providing error reports).
• anima® render node: The Command-line Deploy tool support for Cinema4D R23.
• anima® render node: Extra information is now stored in the log file created by the Command-line Deploy tool.
• 3ds Max® Plugin: Added support for 3ds Max® 2022.
• 3ds Max® Plugin: Added a message warning if the scene has been changed and it was not reloaded in 3dsmax.
• Cinema4D® Plugin: Improved performance in plugin scene loading.
• Cinema4D® Plugin: Added initial support for V-Ray 5 (known issues with motion-blur pending).
• Unreal Engine® Plugin: The plugin is no longer installed if you select render node install mode.
• Maya® Plugin: Added support for Maya® 2022.
• Maya® Plugin: Added an option to the anima controller to manually enable Motion Blur generation on 4D models.

BUG FIXING:

• anima®: Fixed an issue where objects located at the origin would show up as highlighted if the mouse cursor was above the horizon of the viewport.
• anima®: Improved the mouse scrolling behavior on the object properties panel.
• anima®: Some slider objects that allow typing big numerical values will now work correctly if the operating system is configured to use a decimal symbol that isn’t a dot.
• anima®: Fixed a crash that could happen when toggling the visibility of area nodes.
• anima®: Updated some application messages to be more accurate.
• anima®: Fixed an issue where the mouse scrolling on a dock widget would work incorrectly when “Scroll inactive windows when I hover over them” was disabled in Windows 10 due to an outdated version of the Qt framework.
• anima®: Fixed an issue in the export FBX module when using Point Caches files with both MDD and PC2.
• anima®: Fixed an issue where the scale of the escalators could be exported incorrectly to FBX on older scenes.
• anima®: Fixed an issue with the memory usage when reloading scenes with 4D characters in all the plugins.
• 3ds Max® Plugin: Some fixes and improvements in the 3dsmax drag and drop gallery.
• 3ds Max® Plugin: Minor stability improvements.
• Cinema4D® Plugin: Improved behavior of alive connection to be more consistent.
• Cinema4D® Plugin: Fixed an issue where the option to select the path of a project from the properties of the anima object would not work correctly.
• Unreal Engine® Plugin: Projects that use the same 4D character with the same phase more than once will now be packaged correctly.
• Maya® Plugin: Excluded the anima nodes from the playback cache to avoid stability issues.

anima 4.1.0 Update

This update includes a whole host of new features related to 4D playback. Several improvements have been made to anima to handle many more 4D actors than what was previously possible. The biggest improvement comes from the addition of GPU video decoding for those with compatible NVIDIA GPUs.

anima®: The biggest improvement comes from the addition of GPU video decoding for those with compatible NVIDIA GPUs. In supported systems, a new option will be visible from the preferences panel to choose between CPU or GPU video decoding. Choosing GPU decoding will give significant performance improvements when playing back 4D actors in the anima viewport while reducing CPU usage overall. Many other tweaks have also been implemented to handle larger amounts of 4D actors in the viewport at the same time without the need to turn them into boxes. If you want to try this out, make sure to increase the previous limit of visible 4D actors in the viewport’s graphics panel. A new LOD has also been implemented to improve playback from very far distances, which will be automatically applied when updating the 4D assets to their newer version.
anima: Simulation performance has been improved on scenes with large backgrounds. The internal collision tree has also been made more efficient, resulting in both a speed increase and a file size reduction for any anima project.

metropoly®: The whole collection of 4D actors has been reprocessed to give a higher and more consistent level of quality. These assets are backward compatible with previous versions of anima, but most of their performance improvements will be available when updating anima to 4.1.0. The most notable change will be that the texture quality of these actors when being rendered by the anima Plugin will be higher than the current version.

Unreal Engine 4® Plugin: This update also includes many optimizations to the Unreal Engine 4 plugin, making real-time playback of anima projects much more viable. First, LODs are now generated for all characters, resulting in many performance improvements when looking at large crowds of characters from a distance. Second, we’ve added direct transfer capabilities when using GPU decoding for the playback of 4D actors, resulting in some really big increases in real-time performance. For example, internal benchmarks have shown that scenes with up to 20 4D actors can go from around 20 FPS to 160 FPS in a system using a single GTX 1080, making these projects much more viable for projects that require high refresh rates. These performance improvements are available when using the D3D11 or D3D12 RHI. The Vulkan RHI will also have performance improvements, but no direct transfer is available at the moment. We encourage you to give this update a try if you were interested in having 4D actors in real-time scenarios.

anima 4.0.3 Update

NEW FEATURES:

• anima: Improved the compatibility of the application in an environment that uses very long file paths (+256 chars).
• anima plugins: Improved the load scene times on 3ds Max® and Cinema 4D®.

BUG FIXING:

• anima: Fixed an issue where the assets displayed as a bounding box in anima® were incorrectly exported in T-pose to FBX, VrScene, or Collada.
• 3ds Max: Fixed an issue where the normals of the meshes could be wrong when rendering animations using render nodes.
• 3ds Max: Fixed an issue where the normals of the 4D models could be displayed incorrectly in the UV seams when using V-ray.
• 3ds Max: Fixed a stability issue with Octane and 4D characters.
• Cinema 4D Plugin: Fixed an issue where the alive™ connection would lock any animated cameras present in the Cinema4D scene.
• Cinema 4D Plugin: Fixed material conflicts when multiple shaders were applied to the same mesh selection tags on custom actors.
• UE4 Plugin: Fixed an issue where you could get UE4 to crash when importing an asset that was already present in the scene.
• UE4 Plugin: Fixed an issue with packages including 4D models made on UE 4.25.
• Maya Plugin: Fixed incorrect texture and normal updates in 4D actors.

KNOWN ISSUES:

• anima: The VrScenes exported from anima® have an issue with their textures in the latest V-ray versions. ChaosGroup® has confirmed to us that they have already made a bugfix for this problem and it will be included in their next releases of both V-ray Next® and V-ray 5®.
• 3ds Max: The 4D models explode in the viewport when using the IPR (interactive render) on multiple renderers, but this is only a cosmetic problem as it does not affect the final render and is automatically corrected when the IPR stops. In Corona, this problem is also visible int he interactive render, but this has been confirmed by the Corona developers to be caused by a bug on their side that they plan to fix in a future version.
• 3ds Max: Displaying the 4D models as arrows may lead to instabilities on some render engines.
• Cinema 4D Plugin: The 4D models don’t have Motion Blur on Cinema4D® due to an incompatibility with the architecture of this application. We have reported the problem to Maxon but there are no plans to solve this yet.
• Cinema 4D Plugin: The IPR mode from V-Ray does not show textures on the models. We are talking with ChaosGroup to find a solution to this problem.
• Maya Plugin: The renderers supported by now on Maya® are Arnold, Redshift, and V-ray. Octane renderer will be added soon.
• Maya Plugin: The texture of the 4D models is not correctly updated when rendering sequences with V-ray.

What’s new in anima 4.0.1?

NEW FEATURES:

anima:

• “Download” and “Update” options will now show up from the right-click menu on multiple selections of actors even if the clicked actor does not support it.

3DS Max Plugin:

• Added support for 3DS Max 2021.
• Material improvements for V-Ray and Corona renderers.

Cinema 4D Plugin:

•  V-Ray materials can now be previewed in the viewport.

UE4 Plugin:

• Motion Blur and TAA support for 4D actors has been added. To activate it, you must enable the “Accurate velocities from Vertex Deformation” option in your project’s settings. The name of this option is likely to change in future UE4® versions. Check the documentation for further details.

Maya Plugin:

• Added an additional transform node between animaSceneRoot and all the anima® objects for a better organization in the Outliner.
  Added automatic detection and unpacking support on scene load for anipack files.

BUGFIXES:

anima:

• Some of the new messages have been changed.
• Fixed a rare crash caused when using alive™ due to an interface error.
• Version updates downloaded from the application are now verified further to ensure they’re not corrupt.
• Fixed an issue where the video preview capture would generate a corrupt file if a camera with an aspect ratio different than 16:9 was active at the same time.
• Fixed an issue where the simplified boxes for actors would show up when toggling a camera active.
• Fixed an issue where an incorrect message would appear when detecting new available product downloads from your account.
• Fixed an issue where activating or deactivating an anima® license while the anima® plugin is active would require to restart said plugin for the license to work properly.
• Fixed an issue on the FBX exporter where rigged and ambient actor animations would not export correctly.

3DS Max Plugin:

• Fixed an issue where ambient actors could not be dropped as ready-posed models from the drag and drop panel directly into the application.
• Fixed an issue where bump maps would show up incorrectly for 4D actors in combination with V-Ray.

Cinema 4D Plugin:

• Fixed an issue where the background components would not be transferred properly to anima® when using alive™ in the recent versions of Cinema4D®.
• Fixed an issue where ambient actors could not be dropped as ready-posed models from the drag and drop panel directly into the application.

Maya Plugin:

• Fixed an issue where the program would not retrieve the anima® path correctly from the registry if it was installed and used from separate Windows user accounts.
• Fixed an issue where incorrect messages would appear when importing scenes with baked animations.
• Fixed the anipack command available for use in the MEL scripting language.
• Fixed an issue that would appear when the same actor was imported several times from the Asset Browser dialog.

UE4 Plugin:

• Fixed an issue where ambient actors could not be dropped as ready-posed models from the drag and drop panel directly into the application.

What’s new in anima 4.0?

The world of crowd simulation has been given new life with the release of anima 4.0. This is a major step towards a new way of creating even more realistic and life-like experiences. The software has been greatly improved since version 3.5 to be the best and fastest option on the market that focuses on a single goal: no fancy features, simpler and more consistent workflow, and at the same time affordable. To achieve this, a new and innovative way of capturing real people in motion has been designed, supported by our new technology for lossless 4D animation data compression.  A great effort has also been made to improve the overall usability of anima by making it even more compatible with industry standards.

Since anima came to the market in June 2016, it has been acclaimed as the best solution for quickly and easily creating stunning 3D animations in very little time. It was the first Archviz population tool to help architects, designers, and 3D professionals bring hundreds of realistic 3D characters into their scenes.  Now also several VFX companies also use it for set-extension shots because of its simplicity slashes production times.  We provide connection plugins for Epic Unreal Engine, Autodesk 3ds Max, Maxon Cinema 4D and now, since this 4th version, we introduce also a brand new plugin for Autodesk Maya®.

In this new version, we introduce several new features related to user content management and library performance, and also our 2 new types of actors: 4D Digital Humans and Ambient.

The update can be downloaded directly from the AXYZ design website or through the automatic software updater.

NEW MAYA PLUGIN

Having a great workflow between anima and the other content creation tools has always been our main goal. 3ds Max, Cinema 4D, and Unreal Engine are some of the industry-standard CG software that is already available for seamless integration with anima. Not to mention that it is compatible with several rendering engines such as V-Ray, Corona, Redshift, Octane, Arnold and more.

To continue improving our availability, we introduce a new plugin for Maya. This new addition allows anima® to reach the VFX industry to help in the highly demanded generation of set-extensions, thanks to the tools we provide to quickly populate extensive backgrounds of virtual environments.

NEW TYPES OF MODELS

• 4D Digital Humans: These new animated characters are capable of preserving all the details of the clothing and offer facial animations that provide unattainable realism. All this is possible thanks to a new motion capture algorithm and technology developed by the AXYZ design team that allows us to apply a lossless compression from 5GB of data of each character into just 150-250MB while preserving absolutely all the detail of the source animated mesh.
• Ambient actors: We have improved our static models by adding them to a new automatic rig algorithm that generates subtle movements to simulate realistic idle animations on models that previously caught the eye for being absolutely static. All our Ready-Posed library will be gradually updated to become Ambient 3D for free! Yes, that means that if you already own a model as Ready posed, you will automatically get it as Ambient too as soon as we finish its conversion.

ACCOUNT INTEGRATION

• Sign In:  By simply sign in your account you can easily manage your licenses, access your profile, downloads, and all animal-related content.
• Notifications: We will keep you informed by sending notifications that affect your account directly to the anima® standalone application. If something new is released or if the Maintenance Plan related to your license is about to expire then you will know before it happens.
• Embedded Webshop: The new version includes a full-featured internet browser that gives you direct access to the full library of AXYZ design products in our online webshop and to your user account dashboard.
• Licensing: Another great improvement of the user experience is the new anima 4.0 licensing system. Instead of copying and pasting weird codes to license the software, you can now use your AXYZ design website login credentials.

IMPROVED CONTENT MANAGEMENT

• Direct Actor Download and Update system: The integration of the website store and account login brings another great feature, while you’re online, the system will automatically keep all your content up to date and notify you of any available content updates. If there is some fix or improvement on any of your actors, you will know right away and you will be able to update it with just one click.
• Multiple Download Cue and Automatic Install: Now you can select multiple actors and download all of them with one click. They will be downloaded one after the other and installed automatically in your library right away, without needing to restart anima®.

IMPROVED WORKFLOW

• Network Optimization: We made a complete rewrite of the library indexing system to optimize the management of large asset libraries on network drives. Now, the bottlenecks that happened in these situations won’t happen anymore and all your projects will load much faster.
• Added a toggle in alive™ to deactivate the automatic update mode and let you manually send the scene to the plugin only when you want it.
• Long Paths optimization: In previous versions, the performance of the Walkway tool to create Paths was directly related to the real size of the background and the length of the path that was being made or edited. The longest the path, the longest the time it took to solve all the collisions with the background and the more you had to wait for each edit or creation of a new path point. This problem was particularly visible in urbanistic scale projects, with paths that were several hundreds of meters long.This new version takes a totally different approach to dramatically improve performance and solve this problem forever. Now the path creation and edition are realtime, with literally zero delays, no matter how large it is.

What’s new in Anima 3.5.7?

• anima: Fixed the C4D R21 parameter support in the command line deploy tool
• 3DS Max Plugin: Fixed an issue where incompatibilities between certain versions of 3DS Max and the anima plugin would cause a white window to appear.

Updates and upgrades are free within a year from the license activation.  Get the Update

What’s new in Anima 3.5.6?

• anima: Fixed an issue where the baked frames could get corrupted under rare circumstances when adding new actors.
• anima Plugins: Minor bugfixes updating the 3D viewport of the host applications.
• 3DS Max Plugin: Fixed a bug that caused a crash when using multiple scenes with alive™.
• 3DS Max Plugin: Added a notification in the render log (Backburner, Deadline or similar) if the node license is not active.
• Cinema4D Plugin: Added support for Cinema4D R21.
• UE4® Plugin: Added support for Unreal Engine 4.23.
• UE4® Plugin: Added support for Unreal Engine 4.24.

(*) All the updates and upgrades are free within a year from the license activation.

What’s new in Anima 3.5.5?

• anima: Improved simulation performance in scenes with very large backgrounds and scattered actors.
• anima: Added the ability to crop an animation when importing motion clips by selecting the start and end frame.
• anima: Fixed an issue where steps would be detected incorrectly and cause problems in the simulation in scenes with backgrounds that include very gentle (almost flat) slopes.
• anima: Fixed an issue where the crowd generator in paths would not generate actors in the same spots its visual indicator highlighted depending on the background geometry.
• anima: Fixed an issue where attempting to save an Untitled scene would not prompt the creation of a new project correctly.
• anima: Fixed a display error in the scenes browser when using long scene names.
• anima: Fixed an issue where enabling and disabling elements in the project tree would cause some actors to not appear correctly in the view-port.
• anima: Fixed a very rare issue where the bake action would cause the application to freeze under certain conditions.
• anima Plugins: Removed the unused “source” textures that were being incorrectly extracted to the texture cache folder.
• anima Plugins: Fixed an issue where the system’s locale could affect the formatting of the anima scene files when sending them to render farms, leading to errors when opening the scenes in other systems.
• 3DS Max Plugin: Corrected a map that was unused in the hair material for certain renderers.
• Cinema4D Plugin: Fixed an issue where closing multiple opened scenes with anima® could freeze the application.
• UE4® Plugin: Added support for Unreal Engine 4.22.2 and 4.22.3.
• UE4® Plugin: Fixed a rare crash when reloading an anima project in for Unreal Engine 4.22.
• UE4® Plugin: Added the bake recommendation that is displayed in the other plugins when importing a scene.

What’s new in Anima 3.5.4?

• 3DS Max Plugin: Added support for 3DS Max 2020.
• 3DS Max Plugin: Added multiple selection support in alive™ background sync.
• 3DS Max Plugin: Fixed scene param errors of scenes re-synchronized with alive™.
• 3DS Max Plugin: Fixed geometry sync bug in scenes including a dot in the filename.
• 3DS Max Plugin: Fixed rare crashes when starting a project with alive™ connection.
• 3DS Max Plugin: Improved alive™ performance when using interactive renderer.
• 3DS Max Plugin: When expanding an .anipack, the .aniproj path is updated accordingly.
• 3DS Max Plugin: Fixed offsets of multiple scenes when their name started with a number.
• Cinema 4D Plugin: Improved materials for Redshift.
• Cinema 4D Plugin: Improved materials for Octane.
• Cinema 4D Plugin: Support for textures with paths containing non standard ascii chars.
• Cinema 4D Plugin: When expanding an anipack the aniproj path is updated accordingly.
• UE4® Plugin: Fixed a bug when using anima® QuickDrop panel.
• anima: Improved material support for custom models.
• anima: Option to choose all the fingers manually in the Bone Matching window.
• anima: Added a “don’t ask again” option to lock/unlock dialog.
• anima: Fixed normal maps on VRScene export.
• anima: Improved reliability in the scene backup method scheme.
• anima: Fixed grouping actors in locked areas.
• anima: Fixed wrong scale visualization after importing some custom FBX models.

What Is New In Anima 3.5.3?

• New alive® connection.
• Real-time updated cameras with alive.
• Drag&drop 3d People directly to 3ds Max, Cinema 4D, and UE4.
• Improved interface and workflow.
• Improved actor and animation importer.
• Improved actor library with re-calibrated skin and material tones.
• New support for UE4 4.21 and Cinema 4D R20

What’s new in Anima 3.5?

1. SYNCHRONIZE SCENES – Synchronizing your Projects and Scenes with your favorite 3D modeling and rendering software is as simple as clicking a button.
2. SYNCHRONIZE CAMERAS – Keep static and animated cameras synchronized between 3ds Max® and anima® for perfect control of your crowd simulations and character placement.
3. SYNCHRONIZE GEOMETRIES – Define and select the collision geometries for your simulation directly in 3ds Max® and send them to anima® within a click!
4. DRAG&DROP IN 3DS MAX – Get access to hundreds of realistic 3D Human assets and start populating your still rendering projects directly from 3ds Max® with a simple and intuitive interface.
5. DRAG&DROP IN UE4 – Get access to hundreds of realistic 3D Human assets and start populating your still rendering projects directly from Unreal Engine 4 with a simple and intuitive interface.
6. INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS – An easy-to-learn and unobtrusive interface that’s designed to guide you through the process of creating complex animations in record time.
7. NEW BAKING PROCESS – Lock parts of your scene so that they’re not affected by any edit or additions that take place after they have been baked is easy and intuitive!

What’s new in Anima 3.0.4?

NEW FEATURES:

• Unreal Engine Plugin: Added support for version 4.20.

BUG FIXING:

• anima: Fixed an issue where certain parameters of the table nodes were not properly saved or copied.
• Cinema 4D Plugin: Fixed an issue regarding material incompatibility with the latest V-Ray version.

What’s new in Anima 3.0.3?

NEW FEATURES:

• 3DS Max Plugin: Added support for 3dsmax 2019.
• Unreal Engine Plugin: Added support for r4.19.

BUG FIXING:

• 3DS Max Plugin: Fixed issue with geometry normals.
• 3DS Max Plugin: Improved V-Ray materials.
• Cinema 4D Plugin:  Fixed potential “missing textures” message issue with anipack format.
• anima: Fixed minor issues with application installer.
• anima: Fixed importing backgrounds issues with .OBJ, .3DS, .LWO and .DAE formats.

What’s new in Anima 3.0.1?

• Support for Maxwell Render in 3DS Max
• Support for Cinema 4D R19.
• A new camera preset designed to resemble Unreal Engine’s controls.
• Improvements to workflow, adding a right-click option in the view-port for importing a background model.
• The model importer now supports non-8 bits per channel textures by converting them to the correct format.
• Anima Render node installations now have an option to access the configuration panel.
• Improvements to installation for users who have non-standard installation paths and the addition of a new shortcut created when installing that allows the user to configure the application before it starts.
• The application has been updated to use the latest version of the Visual C++ Redistributable 2017 Package. Said package has been included in the installer.
• Many small improvements and bug fixes.

See the release notes

Anima 3.0 Update

NEW FEATURES:

• New Unreal Engine 4 Plugin! Import your anima scenes into Unreal Engine 4 easily with the new native support. Most of your favorite features from the 3DS Max and C4D Plugins have already been included!
• Chairs, Squares, Escalators, Traffic Lights and Avoid Areas are now drawing tools instead of object templates! You can now find all of these objects and even more options on the left toolbar in the main editing view. You can also change your preferred drawing shape for these objects by clicking on the small arrow on top of them, allowing you to change between Square, Circle and Polygon drawing mode. Being able to use all of these as drawing tools will make your regular workflow much more efficient
• anima can now open multiple scenes at the same time! You will now see tabs on top of the editing view indicating what scenes are currently open. By clicking on a tab you can easily switch to the scene you’d like to work on. You can select multiple scenes when opening a project to indicate what scenes you’d like to open at the same time. Make your workflow much more efficient with these new possibilities!
• New shading system! anima has now switched to a Physically Based Renderer, giving you far higher quality visuals to preview more easily how your actors will look in your renders. The quality of materials has been significantly improved, and shadows will now act more realistically on both the actors and the background models, improving depth perception overall. The switch to a new renderer enables us to do some pretty exciting features in the future.
• New motions! A great deal of the motion clips included in anima have now been replaced with new higher quality motion captures, giving you better results in your resulting animations.
• New backgrounds panel! Backgrounds can now be shared in the same project between different scenes without having to re-import them. You can also find all your imported backgrounds in the new panel along with thumbnails and screenshots to easily visualize them. Simply drag and drop one of these backgrounds into your scene to use them! anima also comes with some new system-wide backgrounds for you to easily try out this new feature without having to import a custom model on your first attempt. (NOTE: The “Import background model” option from the context menu of the editing view is no longer available. You will find this option by clicking on the + button on the new backgrounds panel)
• Many improvements to the backgrounds system! Since backgrounds are now a shared asset of the project, this means many performance improvements were made to take advantage of this. Moving or rotating your background model will no longer cause the simulator to recalculate all the collision data. The only parts of the simulation that will be recalculated is the surface detection when you rotate the background model. Since the collision data and models are now shared, this means the overall size of a project will be much smaller if you were prone to reusing one background across multiple scenes.
• Improved camera controls! Rotating the camera when a node is selected will no longer “snap” the camera to the selected node, and will now allow for a much smoother rotation instead. The camera speed is also now dependent on the distance to your scene, so you can easily move around large distances when needed. The “Zoom All” option will also now preserve the direction your camera was facing.
• You can now install .y asset files by double clicking on them directly. This will work if you have anima already open. This functionality has also been extended to opening .aniproj and .anipack files directly into your current anima instance.
• New tip system! Helpful tips are now provided on the bottom of the editing view when using most of the tools. This should help you find out quick shortcuts that will make your workflow much more efficient. You can disable these tips from the display preferences menu if you no longer need them.
• anima: A new escalator step mesh with improved visuals has been included. This mesh will also be displayed on the Plugins and Exporters.
• anima: The display preferences toolbar option has now been moved to the top-left of the editing view along with a more representative icon. You should be able to spot this panel much more easily now.
• anima: The “Shadows” and “Shadow Quality” setting have been both merged into one single setting. The quality setting has now been changed to a preset instead of a resolution.
• anima: The new default play mode will be the “Preview” mode, which hides all visual helpers and lets you focus on the contents of your animation. You can switch back to the regular play mode by clicking on the small arrow on the play button.
• anima: It is now possible to press the Space key to toggle between playing your animation or stopping it.
• anima: Holding the shift key will now allow you to continue performing various drawing actions even after the first one has been performed. This also works when dragging nodes around the screen, allowing you to easily clone nodes.
• anima: A new soft shadow is now displayed below the actors on both views when previewing actor models or clips.
• anima: Models that are no longer being used will now be unloaded when selecting various models on the Actor Model & Motion editing mode. This will help reduce memory usage significantly when working with lots of assets in this mode.
• anima: When previewing motion clips, only the male or female generic model will be displayed by default if the clip is tagged to be used exclusively by either of them. (It’s still possible to change what model is displayed by toggling with the toolbar button)
• anima: Libraries will now display how many items are being filtered when using the search function.
• anima: When editing protected ranges for a model, it will now be properly explained why the options are disabled if the model has a custom protection mask included. (Which is currently the case for Ready-Posed actors)
• anima: Actors will now react to harsh turns in more realistic ways. They’ll now change their walking lane so their trajectory ends in a smooth curve instead of strictly following along their current lane.
• anima: Many improvements to the surface detection for background models. Small surfaces that are not usable will now be filtered and step detection should be significantly more accurate.
• anima: Squares can now generate purely random distributions of actors when no grid or no points are placed on it.
• anima: Raised the limit of area sizes for Squares, Traffic Lights and Avoid Areas and allowed typing bigger values if necessary.
• anima: Exporting a project pack will now display a percentage progress.
• anima: Video previews will now include the ambient occlusion effect along with all the other visual improvements.
• anima: Paths have been made more transparent to improve the visual style of the application and allow you to easily see overlapping paths.
• anima: Project folders will now be created when opening projects if they’ve been deleted manually.
• anima: Several minor UI style improvements have been made across the board.
• anima Plugins: Exported project packs for render farms will no longer include unused textures in the assets, bringing down the total size of these packs by a large margin.
• anima Plugins: Plugins will now default to using a system path for the texture cache if the directory of the project is protected against writing. This will allow for render nodes to not need writing permissions on the network directory where the project is and still render out correctly.

BUG FIXING:

• anima: Generating actors with paths will always now ensure actors are placed on valid surfaces and are not generated in the air. This helps solve a lot of issues when the paths were not drawn to match the shape of the surfaces very accurately.
• anima: Copying nodes that were in lower level of hierarchies (Like groups or squares) will now properly copy the orientation and position they had instead of just showing the relative transformation. This fixes several issues with the shift-cloning operation.
• anima: The simulation will no longer detect stair steps in far larger sizes than what can be used, which caused problems for the actors to use them properly.
• anima: Actors were walking up or down stairs in different ways depending on their height. These animations have been made much more consistent across all types of actors.
• anima: Actors would not follow the path properly on harsh (90 degrees or more) turns or would make very sudden rotations. This behavior has been improved across the board.
• anima: Actors would cross their legs on harsh turns. Actors will no longer be able to place their feet or legs causing unrealistic results like that.
• anima: Actors’ feet would slide in place on harsh turns even if the foot was already placed in the ground. This behavior has been made much smoother.
• anima: Actors’ pose would not be modified properly when performing harsh turns. This pose has been significantly improved.
• anima: Actors would not stop in place properly in squares or other similar objects. Stopping behavior has been improved.
• anima: Actors would not leave squares properly and stay there for the rest of the simulation. These cases are no longer possible.
• anima: Actors would skip traffic light or square areas if they were too small but there was still enough room for the actor to stop. They will no longer skip these areas.
• anima: Actors would ignore the sizes of the conversation groups areas even if they were defined, making them end up in the wrong position when entering a square. Actors will now take these sizes properly into account.
• anima: Actors’ feet would be incorrectly placed in the air when using escalators. This has been fixed.
• anima: Actors would change their ankle position while using an escalator. This is no longer possible.
• anima: Actors were capable of performing unrealistic head turns at extreme angles. A new constraint has been added to address this.
• anima: Actors would move their hip node in unrealistic ways and would do “jumps” in animation depending on the surface. This is no longer possible, as hip movement will now always result in a smooth animation regardless of the surface.
• anima: Actors would not properly react to an avoiding area if the area of it was moved away from the node. They will now react properly.
• anima: Squares would not accurately display the amount of available placement slots, showing far higher numbers than what was really possible. This number has been corrected.
• anima: Squares will now allow generating actors around 0, 0, 0 properly.
• anima: Ghost actors will no longer be displayed if they’ve been turned invisible from the project tree.
• anima: Project Pack exporter will no longer ignore resources used by scenes that were not currently open in either anima or the Plugins.
• anima: Selecting the X, Y and Z coordinates on the node transform options will no longer select the prefixes, making it much easier to use.
• anima: Undo and redo actions will now return properly to the default editing mode.
• anima: Camera cursors will now be displayed when the proper keys are pressed and not just when the mouse is moved.
• anima: Selecting nodes from the project tree will now return properly to the default editing mode.
• anima: Background importer will now use the new type of Zip streaming, reducing overall memory usage when importing background models.
• anima: The error message when an unsupported renderer is selected has been improved to be more clear on what actions you should take to solve the problem.
• anima: Added a warning for importing actors who have bones on the binding pose but are not applied to the Skin modifier, causing issues when determining their original position.
• anima: Library filters will no longer be lost when selecting a different actor model or motion clip.
• anima: A fatal error on the simulation will no longer leave the application “stuck” and will now close the application properly to indicate this.
• anima Plugin: Actors that were invisible during the entire animation will no longer get added to the list of valid actors. This affects both exporters and the plugins.
• anima Render Node Manager: Invalid emails or purchase codes will no longer be allowed on the list.
• Installer: Some minor grammar fixes.