The Future of Animation

Backgrounder

March 1997

Sumatra is more than an evolutionary upgrade..it is a bold new initiative that aims for nothing short of a revolution

Introduction

To Softimage Inc., computer animation is about much more than the ability to describe intricate shapes, simulate physical events, or create walking characters automatically. It’s about the artist and about how the artist creates. Softimage^® 3D has been and always will be an artist’s tool – conceived by artists, designed for artists, and evolved under the direction of artists.

Over the past 10 years, Softimage 3D has revolutionized the 3-D animation industry, with the first artist-centric user interface, an advanced tool set designed for the way artists work, and a production-centric focus that seamlessly fits into real-world production environments. Today, Softimage 3D is an essential tool for creation and production of serious works of animation.

This paper provides perspective on the past decade in computer animation, discusses some of the challenges facing the industry today, and outlines a road map for how Softimage will drive innovation for the next 10 years.

Looking Back

The ability to use computers to create stunning visual effects and, perhaps more importantly, believable characters, quickly caught the imagination of animation artists 10 years ago. Computer animation now has completely captured the hearts and minds of audiences around the world. Softimage is proud of its role in the computer animation industry, particularly the accomplishments below.

• Creation of a truly artist-driven environment. Softimage 3D was the industry’s first 3-D animation tool designed by artists for artists. Today, it is still focused exclusively on addressing the art and animation needs of the entertainment world. Softimage 3D was among the first professional products to integrate modeling, animation and rendering features, allowing artists to work in a single, seamless environment and defining a new standard for workflow. The renowned two-menu columns in Softimage 3D enable most commands to be performed with a few keystrokes. Softimage interface designs provide a natural working environment that becomes secondary to the creative capability of the artist.
• Character animation. Creating believable character animation is the pinnacle of the animation industry. Softimage pioneered and commercialized many character animation techniques, including widely adopted technologies such as inverse kinematics (IK) for achieving realistic body movement, and expressions and constraints for creating powerful relationships between elements. Perhaps more than any individual feature, the ability to combine features in Softimage 3D has liberated artists to create character animation effects that would be impossible in other systems.
• Achievements in motion capture. Softimage has made significant breakthroughs in integrating motion-capture technologies with animation software. Providing much more than simple import tools, Softimage 3D is an effective production tool because it enables users to move beyond the traditional boundaries of motion capture. Softimage motion-capture technology is also used widely in the implementation of virtual sets.
• Multiplatform support. Softimage is consistently an early adopter of new technologies, and Softimage 3D is the only professional 3-D animation software available for the Windows NT^® and Silicon Graphics platforms. The availability of Windows NT-based products fundamentally changed the dynamics of the 3-D animation software industry, spurring innovation and cost shifts that have made high-end animation affordable to a much wider audience. The competition-driven innovation continues today on both Windows NT and UNIX platforms.

The Industry Today: A Pivotal Time

The 3-D computer animation industry has reached one of the most pivotal times in its short history. Whereas productions were once typically created in “garage shops,” larger workgroups are becoming the more common entity. These workgroups include many types of creators – directors, producers, musicians, audio engineers, editors, marketers and, of course, animators – all working collaboratively on productions. With this shift in the typical production model and major changes, the challenges of 3-D computer animation have changed greatly. These new challenges cannot be addressed simply by adding more hardware and features to animation systems: It is time for a fundamental paradigm shift in the way we approach the creative process.

For example, today’s productions require extremely rapid development. However, the same methodology introduced in the first 3-D computer animation products is still being used today. Modeling, animation and rendering features and functions have advanced tremendously, but they are still very linear processes. Aside from the creative restraints this imposes, it also requires animators to spend a tremendous amount of time moving between such tasks as modeling an object, adding materials and textures, preview rendering, final rendering, and adjusting lights, often only to repeat the process because some element was missed. This can easily happen thousands of times in a single production; reducing that number is imperative to help animators meet today’s production schedules.

Animation is not well-integrated into the production process. Once an animation is complete, it’s extremely difficult and costly to make revisions based on other elements in a production. For example, adding one second to the beginning and end of an animation to match a live-actor scene is extremely difficult. Synching sound and animation is challenging because no system available today provides a truly integrated time line for different media. And within the editing environment, where the make-or-break finishing touches are added, almost no controls are available over aspects such as lighting and materials for animation. Integrating animation into the overall production process is crucial to making it a more easily introduced element and enabling the next creative leap in computer animation.

The Next 10 Years

The current vision at Softimage is a direct extension of what it has been pursuing over the last 10 years, but the vision is bold and more encompassing, extending to the entire production process. The goals are to provide the ultimate creative, collaborative environment for 3-D animators and to extend well beyond that into the entire digital-content creation process. For Softimage, all digital production is inextricably linked, and only through the integration of all elements, including powerful 3-D animation capabilities, can production reach its full creative potential and efficiency. Over the next decade, Softimage will continue its legacy of artistic innovation and will begin a new one: spearheading groundbreaking new ways to create digital content.

The tool Softimage is building to realize this vision, code-named Digital Studio, is a comprehensive non-linear editing environment that encompasses all aspects of digital media production including nonliner editing(NLE), audio, compositing, titling, paint and, of course, 3-D animation. Because all media in this environment are linked by a single time line, each element can be created, edited, re-edited and synchronized in real time.

To fulfill the vision, Softimage is creating a next-generation animation system to be both integrated into Digital Studio and fully functional as a standalone system.

Introducing Sumatra: Collaborative Nonlinear Animation

Sumatra, the code name for Softimage’s new 3-D animation product, will be the world’s first collaborative nonlinear animation system. More than a simple upgrade, Sumatra encompasses the rich features of Softimage 3D and builds on a legacy of speed, integration and productivity earned from a decade of experience in the most demanding production environments. With Sumatra, 3-D animation is fully integrated for the first time into NLE, compositing, audio and other production elements.

New Architecture

Sharing the same architecture as Digital Studio, Sumatra is a fully multithreaded, cross-platform application capable of fully exploiting the power of Windows NT and Silicon Graphics workstations, as well as multiprocessing servers. A highly optimized operator structure combined with a powerful execution engine ensures that all functions work together seamlessly and can be combined in a wide variety of configurations. The real-time heritage of this architecture guarantees the fastest refresh for viewing and rendering. Artists have full control over element update, including level-of-detail and refresh ordering.

Sumatra will provide the most open platform in the history of the computer animation industry. Softimage developers are using the same environment that will be available to customers and software partners to create features for Sumatra. Third party plug-ins will have the same power as the native tool set, with complete control over data and user-interface parameters.

Interface

Softimage is the industry-acknowledged leader in interface design for artists, in large part because of its fundamental philosophy that tools and features are only as powerful as the creative workflow allows them to be. Sumatra’s transparent interface provides two-click access to all major tools, a work-centric design, and direct, modeless object manipulation. Combining these principles with contextual, customizable menus and an innovative design, Sumatra enables individual artists to adapt the interface to their needs and work style.

Sumatra provides intuitive new ways to work graphically with scene data, simplifying the management of multiple scenes and mass character animation. One, two or all characters can be changed with just a few mouse clicks. The overall direction of a crowd can easily be shifted. Artists can go beyond granular animation to high-level character control – from animating one athlete to orchestrating the complex actions of an entire team. It is also possible to set up several tools on the same screen – for example, interactive rendering in one window and modeling in another.

Collaborative

The future of 3-D content creation will be built around multiuser, multilayered animation, for which a common vision, easy access to production data, and project tracking are essential elements for success.

Designed to be a true multiuser, multilayered animation system, Sumatra will shift animation production software design from an individual task to a workgroup-centric process. Sumatra will be the first animation product to allow teams to work efficiently across hardware and data boundaries, enabling the whole to exceed the sum of its parts.

In practice, this collaborative integration allows enables one artist to model a character while another designs the set lighting and another works on facial animation. Advanced project tracking, multiscene and multiobject viewing, and advanced database management will also be central elements in Sumatra, offering significant new support for the model of team-based animation production.

Nonlinear Animation

Small incremental steps that make existing processes better won’t change the animation industry, but new ideas that challenge existing norms will. Nonlinear animation is an industry first and a ground-shaking new idea. In nonlinear animation, animation data can be thought of as an image layer rather than a linear process involving a single stream of keyframes. This frees the artist to mix, move, reorganize and change different streams of animation as if they were layers of an image.

As an example, consider the facial animation of a character that requires hundreds of different expressions. In the past, different mouth orientations could be combined to produce the appearance of speech. Eyebrows and eyeballs could also be controlled independently. With Sumatra, the artist will be able to assign a dedicated animation to each facial muscle, assigning one set of muscles to the jaw, and another set to the tongue, nose and eyelids. When the artist is ready to animate the face, each animation stream can be mixed, stretched, reorganized and then “composited” to the global time line by hand or by procedural functions to create countless expressions.

Secondary animation, such as breathing, veins pulsing and random nervous twitching, could be layered on top of the original animation to give even more life to the character. To complete the picture, dynamics could be added to the face to create the appearance of aging.

Because of combinatorial mathematics, nonlinear animation enables the artist to breathe more life into a character with fewer animation sequences. It’s a simpler, highly efficient way to animate characters and objects.

Animation

As with preceding generations of Softimage animation products, Sumatra will deliver the industry’s most artist-oriented animation tools. Softimage will once again change the art of taming the science of motion.

Moving beyond today’s explicit definition of movement towards the creation of characters that can react to their environment, Sumatra characters will be able to take action seemingly of their own volition, responding to environments in ways defined by artists. Actions can be combined with customized transitions, and character behaviors can be triggered by events.

Powerful new animation control tools in Sumatra make it much easier to orchestrate complex movements among multiple characters or objects in a scene, animating a football team as easily as a quarterback, for example. In Sumatra, artists can preset values for a localized animation system and allow universal dynamics to drive the animation across a given number of keyframes, evaluating collisions and generating animation on the fly. The fully integrated particle system in Sumatra provides yet-another layer of reality, allowing artists to treat particles as naturally as they treat any other kind of primitive.

Modeling

Fast, interactive modeling tools in Sumatra instill geometry with a complete knowledge of how they were built, freeing the artist to experiment with form and shape. The Sumatra modeler adapts equally well to ground-up model creation and resolution-targeted model manipulation.

Pushing the bounds of traditional model manipulation, the Sumatra modeler adds direct manipulation techniques to the classical approaches in Softimage 3D, so that artists can modify all aspects of an object directly and intuitively. Powerful data types incorporated as base classes in the Sumatra architecture provide for complete parity of tools between mesh and parametric surfaces, freeing the artist from remembering what tools work on which objects.

With Sumatra, levels of control and detail are completely in the hands of the artist. The artist can model a character’s head with a bezier spline control, the body with cardinal control, and the legs with nonuniform rational B-spline (NURBS). Blend the entire character together with fully relational blended surfaces, blend on blends, then animate the entire piece. Sumatra also includes a full suite of tools developed for the specific needs of game developers.

Rendering

Sumatra incorporates the next generation of the Mental Ray^TM renderer as a completely integrated system. Sumatra offers truly interactive render control, allowing the user to interactively preview a part of a scene or the whole scene. In combination with attribute-space editing tools that provide precise control over texturing, Sumatra eliminates the traditional wall between geometry, texture and rendered output.

Sumatra also provides a sophisticated renderfarm manager for parallel and distributed processing. With multiple hardware platform compatibility, you can assemble a highly optimized and cost-effective solution for the most demanding rendering tasks. – so you can distribute what you want, where you want it, and allow the tracer to determine how to get maximum speed from each workstation.

The Road to Sumatra

The road to Sumatra will be gradual and evolutionary. The product itself is revolutionary.

First, rather than releasing all major components at once, many Sumatra-class tools will first appear as Softimage 3D plug-ins on both Windows NT and IRIX platforms, providing next-generation prototyping, modeling, animation and rendering tools for use in today’s Softimage 3D environment. Sumatra functionality such as surface blending will be incorporated into the current architecture of Softimage 3D. Custom applications based on the Softimage Software Development Kit will work on both Softimage 3D V3.7 and Sumatra, preserving existing investments of time, resources and ideas. Later this year, Softimage will also release a new standalone version of Mental Ray that will provide highly interactive rendering, with material editing, texturing and more. This new renderer will be integrated into the first version of Sumatra.

Second, forward compatibility will be maintained for all customer assets. Data models, animation files, rendering scenes and shaders from Softimage 3D will transfer seamlessly to Sumatra, again protecting existing investments.

Third, all current Softimage 3D features have a functional equivalent in Sumatra, maintaining a continuity that is vital for the immediate application of this next-generation system to current production needs.

Conclusion

Sumatra is more than an evolutionary upgrade of existing products and the current production paradigm. It is a bold new initiative that aims for nothing short of a revolution in the way that 3-D digital media is created and produced. Sumatra embodies a unique and exciting vision in the 3-D animation industry, a vision that embraces both the artists and their world. At no other time in the history of computer animation has Softimage seen a greater opportunity to move artists and the industry to new levels of efficiency and creativity.

Building on the essential principles of artist-oriented workflow and advanced animation control, Softimage will continue its legacy as the leader in 3-D computer animation.

Important notice:
The information contained in this document represents the current view of Softimage Inc. on the issues discussed as of the date of publication. Because Softimage must respond to changing market conditions, it should not be interpreted to be a commitment on the part of Softimage, and Softimage cannot guarantee the accuracy of any information presented after the date of publication.

This document is for informational purposes only. SOFTIMAGE MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS DOCUMENT.

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