The new built-in Animation Store makes hundreds of characters and thousands of animations available within 3ds Max’s viewport!
The Autodesk Animation Store is a new feature found in 3ds Max 2013 and 3ds Max Design 2013.
It is driven by the online animation store Mixamo, and offers the highest quality 3D characters, but also automatically applies animation to any 3ds Max Biped or CAT rigged character.
Motion clips in the animation store are automatically applied to the Biped or CAT control rigs.
They can be customised in real-time and previewed for free in the 3ds Max scene, so you can quickly test multiple animations on a given character and see how the motion will perform before making a purchase.
After purchase, you can take advantage of 3ds Max software’s support for animation layers to non-destructively edit the animations as required. For more information on animation layers in 3ds Max, visit Mixamo.
“The Autodesk Animation Store was built for a range of 3ds Max users including game developers, architects, and broadcast teams,” says Mixamo’s Product Manager Allison Tinney.
“Anyone using 3D character animation in their pipeline can leverage the Autodesk Animation Store to speed up production times, and cut down on animation cost.”
“The idea to build the Animation Store was a mutual idea between Autodesk and Mixamo. Mixamo’s partnership with Autodesk reaches back to Mixamo’s launch in 2009″ she continues.
“We have always worked closely with the Autodesk team to ensure that our 3D animation services work seamlessly inside the Autodesk suite of products. Because of this history, it only made sense that a deeper integration would be beneficial to both Mixamo and Autodesk customers.”
Mixamo had to develop some new tools in order to deliver this service: “The Animation Store features a new 3D character store selling top-notch 3D characters from global partners,” says Tinney.
“We have also built additional back-end features to ensure seamless automatic animation for all 3ds Max Biped and CAT characters.
“We also put a lot of time into creating two scripts for 3ds Max users, the Auto-Biped and Auto-CAT scripts, which can automatically create Biped and CAT rigs out of any Mixamo Auto-Rigged character. You can find the scripts on the Mixamo website.
“Mixamo is currently working on building more animation and character content as well as phase two for our Auto-Rigger, an automatic rigging system for bipedal 3D meshes,” adds Tinney.
“We have had many feature requests from our customers including facial animation and automatic quadruped rigging and animation. We are exploring many possibilities for the future in order to become the world’s number one animation solution.”
You can see how the Animation Store works via the YouTube video below.
The Autodesk Animation Store can be accessed from the 3ds Max products to provide a simplified animation workflow that allows users to search, customize and purchase licenses to characters and motion clips without leaving the software.
Powered by Mixamo, the Autodesk Animation Store offers hundreds of characters and more than a thousand editable animations for 3ds Max Biped and CAT characters. The content is aggregated from top-quality providers, such as aXYZ design, Original Force, Winking, Radiance and China West Coast.
“At Autodesk, we are removing technical barriers to creativity by providing more iterative streamlined workflows, and offering powerful creative tools like the Autodesk Animation Store,” said Ken Pimentel, Autodesk director of product management for media design. “The animation store is a great resource for users who don’t have the time or expertise to create quality 3D animation from scratch.”
“Now, broadcasters can quickly assemble an animated clip in response to today’s news, and casual game companies can reduce production time by licensing motions targeted to their game and characters,” said Pimentel. “Architects can also use the service to license animated characters in order to more easily populate architectural visualizations.”
Read more about Autodesk’s Animation Store
Posted on Monday, April 16th, 2012 at 4:30 pm under News, Products. You can subscribe to comments. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.
Tags: 3ds Max, 3ds Max 2013, 3ds Max Design 2013, Animation, Animation Store, animation tools, Autodesk, mixamo, mocap
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