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ANIMA 4.1.0 RELEASE CANDIDATE | 28/09/2020

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.

Please note that these versions are beta versions with the potential to be a final product, which is ready for release unless significant bugs arise. However, please understand that this is not an official version and should be used with caution in professional production projects.

• DOWNLOAD Installer (630 Mb)
   

NEW FEATURES:

• anima®: 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. 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 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 more consistent and higher 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.

• UE4® 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.

• Cinema4D® Plugin: Added support for Cinema4D R23.

BUG FIXING:

• anima®: Fixed an issue with the FBX scene exporter that would cause the joints to flip if the application’s framerate didn’t match exactly what the exported framerate was. This was solved by creating smoother interpolation curves on the animation keys. This should solve all interpolation problems when importing these files elsewhere.

• anima®: The behavior of the time bar has been improved in multiple ways and will work much more accurately now.

• anima®: Fixed an issue where the application would slow down when returning from the embedded shop when running in OpenGL.

• anima®: Fixed an issue where an incorrect animation modifier would be applied in the simulation, resulting in frames that would sometimes appear as static frames in running clips.

• anima®: Fixed an issue where the application would crash if the alive connection was canceled manually under certain circumstances.

• anima®: Fixed an issue where the actor importer would create transparent textures for non-standard texture formats, which would generate bad thumbnails with missing materials.

• anima®: Fixed an issue where updating an Ambient actor’s height would not work properly.

• anima®: Fixed an issue where certain motion clips with incorrect loop detection would crash the application.

• 3ds Max®: Fixed an issue where the plugin would enable the auto-backup feature on its own.

• 3ds Max®: Fixed an issue where 4D actors that were displayed as arrows would be corrupted when rendering the scene.

• 3ds Max®: Fixed an issue where 4D actors would get corrupted after exporting the current project as a VrScene.

• Cinema4D® Plugin: Fixed an issue where the plugin would lock up if the anima project could not be found in the stored path of the C4D scene.

• UE4® Plugin: Fixed an issue where 4D assets would store more files than it needed for playback, causing an increase in the project’s file size.

• UE4® Plugin: Fixed an issue where deleting 4D assets would not properly delete its associated files.

• UE4® Plugin: Fixed an issue where the phase property in 4D actors was not being applied properly.

• UE4® Plugin: Compatibility with paths using Unicode characters has been improved.

• Maya® Plugin: Fixed an issue where ghost actors in the scene would not be properly hidden and instead appear in a T-Pose.

• anima® plugins:  The plugins will no longer recommend baking a scene if only ready posed or 4D actors are present.

• anima® plugins:  Fixed an issue where changing the anima scene’s time would fail and not update to the last frame instead, causing fake animation “loops” in distributed rendering processes if the scene was too short for the entire animation.
   

KNOWN ISSUES:

• 3ds Max®: 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 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.

• Cinema4D® 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.

• Cinema4D® 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.