BETA | TOOLS // ANIMATION
The human touch
Craft Animations hopes to give a new finesse to camera animation with its latest tool, Craft CameraFX. Product manager Patrik Martin tells Will Freeman more about how the tool helped shape the latest Splinter Cell
Patrik Martin (above) says Craft Animations is dedicated to making the process of animation easier, which is why its tools can be controlled with a console gamepad
For readers not familiar with Craft Animations, where has the company come from? What’s your past experience? Craft Animations started out from a research project that one of our founders Luigi Tramontana began at university. The idea he had was that animation was quite cumbersome, and took a lot of time. So he made tools to help himself do better animations. He then realised that maybe somebody else would want the same tools, so in 2005, with the other founders Michael Belin and Debbie Lygonis, they formed the company Craft Animations.
Slightly later in 2006, the first version of Craft Director Studio was released. It wasn’t called Craft Director Studio at that time, but later changed to that name. By 2010, we had bundled our tools up with 3ds Max, Maya and Softimage for the 2011 and later 2012 versions.
The main appeal of Craft Director Studio was the ability to create high quality animations in quite considerably less time than ordinary keyframing would take, but still have high quality.
Now in 2014, we’re introducing the Craft CameraFX tool for Autodesk MotionBuilder.
46 | JUNE 2014
So what does Craft CameraFX offer games developers?
Craft CameraFX is, as the name suggests, a camera animation tool, aimed to make it much more easy to animate cameras, and like our previous products, offers real-time animation. Craft CameraFX is for MotionBuilder, and has an even better system than we’ve had before. That’s because you are controlling
One of our founders thought animation
was cumbersome, so he made tools to help himself do better.
Patrik Martin, Craft Animations
the timeline with, as an example, a gamepad or other input, and all the things you do are actually recorded inside the system right away. It also offers a layering system, to allow users to add and remove or switch off layers, which will be familiar to people that have used Photoshop or MotionBuilder. In those layers you can create various effects that are
applied to a camera, such as noise to shake a camera. Of course, you can do noise inside other systems but this makes it easy to do. And you can tweak, change, and see the results right away.
We really believe, also, that the layout of the software is much better and easier to understand than what we offered with Craft Director Studio. The workflow is very easy and it gives animators the results they want to create.
And you let the developer use a traditional game controller, such as an Xbox 360 controller – as well as other input devices – to assume direct control over a camera they are animating. What’s the advantage to that method?
Really, it makes it easier. When a user picks up the gamepad, they can do their animations without needing to go in and click record or freeflight. You can control all of that from the gamepad. It gives a familiar way to control the animation all of the time.
So what inspired you to build Craft CameraFX as a standalone tool, when the previous approach with Craft Director
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68