An in-depth Study on the Animation Industry - Philippine Institute for ...

This new breed of programs like Maya, Houd<strong>in</strong>i, MAX, Sumatra, and Dune
aimed at help<strong>in</strong>g animators scale new heights replaces products with colder, more
technical names: Power <strong>An</strong>imator, Advanced Visualizer, Prisms, 3D Studio, Softimage
3D, N-World. <strong>An</strong>d yet, part of their importance is the freedom they give technical
directors and CG supervisors as well as artists and animators.
All these programs offer sophisticated model<strong>in</strong>g, animation, and render<strong>in</strong>g
capabilities, but what makes the software qualify as part of the next generation is not
the feature set, it is the underly<strong>in</strong>g architecture. They are all based on an "open" and
extensible architecture, they all have a procedural architecture, and they all offer a
script<strong>in</strong>g language or the equivalent. In this generation of software, animators can
customize programs with nearly as much flexibility as a programmer without ever writ<strong>in</strong>g
code; and programmers have the tools to write plug-<strong>in</strong>s that extend the basic tool sets.
The GUIs gave non-technical animators easy access to tools, thus provid<strong>in</strong>g a
much-needed path to computer animation for people who would otherwise have
avoided the mach<strong>in</strong>es. Unfortunately, the pretty <strong>in</strong>terfaces made customization difficult
for technical directors (TDs).
Autodesk took the lead <strong>in</strong> show<strong>in</strong>g companies target<strong>in</strong>g the enterta<strong>in</strong>ment
<strong>in</strong>dustry why it made sense to have third-party developers add functionality--a strategy
that Yost had implemented <strong>in</strong> software he developed for the Atari <strong>in</strong> 1986 and that
Autodesk had also successfully leveraged with its AutoCAD software. Eventually, other
software companies <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g Softimage, Alias, Lightwave, and Electric Image also
began offer<strong>in</strong>g software development toolkits (SDKs) so that programmers could write
"plug-<strong>in</strong>s" to extend the toolsets packaged with<strong>in</strong> the fancy GUIs, and studios used the
SDKs to extend functionality as well.
The problem is that to create a plug-<strong>in</strong> for most programs, someone has to write
C++ code. That is f<strong>in</strong>e for third-party software developers. It is not so f<strong>in</strong>e for production
studios work<strong>in</strong>g on fast-track projects. Yet, like people <strong>in</strong> most studios they should
customize and extend software for particular projects to have a creative edge. At the
same time, they need to have software that non-technical animators can use.
Two 3D animation software programs, however, followed a separate route. Side
Effects! Prisms had a procedural architecture that gave technical directors enormous
flexibility, but the lack of a GUI made it hard for many animators to use. Similarly, the
pioneer<strong>in</strong>g LISP-based Symbolics software, which was be<strong>in</strong>g ported to Silicon Graphics
hardware as it moved from Symbolics to Triple-I and f<strong>in</strong>ally to Nichimen, had a wideopen,
object-oriented architecture but lacked a pretty <strong>in</strong>terface.
The next generation of 3D animation software began when the PC-based 3D
Studio evolved <strong>in</strong>to the W<strong>in</strong>dows 95 and NT-based, object-oriented MAX; and SGIbased
Prisms evolved <strong>in</strong>to easier-to-use Houd<strong>in</strong>i, which now also runs on W<strong>in</strong>dows NT.
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