Desktop Video News and Reviews (page 2)

Today, much of the real excitement in computer graphics is in the world of 3D animation. There are a lot of good reasons for this. For one, it looks terrific. The program automatically calculates shadows and highlights. Rich textures and dramatic lighting are easy to achieve. For another, once you create a 3D object, you can shoot it from any angle, move it around just like a real object or even push it through a brick wall if you want. Most actors aren't so accommodating.

Another advantage of 3D animation is the ability to use linked objects. For instance, you can create toes and link them to the foot, which is connected to the shin-bone, which is connected to the thigh-bone, etc. Everything is connected in a hierarchy so that moving the shin automatically moves the foot and toes. All of the major 3D programs have some sort of linking available.

Even more powerful is inverse kinematics, a mouthful that means if you pull the toe, the model knows how to move the rest of the leg appropriately. Usually, this kind of power is out of the range of casual users, but more and more features are always being added at the low end, so don't lose hope.

3D programs require a lot of computer juice. The calculations require that thousands of light beams be traced back through your scene, refracting and reflecting as they go. The problem is non-trivial and can bring even the fastest computer to its knees. So don't stint on the hardware. Use the fastest CPU/graphics card combo you can get. Don't forget a floating point processor. If you still need more speed, most 3D programs today let you render across a network of computers. There is very little overhead in parceling out the job--five computers will render about five times faster than one.

Surprisingly, there are more 3D animation programs available for the home computer than 2D programs. On the PC side, there are two good programs with long pedigrees: TOPAS from Crystal Graphics and 3D Studio from Autodesk.

3D Studio is a strong contender in this arena, thanks largely to add-ons available from third-party vendors and Autodesk itself. These add-ons allow 3D Studio to perform some pretty exotic stuff for PCs, like smoke effects, water waves, fireworks and particle systems. All these extras cost more, of course, but it's nice to know that the program is extendible. More manufacturers should open their architectures like this. When they do, everyone benefits.

While 3D Studio has an interface that might remind one of Autodesk's long-running AutoCad software, 3D Studio is not a revamped CAD program. It is well-loved by engineers, but artists sometimes flinch at the thickly-layered menu structure. Nevertheless, 3D Studio has good animation capabilities, including object tweening, bending and warping.

TOPAS Professional, from CrystalGraphics, is another feature-rich PC program for 3D animation. It comes with a slick video that shows off some of the animations that the product has produced. You will surely recognize many of the broadcast-quality commercials in this video resume. TOPAS has excellent texturing abilities, allowing you to apply up to 256 layers of mapping at one time.

TOPAS has another feature that sets it apart from the crowd: Perspective Matching. This is a well-implemented technique for inserting computer-generated graphics into a real scene. By simply moving a bounding box around the graphic to match a corresponding box in the photo, the computer rotates the graphic and scales it to fit your scene. Drop a shadow into the scene and you have perfect compositing. The trick works with animation, too. You can have your character run in and out of a moving photographed scene with perfect registration. This is the same technology that made Roger Rabbit possible, only for about a thousandth of the price.

Studio Pro from Strata is a solid 3D program for the Mac. Since it (mostly) adheres to the standard Mac interface, you can be up and running in seconds without even cracking the book. However, animation is tricky, and 3D animation is tricky squared. Cracking the book is a good idea. Studio Pro, like 3D Studio, has a bevy of third-party add-ons to enhance its already-extensive functionality. The brooding, foggy images in the hit CD-ROM game MYST came from Studio Pro.

For animation, Studio Pro includes several techniques for aiming the camera that can help you shoot that 3D roller-coaster ride or a wild-banking airplane ride.

Another animation-intensive program available for a number of platforms is Animation Master from Hash, Inc. This is a great character-creation program that uses splines to create natural-looking surfaces. Then you can warp or twist your character into action.

As its name implies, the program concentrates on animation and provides several powerful tools for the job. It lets you build characters out of a skeleton and muscles to provide realistic motion. It even has tools to help with lip-syncing. This is not only one of the least-expensive 3D animation programs around; it is one of the very few available with inverse kinematics. Give this one a look.

All of this awesome software is great, but what are you going to do with it? If your target is animation for the computer, you're basically done. Turn it into a QuickTime movie, burn it into a CD-ROM and sell that thing. But if your target is video, you have another hurdle to hop. More specifically, you can't get full-screen, full-motion animation off of a standard PC. Even at 12 or 15 frames per second, we're talking over ten megabytes per second throughput. That, unfortunately, is out of reach for most PCs.

However, with a dedicated hard disk, you can pull your animated rabbit out of a tiny PC hat. One noteworthy entry into this niche is the Personal Animation Recorder from Digital Processing Systems. It will control very fast hard disks that quickly handle data to and from a VCR. To use this product, you'll need specially engineered hard drives that avoid recalibration--a nasty habit that leads to dropped frames and loud curses.

Another option for broadcast-quality animation is an 8mm tape drive from Exabyte. These drives put data-grade 8mm videotape to a new use: carrying bits instead of an analog signal. It works great as a data backup system, but it also moonlights as a video image storage device. Using special software drivers, you can off-load these tapes at a video production house to an Abekas hard disk. From there, you can convert them to D1 tape for broadcast. This is mation.

A third option is to output to single-framing VCRs. This is the least exciting method. Your poor VCR is going to do a pre-roll for every blasted frame in your animation. Not only will it be up all night, but it will die at a very young age. You should limit this technique to very short spots.

Expect soon to see recordable laser disks. With random access and no need for pre-roll, this will be a media to contend with.

I know it seems like I talked about everything, but this column just scratches the surface. There is simply not enough space here to talk about some of the other great animation packages like Animator Pro from Autodesk, Infini-D from Specular International or trueSpace from Caligari. And new animation programs are sprouting up every month. But at least you've learned about some great ways to jazz up your videos with the magic of animation.

So what are you waiting for? Your epic won't draw itself, you know. Get tweening!

Scott Anderson is the president of Wild Duck Software, a computer graphics development company.

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