.animata
Written by nathalie on January 27, 2009.
Pixelache Software of the Year
It’s the first time that Pixelache promotes a specific software tool. For the first edition of this initiative, the chosen tool is a real-time animation software.
The idea behind this concept is to give visibility to an interesting tool and support its development by organizing workshops and other events related to it, in the context of Pixelache festival and other local punctual events, and in the Pixelache network at large.
About Animata
Animata is an open-source real-time animation software for live performance, which has been developed in Kitchen Budapest by Péter Németh, Gábor Papp & Bence Samu. Animata allows to create scenes with virtual puppets. The movement of the puppets and the changes of the background are generated in real-time, making continuous interaction possible.
In contrast with traditional 3D animation programs, creating characters in Animata is quite simple and takes only a few minutes. It is as simple as loading an image and attaching a skeleton to it. On the basis of still images, which serve as the puppets’ skeleton, a network of triangles is produced and the triangles are linked with a bony structure. The bones’ movement is based on a physical model, which allows the characters to be easily moved. This ability also permits that physical sensors, cameras or other environmental variables can be attached to the animation of characters, creating a cartoon reacting to its environment. For example, it is quite simple to create a virtual puppet band reacting to live audio input. Combined with a pattern recognition system, the characters might even be controlled by live actors. It would be for instance possible to set up a scene of drawn characters controlled by the movement of dancers.
Furthermore, Animata allows a multi-user collaboration via the internet, thus providing an opportunity for the collective editing and creating of the performance.
The software can be run on multiple operating systems, like Mac OS X, GNU/Linux and Windows. In the near future, the plan is to develop collective control via external devices. The animation of the characters, camera movement, and other special visual effects will be controllable by cell phones, or through multi-touch-screens or sensors. One of the goals is to connect Animata with widespread programming environments (Max/MSP, Pure Data, EyesWeb) used by multimedia developers and artists, in order to make use of the possibilities of these applications in the fields of image editing, sound analysis, or motion capture.
Join the Animata community!
Animata has a lot of potential and there are many ideas of how to develop it further. But to realise these plans, we need your help, as a user or as a developer!
if you are interested in Animata as a user, please join the Animata-users forum: http://lists.kitchenbudapest.hu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/animata-users
if you are interested to join the community of developers around Animata, please join the Animata-devel forum:
http://lists.kitchenbudapest.hu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/animata-devel
More info: http://animata.kibu.hu/index.html
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[...] some of their new projects in Kiasma lobby tomorrow afternoon (Sat 4 April), including Animata animation software, macsEk travel mate and QR code t-shirt [...]
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