Coming Soon: The Ephemeral Animation System
Pose freely
Traditional rigging makes animators manage rig state–like FK/IK and space switches–manually. We want to free animators to pose a character any way they want to, whenever they want to.
So the Ephemeral Animation System offers “manipulation modes” (like Forward, Backward, or IK) instead of switches, blends, and alternate controls. No need to worry about whether you’re painting yourself into a corner by choosing FK over IK, or world over local space. There are no wrong choices!
Use inbetweens, not splines
Spline-interpolated keyframes were never designed to support a traditional pose to pose workflow, so TDs had to build an ever-growing tower of bandaids and hacks on top of them to make it viable.
The Ephemeral Animation System does away with spline-interpolated keyframes; instead, a robust set of breakdown and inbetweening tools lets you treat poses like infiitely-editable drawings.
Edit dense motion data
It doesn’t matter whether your motion was created by hand or comes from mocap data, simulation, or AI; The Ephemeral Animation System will let you edit it without the need for key reduction, animation layers, or baking.
Among other things, this allows polishing motion without using tangent handles or a graph editor! It’s almost like sculpting with motion.
Rig with Rules
Traditional rigging makes the rigger manually specify every behavior the rig might need, and how those behaviors affect each other. The result is rigs that are slow, complex, and hard to maintain.
So we went back to the drawing board on rigging and came up with a unique contextual rig solver. The rigger just tells each control what kinds of relationships it could have with other controls, and then, at runtime, this simple specification expands into potentially thousands of possible ways for an animator to interact with the rig!
FAQ
When will the Ephemeral Animation System be released?
We’re aiming to make a beta version available soon, but can’t put a specific date on it yet.
What software will the Ephemeral Animation System be available for?
We’re currently working on a release for the Unreal Engine. We have plans to release it for other software too, but don’t yet have anything to announce on that front.
Has the Ephemeral Animation System ever been used in production?
An early prototype running in Maya was used for the Emmy-nominated short Little Bird and a series of web videos for FAFSA.