Maya 2024

We upgraded the Maya-based animation pathway of our API from Maya 2020 to Maya 2024. This means faster turnaround times for our web service, which provides fully automated generation of animations. In fact, we're seeing turnaround time for several animations reduced from 30 to less than 20 seconds. For example, an API request for one of our standard 800x800 animations, 7 seconds in length, of our 'Cube' animation:

• a model of a QR code is created,

• an animation is applied,

• 240 frames are rendered,

• 240 frames are encoded into 1 mp4 file,

• and file is streamed to a remote location

in 18 seconds or less. We've also noticed substantial improvements in consistency of animation dependency graph evaluation in Maya 2024 as compared to Maya 2020, allowing us to remove a fair amount of workaround code, especially for animations involving animated textures or motion blur.

It's great to see these industry tools become more and more stable and reliable with parallel evaluation of GPU based renderings.

We're also researching and exploring newer GPU based rendering solutions. Some of our animations require reflections, and this typically requires a software render solution, which is much slower. But the market for GPU rendering is growing, and newer GPU solutions like Redshift, Nvidia Iray, and Unreal Engine support raytracing - and therefore reflections - even in GPU rendering. What does this mean for you? Well, would you like to be the coolest presenter, and have a customized animated QR code - with your supplied image integrated into it - made for you just a few minutes before your talk? Not a problem. Visit our Animation Library and you'll have an mp4 file of your awesome animated QR code in just a few minutes.

Share your phone number with style

People meet and share phone numbers routinely, but sometimes it's tedious to say the numbers, or too loud an environment to clearly communicate verbally.

One new way to efficiently share your phone number with a friend is with one of our Phone Codes. Phone Codes are QR codes with your phone number in them by industry standard encoding, but ours are animated to the image of a Phone Icon, so it's clear what the QR code is for. When you display your Phone Code on your cellphone, a friend can open their cellphone camera app and scan in the Phone Code, easily adding your phone number to their contact list.

Impress your new friends with your animated Phone Code! You can make one right now in a few minutes with our Phone Code Generator, or learn how easy it is with our Phone Code Demo Video.

Python 3 Upgrade

We've completed our backend service migration to Python 3. Not that anyone out there should really care, since our API is unchanged, but we wanted to let developers know we're constantly maintaining the backend stack to be in the sweet spot between:

• Old software that is very stable, bug free, and reliable, but possibly with security risks and compatibility issues with newer operating systems, and

• New software that has shiny cool features and performance improvements and security patches, but is possibly more buggy.

To date we've done 12 version migrations. 5 Maya, 2 Python, 3 CherryPy, and 2 MongoDB. We're nerds - we kinda like this stuff. Plus we generally get performance improvements with these software upgrades.

Enjoy the fact that we're keeping our API up-to-date and humming along now for over 7 years.