Multi-pipeline framework for API animation creation

ACME’s dual microservice pipeline is now released. What does that mean? Well, ACME uses big - and I mean big - software programs and apps used by the Visual Effects Industry. All of these programs are primarily designed to be used interactively by 3d artists. These 3d programs also have highly integrated scripting languages (mel, Python, lua) which can be used to automate many of the actions that a 3d artist can do. Now: The key word in that last sentence is ‘many’. The truth is *not all* of the actions of an artist clicking on the program interface can be scripted. Because these programs have massive subsystems smartly designed to not block each other (graphics display not blocking animation evaluation, texture loading, dependency computation, and runtime API alterations via plugins for example), many artist action sequences simply cannot be easily scripted because the scripts run much faster than 3d artists clicking on the GUI interface. Many tools in these programs were only designed with ‘slowly’ clicking humans in mind. This means race conditions occur when scripts attempting to mimic 3d artists are run within these programs. ACME engineers however, know the ways around this problem, and for the animations that require it, we have nimbly created a parallel pipeline which progresses these animation’s creation through Maya as if an artist was there driving it. We consider this one of our core advantages to the competition. As of today, ACME can create any animation that Hollywood can. Only ACME does it *completely automated*.

As a result of this new pipeline, we can now support animations based on frameworks like Maya's MASH framework, which is an animation creation system that relies on non-blocking spawned threads for dependency node network creation. Frameworks like MASH are easy for humans to interact with in the MAYA interface, but they are also notoriously very difficult to automate via standard scripting. Well, difficult for anyone but ACME.

Also, this new multi-path pipeline is not limited to Maya based animations. Another feature is that we can now add parallel pipelines using any major animation package that we can swap into the needed task - 2d image processing, 3d surface animation processing, frame rendering, or mp4 encoding. If a particular animation is best done in Unreal Engine instead of Maya, we can have that animation be created through a pipeline based on the Unreal Engine.

Animation Engine Released

ACME's Animation Engine V1 is out; our B2B animated QR code Generator web page now supports professional grade resolution animation generation of any animated QR Code for turnaround in minutes. Also, the Animation Engine provides full access to all of our API options, unlike our retail-friendly Coderunner which is simplified for ease of use and limited in resolution.

Here I am giving a demo of our Animation Engine:

Tools for 'Block' timing and custom animation speeds

Happy St Patrick's day!

At long last, ACME supports uniquely customized animations by providing the choice of arbitrary sub block timings. What the heck does that mean, you ask? Well, all of our animations have default timings for each sub animation 'block'. 'Blocking' is a timing standard of the animation industry. Typical ACME animations have 4 blocks: 'QR code-to-image', 'image hold', 'image-to-QR code', and 'QR code hold'. As of today, anyone can customize the time for any block, making them as long or short as they wish. Do you want the first animation to be nice and slow… and the second to be quick? No problem, just let our API know, and we’ll crank that animation out for you in a few minutes. See our documentation on the blocks argument here: https://acme.readthedocs.io/en/latest/new.html#blocks But wait, there's more! ACME's API also supports a 'length' argument, which is applied to the sum total of sub block times. https://acme.readthedocs.io/en/latest/new.html#length So, if you want to define the sub block times in terms of simple ratios to each other, and then set the time of the entire animation a precise length, it's very easy to do so. For example, let's say you want a the 'image-to-QR code' portion of your animation to be 4 times as long as all other block times, and have the entire animation last 3.75 seconds. For you programmers out there, here's the API call you would make to trigger the generation of that animation:

https://api.acme.codes/new?length=3.75&blocks=0-1,1-2,2-3,3-7&anim=Exchange Are you not a programmer, but you still want a custom timed QR code animation? No problem, contact us and we'll be happy to setup you up with an account on our Animation Engine page, or we can make a custom animation for you.