Roman Ormandy, driving force behind Caligari and trueSpace!Driving Force....

One of the great things about working at a place like Caligari is that you get a chance to meet and sit down and talk with all kinds of cool people. Here is an extract of an interview with Caligari President and trueSpace creator Roman Ormandy talking about the latest version of trueSpace, version 6.5.
 


 
Q & A
 














 

Q: TS6 was about modeling. What is the story with TS6.5?

A: With TS6 we virtually completed modeling capabilities necessary for advanced shape creation, it is just perfect. TS6 has everything you would ever need to construct any kind of shape. There are tools for polyhedra, NURBS, subdivision  surfaces, particles surfaces, and metaballs.  We knew that there were animation issues which we ignored for some time and we decided that for TS6.1 we will finally fix a couple of most urgent ones. We thought we could do it in 2-3 months.

Q. So what happened?

A: The more we looked at the animation code the more we realized how old it was. Nothing turned out to be simple to fix and after a while we decided to just rewrite the animation core code from scratch. It took us more than 6 months but it was worth it. In fact it was our plan to call this release 6.1 but when we realized how much more functionality we were adding, we decided to change the release from 6.1 to 6.5.

 Pepo, a character created in tS6.5 beta using subdivision surfaces
 trueSpace6.5 WIP, using subdivision surfaces,  by Oliver Röhe

Q: So what does the new animation engine look like?

A: It is much more flexible. The most important consequence of this is the new Non-Linear Editor which allows the user to compose animations at a higher level of abstraction. We kept the existing Key-Frame editor where the user can define low level local behaviors using traditional key-framing. Once the user has a few of these created, he can name them and turn them into clips. Clips can then be edited and combined at a higher lever within Clip-View Editor. By separating low level and high level editing, we gave the user tremendous flexibility as he can literally experiment in putting together various animation scenarios. I for example used TS ubiquitous tricycle model to create “back to the future” transformer-like flying scenario, complete with rotating wheels and folding handlebars. Once I created a few of those, it became real easy to choreograph vertical takeoff flying sequence with folding wheels and handlebars as I could simply stretch and slide local clips in NLE to make significant changes.

 The scene editor being used to control the clips
The Scene Editor, in clip view mode

Q: What about other benefits?

A: Clips can be smoothly blended, which is quite useful for character animation, including IK and motion captured characters. Once you set up step clip, hand wave, jump clip and the like, you can easily blend them on the same character to create convincing and realistic complex behavior. You can also create special effects, like “bullet time” etc and add sound output to the final animation.

Q: You have mentioned that there is improved physics animation in TS6.5?

A: Yes and they are quite significant. First, we improved collision detection to be more accurate. Then we added adhesion to objects so they can stick together and in fact break if dropped and they hit the ground. We also created local physics environments, like streaming water or airborne tornado. Because these are local, you can attach tornado object to a vehicle and when this vehicle drives through a street full of fallen autumn leaves, the effect is quite spectacular. 

We also created fully physical joints which can be edited with the new Non-linear editor. So you can have for example an IK character walk under IK control towards stairs and then have it fall downstairs under physics control.  New animation architecture was quite handy for that.

Lightcycle approaches the leaves.....The tornado local physics object begins to take effect!The leaves swirl in the air - the lightcycle was the only keyframed object here!

A local physics environment in action - a "tornado" object attached to the lightcycle makes the leaves swirl in the wake, all calculated by trueSpace itself. Click any of the images to view the animation itself (requires DivX codec)

Q: Why so much emphasis on animation?

A: We consider animation the next important milestone for us. We always considered it important both for a traditional animator, interactive web animator and game designer. We just felt that it was better for us to complete the modeling and rendering functionality of TS first. Now that we are focusing on animation in a big way, expect some great things from Caligari this year.

Q: Is trueSpace6.5 only about the animation improvements?

A: Not by a long shot. We added great modeling features like new selective subdivision surfaces, interactive object replace and my favorite: geometry paint. With geometry paint and global replace you can create complicated surface structures like a forest for example with just a few brush strokes. We also added surface healing for NURBS conversion to Polygon meshes, DWG format, better X format, ViewPoint format and a whole lot of user interface improvements like face accurate picking etc. But I start to sound like a press release now:) The fact is this is one upgrade packed with new features and we hope TS users will like it.