ANIMUX is an absolutely FREE animation based toolset which can handle tasks from creative development to post-production stage of your creative project.
Animux's journey starts in Chapter 1: Genesis (coming into being) trying to provide a tool that will help animators visualize their dreams into creative reality. It is our coming into being phase in the public conscience, but we have been around for quite sometime doing some incredible things while it was still unknown. Right from chapter 1 of its life, it will strive to adhere to 3 main goals of
- Pipeline Integration
- Digital Asset/Workflow Management
- Infrastructure Efficiencies
In its prologue, Animux has been used to create a DVD with 3D animation for Bassam Kurdali's Mancandy, helped a bunch of animators from around the world to participate in a 48 hour film project, creating a 5 minute 3D animation short in 48 hours. We are curretly working on an animation short called "Prince Harming to Prince Charming" to test our pipeline and tools included in animux.
The people behind "Animux" are right now working on "ADAM" the "Animation Digital Asset Manager" which will help animators manage assets and workflows that help in easy pipeline integration.
We hope that you would hang around to see this absolutely free software called "Animux" mature into something valuable to both novice and professional animators.
Features
Animator centric Goals
- Pipeline Integration
- Digital Asset/ Work Flow Management ...(wip)
- Infrastructure Efficiency
Because we are animators or friends of animators...
Most of the people in Animux are animators or technical wizards with a passion for animation. So whatever we do/add to animux is because we think it will help the general animator population.
Our vision has always been to grow the animation population by making it easy for hobbyist and professional animators alike in setting up their studio. We want to take out the role of technical administrators from the animators required skills so that they can concentrate on bringing their creative dreams alive.
In short we say, "Let creativity be your only limitation, all the others leave it for your buddy's at Animux to solve."
Animux includes 60 tools that handle various tasks from preproduction, production and post-production work. Also with access to over 24000 applications you can add applications to your machine that may suit your needs.
Animux made the decision to go with the XFCE desktop enviroment because it is lightweight and fast. We wished for the animator to have the system resouces available for the animation task at hand without having to hog on it to run itself. We did not compromise of stability for this as XFCE is stable.
Compiz-Fusion can help boost your productivity by creating an intuitive desktop that you can customize using a easy to use configurator. With over 30 plugins you can definitely you can choose to increase the visual appeal of your desktop or add some very neat shortcuts that will cut time to do your day to day job.
Easy-to-user installer
Animux comes with a easy to use installer on the LiveUSB or LiveCD. Boot into Animux from the LiveUSB or LiveCD and if you like Animux just click on the "Installer" or "Autoinstall" icon. Once you are done with this process you will have Animux running on your machine.
Animux comes with 2 renderman complaint renderers. Aqsis and Pixie.
Animux includes 8 renderers which the animator has a choice to use to create his final render. Aqsis, Lucille, Lux, PBRT, Pixie, Yafray, Sunflow, Blender
Animators no longer need to compile and configure it to make it work for different architectures. We have done that for you.
With Animux you do not need to compile the NVidia drivers. We have done that for. All you need to do is download the driver and follow the simple 3 step instruction to install it.
Animux comes default with RT kerne which is a must have for the sound engineering tasks on your animation project. The other benefit is that the operating system is very responsive. We ran benchmark tests on Animux and you would be pleased to know that the latencies in the OS in the micro seconds.
We at Animux believe that virtualization is like shot of steroids for an animation studio. It will go a long way in helping you get the infrastructure efficiencies you are seeking of your invested hardware. Some of the benefits of virtualization are (rendernode consolidation, migration/sharing pipelines become easy, sharing of rendernodes for different project become easy without having to have a complex setup ...) and a bunch of other benefits.
You have 3 renderfarm managers included in Animux. Based on what your technical comfort level is you can pick the simple/easy to set up one for a quick start on a short project or you could have a complex set up with for a long term use. We are also working on a technical guide which should be out soon to guide you through setting up a working renderfarmer that will stand the test of time and need.
Right now Animux comes with tools that help you locate your digital assets on your machine easily. You can search for your digital assets with tools just like that a text search where you can search for based on similarity to a particular image. It also comes with GUI based backup and restore tools that help you safely store your assets. You can all use tools that create snapshots of your assets in time that can be automated. These backups you can burn on a CD, DVD or move them to an external hard-drives or network location.
The work on Animation Digital Asset Management (ADAM) has been started to come up with an asset manager that takes care of the needs in the animation world. The people working on this project right now have a collective of 50 years in DAM and we are excited about what it can accomplish.
When you are working on a renderfarm, we understand you cannot install/upgrade the OS, applications one machine at a time. It can be done, but who does it now a days. We have included tools that help you install/upgrade/configure all from a single point.
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