Craft Animations releases its first commercial plug-in suite for 3ds max, Craft Camera Tools, which will be publicly presented at the official release of 3ds max 7, Oct. 14, in Stockholm, Sweden. Craft Camera Tools is used by animators in realtime to steer cameras with a joystick or keyboard in the 3ds max viewport. Four types of cameras and two help tools, are available:
* Craft SpyCam is quite straight forward, and is usually used to fly in the scene with high controllability. The camera gives a human feeling to the recording when following moving objects. It is also great when shooting inside complex architectural buildings, to just move around and show the interior in a smooth manner.
* Craft SpaceCam is modeled as a craft (such as a satellite) moving in free space without gravitational force. The way to use this camera is to put it in a correct, usually slow spin and translation, and just let it flow past the scene being recorded. This gives the camera recording an exceptionally smooth, weightless feeling. Another useful feature is that one can apply three different breaks to this camera, which makes the navigation far more controllable.
* Craft AeroCam behaves in many ways like an aero plane but greatly simplified to be usable as a camera tool. One obvious way of using this camera is in dogfight situations, far away from surrounding objects. After some flying with the camera, one links an aero plane mesh to the camera, and then creates a new camera with which one follows the aero plane mesh in front. This method creates quite realistic flight maneuvers.
* Craft Helical is the most sophisticated of the cameras. It is modeled after real helicopter physics, and hence gives very realistic movements. A great feature is to link a helicopter mesh to the camera to make it fly like a real helicopter, as with Craft Aero Cam above.
* Craft Star Dome Generator creates a randomly generated star dome mesh. It is very fast and performs the creation in realtime, allowing the user to tweak the star dome directly in the viewport.
* Craft Camera Shake is a tool, which, in realtime, allows an animator to tweak a camera shake to fit a turbulent situation.
An evaluation version of Craft Camera Tools is downloadable at: www.craftanimations.com. Craft Camera Tools can be purchased directly at Craft Animations, or through Craft Animations main retailer Creative Tools, www.creativetools.se.
Gothenburg, Sweden-based Craft Animations has a team of highly skilled and highly productive programmers, physicists, mathematicians, 3D modelers and 3D animators. Currently Craft Animations is mainly developing realtime plug-ins for 3ds max and Maya. However, plug-ins and other 3D related applications are also developed on demand by customers from any part of the 3D industry
Bill Desowitz, former editor of VFXWorld, is currently the Crafts Editor of IndieWire.
