ProAnimator 7
Publisher: Zaxwerks
Website: Click HerePlatform: PC/Mac
x32/x64: x64
Description: 3D Animation Plugin for AE (or Standalone Program) for Titling and Lighting for AE.
Purchase/Rent: Purchase
Pricing: New $399; Upgrade $139
Download Demo: Click HereDiscount: None
Expected Release: Available Now
Review Issue: #96 (02/14)
Reviewed By: Mark Bremmer
Final Score: 9.4 out of 10
Zaxwerks has long been a denizen of the Adobe After Effects environs. They’ve chosen a very specific niche that has brought them success in the world of television bumpers and titling. The release of ProAnimator 7 offers some capabilities worth looking at that may be attractive to the microfilmmaker.
The new features bring a significant level of simplicity to doing complex, 3D/CG lighting that resembles stages or ‘Events’ where bright lights, high activity and visual excitement is the rule. Tucked along with this significant new ability is a revisited level of texture/material controls that make creating CG environments for non-3D fluent users very quick and easy.
ProAnimator 7 does significantly more than lights, especially in the world of animating titles in the style of NFL bumpers and basic CG scene animation. This review focuses on the lighting abilities because it’s really the most viable component of this application for microfilmmakers.
Ease of Use
Zaxwerks has embraced the philosophy of making things user friendly. This philosophy also acknowledges that many users aren’t 3D/CG wizards either. ProAnimator is crafted to eliminate the tedious nuts and bolts adjustments that are part of running a full-on CG application.
Pro Animator Rig and Light Interface
The integration of this plugin with Adobe After Effects (AE) is a snap. After applying the ProAnimator effect to a track in AE, users are presented with a thoughtful and workflow streamlined interface. This ability to choose prebuilt lighting rigs greatly accelerates development time.
More importantly is the fact that stage lighting and outdoor event rigs have click-and-drag adjustments for everything. For example, is your lighting truss too short? Just drag the adjustment slider and make it longer while the lights simultaneously re-adjust to the new length. Likewise, multiple lights can be adjusted for color rotation, imperfections in alignment plus more can be altered with simple widget/slider controls.
Depth of Options
The level of automated, easy-to-control options is fantastic. What’s more, the options are based upon user needs. Say, for example, your had a hero shot in your movie where the actor is against a green-screen so you can add a fan of dramatic spotlights shining into the sky behind them. ProAnimators controls let’s you grab a prebuilt, trussed rig with a quantity of lights that can be adjusted by a slider control. Lighting brightness color and more is located first, followed by truss and light cone adjustments where you can select from a wide array of real-world gel/light cone effects. Length of the cones, fall-off and more can be modified as can lens flares for color, type and strength. Finally, animating the lights individually or as a group is just super easy – and it doesn’t involve any key frame work either.
ProAnimator 7 Pre-built Rigs
One of the truly coolest things is that users can invoke actual CG models of lights that are linked to the lighting effects in the scene. Changing out lights for real search lights or a variety of stage lights is as easy as a menu selection. No complex rigging or geometry replacement required as with ‘normal’ CG applications
New highly realistic materials and textures also reflect this kind of common-sense set of controls for color, highlight, specularity, bump and more.
Fundamentally, not only are there a wealth of good options for anything in the ProAnimator package, their implementation doesn’t require years of experience or complex interactions to achieve exactly what you are looking for.
Performance
Zaxwerks has also taken a smart approach to their tools as well. As users stack more complex actions onto their lighting rigs, when orbiting or navigating around the scene, the rendered preview immediately changes to a wireframe presentation so as to not slow scrolling to a crawl.
ProAnimator 7 Lens Flares
ProAnimator has been updated to play nice with the new AE Ray-traced rendering abilities too. For non-CG types, this means that things like reflections and other real-world light interactions are present. Bottom line, Zaxwerks is keeping up with the host softwares capabilities.
The only anomaly that I experienced was when changing light types. The Object List preview of the real-world light type did not update when changing. I had to select another track in the Object List and then re-select the lighting object which would then display the correct geometry selection.
Value
If you do any kind of titling, then ProAnimator is a no-brainer to purchase – it’s fast, smart and a real productivity enhancer. However, if the main appeal as a microfilmmaker is working with the lighting components, this becomes an expensive plugin. That said, you get what you pay for: ease, quality and speed of productivity. If that’s what you need, then ProAnimator 7 quickly pays for itself in ease-of-use and results. Even if you are a CG whiz with another tool set, the automated and common-sense features of this tool are impressive.
ProAnimator 7 Light Rig Rendered
Final Comments
For the stereotypical microfilmmaker, if there is such a thing, ProAnimator 7 has very limited cross-over abilities since we are more about story telling then short lived eye-candy. The toolset itself is fantastic and solid but not really on-target for story-telling needs. But man, if you need short lived, realistic lighting eye-candy, you simply won’t go wrong with this.
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Breakdown
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Ease of Use
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9.5 |
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Depth of Options
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10.0 |
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Performance
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10.0 |
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Value vs. Cost
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8.0 |
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Overall Score |
9.4 |
Mark Bremmer
Mark Bremmer has operated his own commercial studio for over 18 years. He’s been fortunate enough to work for clients like Caterpillar, Colgate, Amana, Hormel Foods, Universal Studios Florida, and The History Channel producing stills, digital mattes and animations. Mark contracts regularly as an art mercenary with production houses that shall remain nameless by written agreements. If you've seen shows like The Voice, The Grammy or the ESPY Awards, then you've also seen some of Mark's day-job work.