(Because Animation System 6.6 doesn’t have a stand-alone review, we gave additional space for 3D artist Dave Stoddard to show more of the Pros and Cons in depth.)
Pros:
As far as strengths of EIAS, I would say that the "secret" feature is ease of use. EIAS has a unified project window which greatly simplifies project management, and the rest of the interface is similarly straightforward and easy to understand. This is something that you will never find on a feature list, but is extremely important.
The Global Illumination rendering system in EIAS is very good, and very fast. It also maintains great ease of use with simple and direct controls for setting the GI parameters.
Camera, the rendering engine in EIAS, is simply blazingly fast. It is capable of consistently producing extremely high quality images and animation, even with very dense geometry meshes made of millions and millions of polygons, where other renderers sometimes fail, or slow to a crawl. The fact that Camera comes with an unlimited license also allows you to run it on multiple computers simultaneously, and easily build a low cost render farm.
There is a very fast and robust dynamics system for doing physics based simulations; layered rendering for post processing in After Effects and Photoshop; and some improvements to the deformation system, as well as the built-in scripting engine; as well as support for true HDRI image based lighting.
Cons:
EIAS was originally developed (and used extensively by Industrial Light and Magic) for exclusively hard body animation, which means that it’s designed as an animator and renderer without the modeling tools found in other 3D programs.
While EIAS has character animation tools, its character animation toolset needs improvement by having some advanced features added. Many character animators are importing data from other apps (like Maya) using FBX and rendering in EIAS. The FBX format support is good, but should be improved to ensure that all data is transferred seamlessly, requiring less user intervention. It also could stand to have the GI rendering system expanded for more advanced (and even faster) GI rendering.
Conclusion:
Due to it's straightforward interface, EIAS offers a fairly low learning curve for low to no-budget film makers. It has very powerful camera mapping techniques, to create digital sets along with extremely fast rendering, which is very important when creating animated sequences. In my experience EIAS is able to produce images of equal or better quality, compared to other renderers, in about half the time.
