Q: Can you describe a workflow you would use for creating and animating a character?
A: Di-O-Matic tools are designed to be easily pluggable in any production pipeline to easily speed up the character animation process.
Imagine been able to drastically cut the production time required to animate the lipsync of your character, what used to take hours can be done now in minutes. For instance, if you wish to make a character talk: you could use Voice-O-Matic to create a first pass of lip sync and further tweak the generated keyframes on your character setup and this will work in any languages, any rig and in 3ds max, maya or softimage.
Q: Maskarad uses state-of-the-art technology to automatically locate and track head motion from a video which can be used in character animations. How accurate is this technology?
A: The underlying technology is an outstanding patented facial detection and tracking solution which requires absolutely no user interaction.
Markerless facial performance is all about getting a good first pass of animation without much setup, but it can't compete with the precision of having hundreds of glued markers on someone's face.
Q: Di-O-Matic is developing plugins supported by Autodesk. Are you planning to expand the support for other 3D software like LightWave or Modo?
A: We have just released a new plugin for Autodesk MotionBuilder and we are very excited to bring our solutions to new platforms. When we started the company we initially only developed plugins for 3ds max, since then we have released plugins for Maya, Softimage and MotionBuilder as well as standalone windows software.
We do not have any plan at the moment to support additional platforms with dedicated plugins although we have worked hard to ensure that our latest windows applications (Facial Studio and Maskarad) could export files that are compatible with applications like Lightwave and Cinema4D.
Q: Are you proud of some specific moment which achieved one of your products?
A: As a Disney fan, it was a great moment when Morph-O-Matic was selected by Blur Studio to be the driving force of the facial animation performance of Mickey Mouse. Our technology played a key role in bringing the iconic cartoon character in CG for the first time.
Q: What are your next plans for the future? What we can expect?
A: Autodesk 2013 products were just released and our plugins compatible with Autodek 2013 products will soon be made available to our customers. Di-O-Matic products have always been driven by our customer's needs and requests and we are currently working on improvements for all of our existing solutions.
