Festival CulturaDigital.Br

Animata is a real-time animation software, designed to create interactive background projections for concerts, theatre and dance performances, and promotional screenings.

The peculiarity of the software is that the animation – the movement of the puppets, the changes of the background – is generated in real-time, making continuous interaction possible. This ability also permits that physical sensors, cameras or other environmental variables can be attached to the animation of characters, creating a cartoon reacting to its environment. For example, it is quite simple to create a virtual puppet band reacting to live audio input, or set up a scene of drawn characters controlled by the movement of dancers.

In contrast with the traditional 3D animation programs, creating characters in Animata is quite simple and takes only a few minutes. On the basis of the still images, which serve as the skeleton of the puppets, we produce a network of triangles, some parts of which we link with the bone structure. The movement of the bones is based on a physical model, which allows the characters to be easily moved.

The software can be connected with many pieces of external software in order to make use of the possibilities of these applications in the fields of image processing, sound analysis, or motion capture. These applications can analyse for instance sound input, or user movement, and this data could drive animations reacting to these environmental changes in real-time.