AnimVR Released!

We are happy to announce that AnimVR has officially launched on Oculus Home. It’s packed with lots of improvements and a bunch of shiny new features. See for yourself:

More Platforms

The next platforms to follow are Viveport on December 6th, and Steam on December 20th, right on time for the Christmas break. We are staggering the release to make sure that AnimVR runs as smooth as possible on every platform.

Commercial Use

If you are using AnimVR in a commercial setting (for example for freelance projects or at a studio) you can buy a commercial license directly from our website.

Beta Closed

At this point, we want to thank all beta testers, and people who have given us feedback over the past 3 years.
You have been the biggest inspiration along the way… We love you!!
We’re still just 2 devs, working on this in our spare time, so thank you for keeping us motivated.

❤️

The beta version will now be converted to a 15-day trial and will be completely disabled once we are live on Steam.

This is just the start of all we got planned and we'd love for you to keep in touch. So if you have any questions or concerns, don't hesitate to contact us! 

Cheers,
Milan & Dario

Poly Integration

We are happy to announce that we have been working with Google on an integration of their new Poly API. Poly is a service that lets you browse a huge library of user made, CC-BY licensed models which you can use in your own projects. It is already well integrated into Google Blocks and Tilt Brush.

Being able to integrate Poly directly into AnimVR is really exciting for us, because it lets you quickly search for and import props and characters for your animations, without ever leaving VR. You can also log in with your Google account and browse the models you've uploaded yourself. 

Featured Animations: Chain Reaction - by Nick Ladd  and Squid Attack - by Joe Daniels

Features

We focused on making the import experience as streamlined and straightforward as possible. Models from Poly behave exactly the same as any other imported model, meaning you can animate them and they are included in any export of your scene.

Search

Search for specific props in the Poly library.

Import

Importing objects from Poly is as simple as dragging their preview into the scene.

Animate

Animate objects from Poly like any other mesh!

Draw

Use AnimVRs frame by frame hand-drawn animation tools to breath life into your scene.

Record

Camera recording tools make it easy for you to get the shots you want.

Licensing

The models are licensed as CC-BY, meaning that you need to give credit to the creators when you publish your animation. To make this as easy as possible for you we are storing the attribution information with your stage files. You can export a list of licensed assets at any time. The list has all the necessary information to satisfy the licensing terms and you can focus on creating instead of keeping track of attributions.

Implementing the API was a breeze, especially thanks to the Poly Toolkit for Unity. You can read more about Poly, the API and other apps integrating it in this blog post by Google.

We are very happy with the experience this integration offers and we are looking forward to expand our feature set in this area in the future, for example by offering a similar workflow for music and sound effects.

Models used in the features section:
Alien in a purple Spaceship and Alien in green Spaceship by Taylor Wilson

Bonus

This is the result of exporting the recording showcased earlier.

Unity Toolkit

We have been working on a Unity integration for AnimVR for a while now and we're happy to announce that we released a first version. Visit the GitHub repository to get it!

Main Features

• Import complete stages, including animation, meshes, textures, cameras and sound.
• Use the Unity Timeline API to playback animations, do scene transitions and integrate it with the rest of your game/movie.
• Create new stages directly in the Unity Editor and open them in AnimVR. When you save, the changes are instantly visible in Unity.

Requirements

• Unity 2017.3
• AnimVR beta

Getting Started

• Download the Unity Package here
• Import it into your Unity project as described here
• Right click in your Unity project panel and choose “Create -> AnimVR -> Stage” (you can also drag an exisiting stage into your project window).
• Double click the created asset. The first time you do this you’ll need to set up the application to open .stage files with. In Windows 10 this done by clicking “More Apps”, scrolling all the way down and clicking “Look for another app on this PC”. Look for the folder your copy of AnimVR is installed to and choose “ANIMVR.exe”.
• AnimVR will open and load the stage. Make any changes you want and save the file as usual. When you go back to Unity the asset will get reimported.
• You can drag the imported asset into a stage like any other mesh or prefab. As long as the prefab instance is intact, changes to the stage will be reflected everywhere you are using the prefab.

Things to watch out for

• Currently we only support import on Windows platforms! We plan on supporting MacOS in the future and would love to hear from you if you urgently need MacOS support. Note that this onlyconcerns importing stage files. You can still use the imported file on MacOS.
• Stages with audio need to be imported twice the first time you import them. The import editor will show a “Fixup audio clips” button if that’s the case. Just press it and you’re good to go!