Chaining of animations to offer faster performance and more choices

Today ACME released new Kaleidoscope animations; here's our public Animation Library. Though these animations are visually simple, the underlying architecture that creates them is a level up for our customers. Animations can now be defined as arbitrary combinations of “Code to Image” and “Image to Code” sub animations. Also, with the splitting of each animation into two distinct definitions, total creation time can be halved as each animation can be executed in parallel by our pool of render engines.

New prototype simulation based animation

Today I released a new simulation based animation “Sprite Squad”. Each tile in the QR code is a cube that falls down into a funnel that ends in its proper landing space. Because of - well, simulated physics - sometimes the cubes can get stuck in the funnel, just like they would in real life. I fixed this like they’d be fixed in real life too: someone would wiggle each cube loose with a small twist. In other words in the simulation, each cube gets a small amount of random rotational impulse, so they never get stuck. This animation isn’t quite yet to our ACME standards for code-to-image looping, but we’ll circle back on that later.

ACME has over 30 requested animations in our development queue now.

Presentation at Tech Talks

Today I presented a high level overview of ACME’s technology and pipeline at DreamWorks Animation’s ‘Tech Con 2020’ at their Glendale California campus. I’ve been an employee with DreamWorks Animation for over 17 years now, and it was a pleasure to share our unique animation engine during the conference’s “Tech Talks”. Fun questions to ask and answer! DreamWorks Animation is simply an awesome place to work.