Reflex is uniquely at home in the massive pipelines of today's feature film and next-generation AAA game studios. Built by a team with a long history in feature-animation production, Reflex addresses shortcomings of previous tools that were not designed for large studios and have been made to work in these environments only through lots of gum and tape... err... hacked plugins and awkward workarounds. We understand the technical challenges you face every day, and we can help you solve them.
Get at Your Data
All Reflex data files (except texturemap images) are human-readable, human-editable plain text. Provide 'diff'-able asset versioning with standard tools such as CVS, Perforce or Subversion. Read/modify/write any Reflex data by hand in a text editor or via studio-built shell scripts or GUI tools.
For instance, "grep -R" to determine what shots include a particular model. Use a Perl script to process animation data, conform a set of shots to some standard, or verify some condition across the content of an entire show. Make a Tcl/TK tool to generate batches of new shots from an EDL. Write Reflex animation data out from an external dynamics simulator without linking to any special libraries or using proprietary API's.
For really huge data, such as high-data-rate motion capture or physical simulation, Reflex text data is compact and typically compresses to smaller sizes than it would occupy in other systems' binary formats.
Our wide-open file formats and fine storage granularity allow for open backlot management. Provide your own back-end, and locate your assets on anything from a hierarchy of Unix directories with well-chosen search-paths served over NFS to a WebDAV frontend for a legacy repository to a high-availability Oracle database.
Choose Your Rigging Weapon
Import Maya models complete with rigging, IK, deformations, expressions and set-driven-key relationships. Or program models from scratch in a C++-like programming language. Build models containing conditionals, loops and function calls. Use sophisticated performance-analysis tools to assist in profiling and debugging character models.
Structure models using a hierarchy of included subfiles with studio-customizable inclusion search paths. Inclusion and search-path file resolution lets Reflex support sophisticated versioning strategies and per-shot model customization via code overlays, and it encourages clean, modular architectures for rigging construction and reuse.
Rig with any combination of Euler-angle (rx,ry,rz) rotations or quaternions. Build models with quaternion-valued motion channels that are gimbal-lock-free and interpolate naturally. Precisely specify available degrees-of-freedom in the model, for animators and across your pipeline. Lock particular motion channels, or classes of channels, per user, workgroup or department.
Build complex deformation networks containing any mix of parallel and serial deformer relationships. Reflex can perform TD-guided simplification and lossy evaluation of large deformer networks to achieve real-time playback, or it can evaluate the network exactly for precise surface rendering as needed.
Lay It All Out
Layout artists can bring scanned storyboards right into Reflex and time them out to follow an EDL. Quickly drop in models, maybe add a background flat, and perhaps block out some motion. Scout the set in real-time to find the good shots. Then use Drawing Planes to communicate intent to animators, lighters and special-effects artists. Your drawings can be static or timed-out along with the shot, and they'll stay with the shot as it proceeds through the pipeline.
Reflex provides an advanced camera model with full bellows movements, embeddable within model code for construction of complex camera rigs such as cranes and vehicle mounts.
For the ultimate in scene-construction flexibility, Reflex lets you create sophisticated cross-data-file, out-of-scene-tree groupings and attachments that are fully animatable.
Take Control
Reflex uses a new motion representation based on general motion compositing. Combine an unlimited number of motion layers using any compositing operator, with alpha-blending and per-layer envelope and time-course control. Freely mix different channels and different models within layers.
Reflex layers allow for the unified treatment of heterogeneous motion data: keyframed FK and IK, motion capture, dynamics, black-box procedural motion and shaped stochastic (pseudo-random) motion can be freely inter-layered. Reflex makes editing motion capture as easy as editing keyframed animation.
Layers also provide important tools for managing collaboration. Assign layers to individuals or departments for tracking. Combine sets of layers into Layer Groups. Optionally write distinct sets out to separate files and control access and versioning via native file-system mechanisms or studio-built GUI tools or command-line scripts
For an individual animator, lighter or effects artist, layers provide some powerful new tools. Isolate fixes in separate layers, and perform easy A/B comparison of different versions, for example for director review. Merge/flatten multiple layers down to one. Or decompose one layer into several by regular-expression matching on the channel names or the data, by frequency band, by time range, or by other logical or mathematical rules.
Fear No Animator
The shot worked when you were done with it. But some animators have an uncanny knack at being able to break even the most solid of technology. And then they drop it back on your desk in a tangled mess. With Reflex, nothing is hidden from you, and you have the tools to examine everything from the underlying data (did we mention human-readable plaintext?) to the full expression graph to console or scripted queries of any parameter or connection in a model or scene. Your data in Reflex is wide open to you, from the files on up.
The Reflex UI
A clean interface goes a long way in speeding up the animator’s workflow. Reflex provides you with only the tools an animator needs to get the job done.
Manipulation Handles
Select the model and quickly see what manipulations it supports.
FK/IK Buttons
On the toolbar, simply select which mode you would like for your character’s limbs.
Drawing Palette
At the click of a button, switch to drawing mode to quickly sketch out a pose.
Layers Menu
Pull down this menu to instantly change to a new Layer. Click the Solo button to see the current Layer by itself.
