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Based on the Unreal Engine, Real-time technology is growing in popularity throughout the animation sector, with more companies adopting a production pipeline.
You can add new features to your pipeline whether you’re a big studio, a small animation shop, or a solo artist thanks to a constantly expanding selection of plugins and integrations made to help you improve your animations.
Today, we’re discussing a few of the plugins that are currently on the market. Be sure to bookmark this page since we’ll be adding new animation tools as they become available.
Autodesk Plugin
Specialist in design software Autodesk serves a wide range of sectors, from product design and film and television production to engineering and architecture. ShotGrid, a robust tracking and review tool for animation productions, is offered by the company, a leader in the field of project management software, and it helps creative studios to streamline workflows.
The ShotGrid plugin for UE, which was co-released with Epic Games, establishes a fundamental interaction between ShotGrid Toolkit and Unreal Engine to permit seamless tracking and inspection of your UE project. It has hooks that let users construct their own unique workflows on top of pre-existing features.
Autodesk FBX objects can be exported from Maya and imported automatically into Unreal Engine for turntable rendering before being published on ShotGrid. Similarly, with the ShotGrid Loader, you can now import FBX files directly into the UE Content Browser with database-driven folder organization. Both UE4.27 and UE5 are compatible with the plugin.
Additionally, Autodesk offers the Unreal Live Link for Autodesk Maya plugin, which permits real-time animation data streaming from the company’s well-known 3D content production program to UE.
With the help of this time-saving plugin, you can animate character assets in Maya and get a real-time preview of your work in a fully lighted and rendered scene inside Unreal Engine.
The ShotGrid plugin was utilized by Aaron Sims Creative (ASC) when creating THE EYE: CALANTHEK. This mysterious and thrilling short film tells the tale of interplanetary maintenance worker Valentina who, while being sent to fix a drone on a far-off planet, comes into contact with a hostile alien and unknown power.
The movie was almost entirely made in UE5 Early Access in under six weeks, with Maya being used to making Valentina’s spacesuit and helmet and ShotGrid to oversee the production.
Aaron Sims, a well-known creature designer and the founder and CEO of ASC, claims that his company has been using ShotGrid from its inception as a VFX firm. Sequences, assets, and images can accumulate while overseeing several projects at once and easily get overwhelming.
ShotGrid’s integrated review tools enable managers to stay focused and ensure that I’m managing the team in a timely and effective manner.
>>>Read more: Unreal Engine Sequencer – A real time editor for virtual 3D production
Kitestring Unreal Engine Plugin
Real-time character deformations of film quality are possible using Ozone by Kitestring. The Ozone Engine plugin aims to make it possible for Unreal Engine 4 and 5 to produce more interesting and distinctive deformations.
Super Giant Robot Brothers! is the first animated series produced by Texas-based Reel FX that was totally built in Unreal Engine; the main characters were constructed using Ozone.
>>>Read more: How Unreal Engine works? Unreal Engine versions, popular features and benefits
Praxinos Unreal Engine Plugin
Praxinos creates Unreal Engine-based 2D tools. EPOS, a plugin for UE that serves as a storyboard manager, is one of the company’s animation tools.
With the aid of this cutting-edge storytelling tool, you can create 2D storyboards in a 3D real-time setting. EPOS creates a camera in your 3D world, a scene in Unreal Engine’s Sequencer, and a transparent board for sketching to manage scene placement in space and time.
The 14-minute CG story The Day I Became A Bird, produced by Academy Award-winning independent animation studio Passion Pictures, used the EPOS plugin for storyboarding and layout. It is about an 11-year-old boy who discovers his interest in the natural world after becoming intrigued by a classmate’s fascination with birds.
>>>Read more: Mesh to MetaHuman Plugin for Unreal Engine is now available
SideFX Plugin
For the biggest film, TV, advertising, and video game studios worldwide for more than 35 years, SideFX has been creating procedural 3D animation and visual effects technologies.
With non-destructive workflows, which permit editing at any point of the process, the company’s Houdini 3D animation software enables artists to work more freely, produce several iterations, and instantly share workflows with coworkers.
Artists can use the procedural assets from Houdini directly in Unreal Engine thanks to the Houdini Engine for Unreal plugin. Additionally, it enables technical artists to create procedural tools and share them with other artists within the studio, regardless of whether they are familiar with Houdini.
SideFX developed Project Titan to demonstrate how the Houdini Engine plugin may be utilized to operate inside the Unreal Editor.
This internal tech demo aims to production test Houdini’s procedural workflows while constructing a 3D scene using Unreal Engine 5’s most recent innovations. Artists may work more quickly while still preserving creative freedom with Project Titan tools. A high degree of detail can be quickly completed by smaller teams thanks to the procedural approach.
The Project Titan demo’s tools and methods will be made available to the animation community by SideFX as educational resources.
Additionally, the most recent season of Love, Death + Robots, In Vaulted Halls Entombed, utilized the Houdini Engine for Unreal plugin. In our Spotlight, you can read about how Sony Pictures Imageworks took a risk and modified a pipeline that had been in place for more than 25 years in order to provide real-time animation for the program.
