Di-O-Matic is a software development company based in Canada specializing in character animation software and plug-ins for 3D artists and production studios all over the world. Their solutions cover plugins for the most popular 3D applications such as 3ds max, maya and softimage together with famous standalone software Facial Studio, LipSync MX and Maskarad. About this and a lot more you can read in our interview with LaurentM. Abecassis, President and founder of Di-O-Matic. If you are curious where Di-O-Matic products were used, check the gallery at the bottom of the interview with a small showcase where you could see their products in use.
Q: What was behind the formation of Di-O-Matic and who?
A: After several years of supervising pipeline and production for animated TV series, I've decided back in 2000 to design some custom tools for 3ds max to assist production studios with more advanced character animation solutions than what was offered at that time in 3ds max. And this is what has driven Di-O-Matic since, to offer more character oriented solutions than what's available in the default package.
Back in 2000, 3ds max 4 had just been release and having worked on multiple productions involving character animation we quickly developed several facial animation tools including Morph-O-Matic which rapidly got popular as it pushed the limits of what was possible using morph-based animation at the time. And offered, without requiring any extra code, much more than what morpher offers even today. The response was incredible and to this day, many leading production studios still rely on Morph-O-Matic to bring some very well known CG characters to life including Mickey Mouse, Crash Bandicoot, SpongeBob SquarePants and many more.
Since 2000, we have released more than 20 commercial software and plugins for many platforms from 3ds max to Maya including Softimage and more recently for MotionBuilder.
Q: Can you closer describe your company to our readers? (How many employees do you have, how look your ordinary day, how many people are developing your plugins, how long you are on the market,etc.)
A: Di-O-Matic’s office is located in Montreal, Canada. Our team is composed of about 8 people with some of us working full time at the office while others working remotely from all over the world. We have a very flexible working schedule to allow us to be present whenever our customers need to contact us.
Q: You are developing products for character animation. What was the reason to developing this kind of products?
A: The ability to help artists bring their characters to life is really what has driven us from the very beginning.
We have 4 categories of character animation tools at Di-O-Matic: Automatic Lipsync, Rapid Facial Modeling, Markerless facial performance capture and Character animation and rigging tools.
Q: You have a wide range of products. Are any of them using any unique technologies?
A: Actually, most of our tools are based on unique technologies to allow artists to create better character animations more rapidly than if you were using the default tools available in your 3d package. Automatic phonetic recognition in audio files and automatic facial feature detection in videos are both very unique technologies that are available in some of our tools.