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.
Q: Can you describe a workflow you would use for creating and animating a character?
A: Di-O-Matic tools are designed to be easily pluggable in any production pipeline to easily speed up the character animation process.
Imagine been able to drastically cut the production time required to animate the lipsync of your character, what used to take hours can be done now in minutes. For instance, if you wish to make a character talk: you could use Voice-O-Matic to create a first pass of lip sync and further tweak the generated keyframes on your character setup and this will work in any languages, any rig and in 3ds max, maya or softimage.
Q: Maskarad uses state-of-the-art technology to automatically locate and track head motion from a video which can be used in character animations. How accurate is this technology?
A: The underlying technology is an outstanding patented facial detection and tracking solution which requires absolutely no user interaction.
Markerless facial performance is all about getting a good first pass of animation without much setup, but it can't compete with the precision of having hundreds of glued markers on someone's face.
Q: Di-O-Matic is developing plugins supported by Autodesk. Are you planning to expand the support for other 3D software like LightWave or Modo?
A: We have just released a new plugin for Autodesk MotionBuilder and we are very excited to bring our solutions to new platforms. When we started the company we initially only developed plugins for 3ds max, since then we have released plugins for Maya, Softimage and MotionBuilder as well as standalone windows software.
We do not have any plan at the moment to support additional platforms with dedicated plugins although we have worked hard to ensure that our latest windows applications (Facial Studio and Maskarad) could export files that are compatible with applications like Lightwave and Cinema4D.
Q: Are you proud of some specific moment which achieved one of your products?
A: As a Disney fan, it was a great moment when Morph-O-Matic was selected by Blur Studio to be the driving force of the facial animation performance of Mickey Mouse. Our technology played a key role in bringing the iconic cartoon character in CG for the first time.
Q: What are your next plans for the future? What we can expect?
A: Autodesk 2013 products were just released and our plugins compatible with Autodek 2013 products will soon be made available to our customers. Di-O-Matic products have always been driven by our customer's needs and requests and we are currently working on improvements for all of our existing solutions.
