--- title: "4D Digital Humans" canonical: "https://documentation.chaos.com/space/ANIMA/125108410/4D%20Digital%20Humans" format: markdown --- This page provides information about 4D digital humans in Chaos Anima. ## **What are 4D Digital Humans?** --- > ℹ️ **Anima 7** release adds 200 new ready-to-use 4D character models with high-quality animations. To distinguish them, use the **New only** filter. This is a new type of model that gathers the best features of the two classic types of models, the realism from the static Ready Posed and the animation from the Rigged, in a mix that elevates the whole to a new category of unmatched realism. They are made using state-of-the-art technology capable of capturing the performance of real live people during a period of time and translate it to an animated 3D geometry with animated textures. The basic concept is the same that the one used to create static Ready Posed models but adding time to the equation, which brings the whole process to a whole new level of complexity. --- ## **Geometry Optimization** --- ## **Texture Optimization** --- ## **Lots of Benefits** --- --- --- --- --- --- ### Showcases of 4D Models --- ## **Limitations** --- As with everything in life, not all about the new 4D models is perfect. The new 3D sequence scanner technology used to capture the 4D models is a very recent cutting-edge that still has room to improve. These are some of the known issues that you may find when using these models: - **Fixed and limited animation:** Each model has about **30s of animation**, but this is always the same, it cannot be adapted to the environment nor other actors. We made the captures long enough to let them fit multiple shots, which usually take about 3-6 seconds. Also, you can set a **custom offset** of each actor’s animation inside Anima to improve the diversity of the performance. - **Artifacts and mesh vibrations:** At a close distance and depending on lighting conditions, some models have visible vibrations in their mesh that can be distracting. This is a limitation of the source scanned processing, not a product of the compression (which is lossless), and it will improve in the future as the scan tech evolves. This issue is improving a lot quicker than we initially thought and our latest releases have far fewer problems than the first ones. - **IPR problems:** The** production render mode** works great but, on some combinations of 3D application and render engine, the **interactive render mode** (**IPR**) does not process correctly the change in the automatic update of the textures that our plugin does when the frame changes. That happens mainly because some renderers use huge optimizations on this render mode that don’t take into account the new 4D stream model paradigm. We are already in contact with the render developers to find a solution to this, and it is already working fine on the majority of render engines that support this feature. - **No MotionBlur only on Cinema 4D:** Our plugin can generate motion blur for the 4D models in **3ds Max** and **Unreal Engine**, but in **Cinema 4D** we don’t have it due to an incompatibility with the architecture of this application. We are in contact with Maxon to find a solution. - **No normal maps**: The current 4D scan technology does not provide detailed normal maps as the ones we can generate for the other 3D scans. That’s why we must generate pseudo-bump maps on the shaders we use for these models that are actually based on the diffuse texture. As soon as the scanner technology evolves to support it we will include that information in our models too because our **Anima **format already supports it. - **No color variations:** A common feature in Anima is that all the models have 5 color variations in their textures. Unfortunately, due to the nature of the source texture data, at this point, it is still **not possible to generate color variations** on the 4D models. ## **Developing our own Anima format** --- Our mission has always been to provide the best product that our clients can use easily and quickly, and a product with that many pitfalls clearly does not align with that vision. This is also the main reason that pushed us to develop our own solution to this new 4D technology. Soon, in our tests, we found that using them in Alembic format just wasn’t production-ready, so we focused on creating our own **4D Digital Human** technology. Then we added it to our software **Anima, **and now we have a new product that solves all these issues, providing a production-ready human asset that perfectly fits our vision. None of the most used 3D formats (fbx, glb, obj, 3ds, etc.) supports the technology needed to store and play the animated mesh and textures captured by the 4D technology. There is one standard format that does support dynamic meshes and animated textures, which is **Alembic**. However, our **Anima format has been specially crafted to handle 4D models,** while the *Alembic* format is designed to support a wide variety of requirements; therefore, we have been able to optimize our format far better than *Alembic allows.* Also, we have added many features that focus on the management of **people assets** that bring a whole new level of functionality thanks to our **Anima **plugins. These are the features that our 4D models provide, thanks to using our own Anima native format, which would not be available using the *Alembic* format. - *Alembic* **can’t generate native shaders** adapted to your renderer. - *Alembic* **can’t automatically define the texture paths**, because they must be set up as animated sequences of images, and this depends on each particular combination of render engine and 3d application. There is no simple way to do this, and it is a process prone to causing problems that can often be seen only after rendering a sequence. - Using the model in *Alembic* format, the renderers would not be able to generate **Motion Blur** for this type of geometry with changing topology. - There are some 3D applications that support standard models in *Alembic* but don’t support this type of streamed model yet because it has not been added yet in their particular implementation of this format. - The same model in *Alembic* would have a **huge size (*****25-55x***** times bigger than the Anima format)**. If we include the textures, this means* up to 8 GB per model*. So, for example, if you have a simple scene with only 5 4D models, in our highly optimized Anima format they have a size of *~750 Mb*. That means that those 5 models exported to a standard format like *Alembic *could require about *20 to 40 GB*, which would cause a lot of problems in any production workflow. - *Alembic* does not support multiple ***Levels of Detail*** (LoD), so playback performance is always the same when multiple actors are present in a real-time application (like **Unreal Engine**), even if the model is not visible in the shot or is very far from the camera. - Our plugin makes use of the latest **hardware accelerations **available in modern **NVidia GPUs **to take the optimization and realtime-performance even further, making it possible to play up to 50 different 4D models in real-time in the same scene, while using *Alembic *you can hardly get a few.