 | |
| Developer(s) | EIAS3D |
|---|---|
| Stable release | 9.1.0 / June 2013 |
| Operating system | macOS, Microsoft Windows |
| Type | 3D computer graphics |
| License | Demoware |
| Website | eias3d |
The Electric Image Animation System (EIAS) is a 3D computer graphics package published by EIAS3D. It currently runs on the macOS and Windows platforms.
Electric Image, Inc. was initially a visual effects production company. They developed their own in-house 3D animation and rendering package for the Macintosh beginning in the late 1980s, calling it ElectricImage Animation System. (To avoid confusion with the current product with its similar name, we will refer to this initial incarnation of the product simply as ElectricImage.)
When the company later decided to offer their software for sale externally, it quickly gained a customer base that lauded the developers for the software's exceptionally fast rendering engine and high image quality[ citation needed ]. Because it was capable of film-quality output on commodity hardware, ElectricImage was popular in the movie and television industries throughout the decade. It was used by the "Rebel Unit" at Industrial Light and Magic quite extensively and was in use by a variety of game companies, such as Bad Mojo and Bad Day on the Midway [ citation needed ]. However, only these high end effects companies could afford it: Electric Image initially sold for US $7500.
EIAS has been used in numerous film and television productions, such as: Cliffs of Freedom, Piranha 3D, Alien Trespass, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, Daddy Day Care, K-19: The Widowmaker, Gangs of New York, Austin Powers: Goldmember, Men In Black II, The Bourne Identity, Behind Enemy Lines, Time Machine, Ticker, JAG - Pilot Episode, Spawn, [1] Star Trek: First Contact, Star Trek: Insurrection, Galaxy Quest, [2] Mission to Mars, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace, [3] Titan A.E., U-571, Dinosaur, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, [4] Terminator 2: Judgment Day - DVD Intro, Jungle Book 2, American President, Sleepers, Star Wars Special Edition, Empire Strikes Back Special Edition, Return of Jedi Special Edition, Bicentennial Man, Vertical Limit, Elf, Blade Trinity, and Lost In Space.
TV Shows: Evil, Invisible City, Shinning Girls, Lovecraft Country, Rising Dion, Legion, The Strain, The Librarians, Falling Skies, Revolution, Breaking Bad, Alcatraz, Pan AM, The whole Truth, Lost, Flash Forward, Fringe, Surface, Weeds, Pushing Daisies, The X-Files, Alias, Smallville, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Babylon 5, Young Indiana Jones, Star Trek Voyager, Mists of Avalon, Star Trek Enterprise....
Electric Image, Inc. was always a small company that produced software on the Mac platform and so never had a large a market share. Play, Inc. purchased Electric Image corporation in November 1998. The first version of EIAS released under the Play moniker was version 2.9. Play later released the 3.0 version. This was the first version to run on Windows, and to mark this move, Play renamed the package Electric Image Universe.
In 2000, Dwight Parscale (former CEO of Newtek) and original Electric Image founders Markus Houy and Jay Roth bought back the original company from Play Inc. On September 19, 2000, the company bought back the shares of Electric Image from Play and set about to recapture the product's former customer base. The new company released version 4.0 and 5.0 under the Electric Image moniker. Then due to a licensing problem with Spatial Technologies, they dropped the Modeler program from the version 5.5 release, and renamed the package back to Electric Image Animation System.
Versions 6.0 and 6.5 were subsequently released with vast improvements to the rendering engine and OpenGL performance. Version 6.5r2 added FBX file importing capability. 6.6 added Universal Binary support and finally drops support for Mac OS 9. Version 7.0 brought Multi-Layer Rendering, Image-Based Lighting, Raytrace Sky Maps and Rigid Body Dynamics. The version, 8.0, added Photon Mapping, Fast soft shadows, area light, Quadratic light drop-off, EXR and 16bit image input support, Displacement Sea Level, new Weight maps tools, much workflow enhancement and Renderama improvements.
In 2009, EITG began negotiations to sell the intellectual property rights of ElectricImage. On January 12, 2010 it was announced that Tomas Egger, Igor Yatsenko, and Igor Ivaniuk had become the new owners of EIAS. Known collectively as "The Igors", Igor Yatsenko and Igor Ivaniuk had been EIAS's primary software developers for many years. They released version 9.0 in November 2012, followed by version 9.1 in June 2013.
The existing customer base for EIAS favors it for its fast renderer, its high output quality, and its camera mapping features. The tool set lends itself particularly well to hard-surface animation/rendering and other forms of non-organic tasks. It is most popular with architects and visual effects artists for TV and film.
EIAS's primary competitors in the integrated 3D package space are Autodesk with Maya, 3D Studio Max and Softimage, Maxon with Cinema 4D, and Newtek with Lightwave 3D.
The Electric Image Animation System is not a single program, but rather a suite of several programs designed to work together. Each of the primary programs handles a particular part of the production workflow:
Animator is the EIAS animation program. It can directly import 3D models in the Lightwave, 3D Studio, AutoCAD, Maya, and Electric Image FACT formats. In addition to animating models, Animator allows you to set up rendering settings. It efficiently supports the animation of very geometrically complex projects.
Camera is the EIAS rendering program, known for its speed and high image quality. As of version 9.0, it supports ray tracing, Phong shading, scanline rendering, spatial anti-aliasing, motion blur, caustics, radiosity, Photon mapping, Irradiance Cache, Screen Cache and global illumination. Camera outputs to several file formats, like Quicktime and EI's own Image format. The latter is directly supported by Adobe After Effects CC and Adobe Photoshop CC.
Renderama and Renderama Slave compose EIAS's distributed network rendering system. It allows for the rendering of a project to be distributed over a network's computers (i.e., for the formation of a render farm). It supports both single and multiprocessor computers, taking advantage of all available processors to distribute the workload. It also supports rendering across platforms (e.g., Windows 7/8 - 64 bits and Mac OS X 10.6.8 or earlier).
Modeler saves its files in Electric Image's "FACT" file format for importing into Animator (see above). It supports ACIS modeling, "ÜberNurbs" (EIAS' subdivision surfaces modeling technology), LAWS (based on parametric formulas) as well as Boolean operations and other modern modeling tools.
Modeler last shipped in Electric Image Universe 5.0. As a result, users of EIAS 5.5 and newer use a third-party modeler instead. As of this writing, Electric Image recommends Nevercenter Silo for this purpose. Form•Z from auto•des•sys is also popularly used as a companion for EIAS.
The Persistence of Vision Ray Tracer, most commonly acronymed as POV-Ray, is a cross-platform ray-tracing program that generates images from a text-based scene description. It was originally based on DKBTrace, written by David Kirk Buck and Aaron A. Collins for Amiga computers. There are also influences from the earlier Polyray raytracer because of contributions from its author, Alexander Enzmann. POV-Ray is free and open-source software, with the source code available under the AGPL-3.0-or-later license.
Autodesk 3ds Max, formerly 3D Studio and 3D Studio Max, is a professional 3D computer graphics program for making 3D animations, models, games and images. It is developed and produced by Autodesk Media and Entertainment. It has modeling capabilities and a flexible plugin architecture and must be used on the Microsoft Windows platform. It is frequently used by video game developers, many TV commercial studios, and architectural visualization studios. It is also used for movie effects and movie pre-visualization. 3ds Max features shaders, dynamic simulation, particle systems, radiosity, normal map creation and rendering, global illumination, a customizable user interface, and its own scripting language.
Poser is a figure posing and rendering 3D computer graphics program distributed by Bondware. Poser is optimized for the 3D modeling of human figures. By enabling beginners to produce basic animations and digital images, along with the extensive availability of third-party digital 3D models, it has attained much popularity.
MASSIVE is a high-end computer animation and artificial intelligence software package used for generating crowd-related visual effects for film and television.
LightWave 3D is a 3D computer graphics program developed by LightWave Digital. It has been used in films, television, motion graphics, digital matte painting, visual effects, video game development, product design, architectural visualizations, virtual production, music videos, pre-visualizations and advertising.
TrueSpace was a commercial 3D computer graphics and animation software developed by Caligari Corporation, bought-out by Microsoft. As of May 2009, it was officially discontinued, but with some 'unofficial support' up to February 2010.
Houdini is a 3D animation software application developed by Toronto-based SideFX, who adapted it from the PRISMS suite of procedural generation software tools.
Bryce, also often referred to colloquially as Bryce3D, is a 3D modeling, rendering and animation program specializing in fractal landscapes. The name is taken from Bryce Canyon—a rugged region with many of the same landscapes that were first simulated with the software.
Aladdin4D is a computer program for modeling and rendering three-dimensional graphics and animations, currently running on AmigaOS and macOS platforms. A-EON Technology Ltd owns the rights and develops current and future versions of Aladdin4D for AmigaOS, MorphOS & AROS. All other platforms including macOS, iPadOS, iOS, Linux & Windows are developed by DiscreetFX.
Pixologic ZBrush is a digital sculpting tool that combines 3D/2.5D modeling, texturing and painting. It uses a proprietary "pixol" technology which stores lighting, color, material, orientation and depth information for the points making up all objects on the screen. The main difference between ZBrush and more traditional modeling packages is that it is more akin to traditional sculpting.
Foundation Imaging, Inc. was a CGI visual effects studio, computer animation studio, and post-production editing facility.
Previsualization is the visualizing of scenes or sequences in a movie before filming. It is a concept used in other creative arts, including animation, performing arts, video game design, and still photography. Previsualization typically describes techniques like storyboarding, which uses hand-drawn or digitally-assisted sketches to plan or conceptualize movie scenes.
Vue is a software tool for world generation by e-on software with support for many visual effects, animations and various other features. The tool has been used in several feature-length movies.
Softimage|3D was a high-end 3D graphics application developed by Softimage, Co., which was used predominantly in the film, broadcasting, gaming, and advertising industries for the production of 3D animation. It was superseded by Softimage XSI in 2000.
This article deals with productivity software created for the Amiga line of computers and covers the AmigaOS operating system and its derivatives AROS and MorphOS. It is a split of the main article, Amiga software.
Cyber Studio CAD-3D is a 3D modeling and animation package developed by Tom Hudson for the Atari ST computer and published by Antic Software. The package is a precursor to 3D Studio Max.
Modo is a polygon and subdivision surface modeling, sculpting, 3D painting, animation and rendering package developed by Luxology, LLC, which is now merged with and known as Foundry. The program incorporates features such as n-gons and edge weighting, and runs on Microsoft Windows, Linux and macOS platforms.
The history of computer animation began as early as the 1940s and 1950s, when people began to experiment with computer graphics – most notably by John Whitney. It was only by the early 1960s when digital computers had become widely established, that new avenues for innovative computer graphics blossomed. Initially, uses were mainly for scientific, engineering and other research purposes, but artistic experimentation began to make its appearance by the mid-1960s – most notably by Dr Thomas Calvert. By the mid-1970s, many such efforts were beginning to enter into public media. Much computer graphics at this time involved 2-dimensional imagery, though increasingly as computer power improved, efforts to achieve 3-dimensional realism became the emphasis. By the late 1980s, photo-realistic 3D was beginning to appear in film movies, and by mid-1990s had developed to the point where 3D animation could be used for entire feature film production.
Art of Illusion is a free software, and open source software package for making 3D graphics.
Third-party plugin vendors:
