Electric Image Animation System
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The Electric Image Animation System (EIAS) is a 3D computer graphics package published by EI Technology Group. It currently runs on the Mac OS X and Windows platforms.
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History
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 to others, it quickly gained a customer base that lauded the developers for the software's exceptionally fast rendering engine and high image quality. 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.
Electric Image, Inc. was always a small company that produced software on a niche platform (the Macintosh) and so never had a large a market share. Play, Inc. purchased the ailing Electric Image corporation in November of 1998. After releasing the minor version 2.9 release of ElectricImage, Play released the major 3.0 version. This was the first version to run on Windows, and to mark this move, Play renamed the package Electric Image Universe. Play was never a greatly successful company, and so Electric Image Universe otherwise stagnated during the time they owned it.
In 2000, Dwight Parscale (former CEO of Newtek) and original Electric Image founders Markus Houy and Jay Roth formed a new company, EI Technology Group. On September 19, 2000, the company bought the Electric Image assets from Play and set about to recapture the product's former customer base. The new company released versions 4.0 and 5.0 under the Electric Image Universe moniker. Then due to a licensing problem, they dropped the Modeler program from the version 5.5 release, and renamed the package back to Electric Image Animation System.
Market Positioning
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 modeling 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 and 3D Studio Max, Avid with Softimage|XSI, Maxon with Cinema 4D, and Newtek with LightWave 3D.
Components
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
Animator is the EIAS animation program. It can directly import 3D models in the Lightwave, 3D Studio Max, AutoCAD, Maya, and Electric Image FACT formats. (See also the Transporter section below.) In addition to animating models, Animator allows you to set up rendering settings. It efficiently supports the animation of very geometrically complex projects.
Camera
Camera is the EIAS rendering program, known for its speed and high image quality. As of version 6.5, it supports ray tracing, Phong shading, scanline rendering, anti-aliasing, motion blur, caustics, radiosity, and global illumination. Camera outputs to Quicktime and EI's own Image format. The latter is directly supported by Adobe After Effects and Adobe Photoshop.
Renderama
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, Mac OS 9, and Mac OS X).
Transporter
Transporter is a standalone program for converting 3D models from one file format to another. Primarily, it exists for importing models in formats that the other EIAS tools cannot import directly, and for exporting models to other formats. For instance, in EIAS version 6.5, Animator supports five of the most popular model input formats, while Transporter supports 29 formats. Transporter can export a model in one of 14 different formats, most usefully the Electric Image FACT format preferred by the other EIAS components.
Modeler
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.
External links
- Electric Image website
- EIAS production list - a list of film and television projects for which EIAS has been utilized
Third-party plugin vendors: