Knowledge Library
ACES
Advanced Content Engines?!
Our advanced content engines (ACEs) work similar to software libraries. They come with an API definition telling you how to control them (input data) and how to use the character animations (output data). We strive for making them as easy to use as possible. Tutorials with code that employ our ACEs will be listed on our website soon. Feel free to reuse the code for rocket-starting your digital content creation!
[Software]
How do you write your code?
Writing useful character animation code requires a lot of expertise from different areas. You will need coding skills like efficient & effective C++ for real-time animations or python skills for quickly iterating on your data processing pipeline. You will also need to understand the client side to connect your animations properly to game play code or package them nicely for movie animations. We will list articles about our own experiences and our best practices here:
Building C++ Code under Windows
For some reason you have to write your C++ code under Windows, but you miss the ease of package and dependency management under Linux?
See our list of steps for C++ development under windows to simplify our workflow for writing animation C++ code that works under Windows.
[Data]
Where do the motions come from?
One of the core aspects when working on character animations is where the “raw motions” come from. These raw motions will later go through various processing steps and used in some kind of animation system. First you however have to decide how to get the raw input motions. We decided to focus on realistic high-quality character animations that come from real people recorded with a motion capture (MoCap) system:
The Motion Capture Setup
Have you ever wondered about how to record the 3D movements of real people using flexible and high-quality capture setup?
We capture high-quality character animations using the link systems from Movella XSens. The captured data then undergoes multiple processing steps for data correction and augmentation before it actually is used in our ACEs.Our Skilled Models
Want to know who’s behind our fancy MoCap acrobatics and cool moves?
The list of the acting and stunt models who work with us comprises amazing talents with various backgrounds and skills. See our overview of talents.
[Business]
How do you run this company?
Starting and running a new business can be daunting, especially, if you start out from a technician point of view like we did. Thankfully, there a many learning materials to help you along the way. Here is what we did and what we learned:
Getting Your Own Startup Going
Are you looking into becoming a founder and could use a clear list of steps to save you time and show you where to start?
See the startup checklist we made when forming AceNerds.The Value Equation
(originally from Alex Hormozi)
You have a vague idea how to help customers achieve their goals, but do not know how to act on it or what to focus on? You want to provide value, but are not sure what that exactly means?
See our view of what providing value to customers means.
