Cacani - Computer Assisted Cel Animation

[Mathias]

I am salivating uncontrollably. In case you needed to know.

Look at this.

http://www.cacani.sg/

http://cacani.org/

https://www.youtube.com/user/cagntu/videos


Now brace for disappointment: as far as I can tell, the software in question isn't yet publicly available, despite its ~5 years in development.
I'd pay a high price for such a tool.

I'm trying to find out if there's a realistic ETA or not.

Just something to be aware of.



04.28.14 EDIT*

Received a response to my questions about an ETA and price. I'll share it here:

Thanks for the inquiry in CACANI. We do not have a specific time for release, but we will be updating our facebook page on any new announcements.

We can not comment on pricing at this time, but we are looking at the possibility of different price ranges.

Keep on checking our pages for any new updates.

Thank you for the interest,

Jose Velasco
CACANI Chief Operating officer

Their Facebook page is apparently their chief means of updating the public at large:
https://www.facebook.com/CACAniAnimation
CACANI Facebook vidz

[32]

Can't exactly tell to what extent this is automated but I can't imagine it's any more advanced than Toon Boom Harmony which can do automatic in-between and pretty complex rigging. Takes some setting up but the results can be pretty phenomenal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zffikdymFRE
This is 5 unique keyframes, one day of rigging and 20 minutes of animating if I recall.

[rikfuzz]

As far as I understood there is no rigging involved (although I presume some hinting), but I could be wrong. 

[32]

Well maybe rigging isn't exactly the correct term but I imagine the pieces are individually layered and told where they need to go. Maybe I'm wrong and it's smarter than I think though.

Edit: should probably clarify that the video I linked requires some pretty in depth prep work but something to the standard of what I'm seeing in these Cacani videos would be something you could easily do off the cuff in a few minutes in Harmony.

[rikfuzz]

I think the whole point is that it doesn't have all the technical set-up / prep work. Admittedly there's not much information about it yet, but no reason to suggest it can't have any benefits over Toon Boom.

[32]

Yeah of course not, but Toon Boom is out there ready to play with right now

I would be really surprised if they've found a way to make it any easier though, it really is a matter of drawing your two keyframes and couple of button clicks later you can have it inbetweened with ease and all that fun stuff. Morphing to have the program draw unique inbetweens rather than just moving them is a bit more hands on if you want really accurate results but it does a half decent job on its own. Really hard to say how the workflow with Cacani compares but the result looks more or less the same. Obviously something to keep an eye on but if anyone is looking to give this type of animation a go there's software out there already that can do it fairly easily, if not as easily as Cacani might.

[CACANI Team]

Hello 32,

Harmony currently can not match the in-betweening abilities of CACANI. Like it was mentioned, CACANI  doesn't require any type of rigging. You can work by using multiply layers within a "Cel" or can just not used them and draw everything in a single Cel or layer. Is a matter of taste, but most traditional artist will try work on single layer or very limited amount. No rigging what so ever is needed, minimizing the technical for artist. Tweening results are different than in-betweening, although they can look similar.

The software is not for sale due to production trials. We are making sure CACANI is production ready, before it moves for commercial use. Harmony could work together with CACANI since Harmony does not posses the strengths CACANI focuses on, (no need to replace one software with another). And the same can be said about CACANI not having Harmony's strengths such as node composting, forward kinematics, inverse kinematics, effects, etc...

There is no other software in the market that can currently match CACANI base on the strengths it focuses on. Most 2D software do not focus on traditional toolsets anymore (they make some additions but very little), but they focus more on puppet style (Flash style) tools. This have made them stagnant on their offering when dealing some professional studios. Precisely because of this CACANI is getting more attention.

Now that said, Toonz, Toon Boom, TV Paint, Anime Studio and others are fantastic tools if they can offer what the artist is looking for for their projects.

[32]

Thanks for taking the time to respond to this  . It would be great if you have any videos or reading material to give us an idea of what the process of working with the software is like. Is the aim to be able to hand draw two unique frames and the software can in-between those? That would be something wholly unique to the workflow of Harmony or really any animation software I'm aware of.

I love the idea of a more hand drawn tool set with the in-betweening ability of puppet style animation but I have a hard time imagining such a program haha.

Thanks again 

[Manupix]

Hello 32,

Since you guys are checking this thread, I might as well warn you than your brand name sounds rather ridiculous in French. Thought you might want to know XD

[CACANI Team]

Thanks for taking the time to respond to this  . It would be great if you have any videos or reading material to give us an idea of what the process of working with the software is like. Is the aim to be able to hand draw two unique frames and the software can in-between those? That would be something wholly unique to the workflow of Harmony or really any animation software I'm aware of.

I love the idea of a more hand drawn tool set with the in-betweening ability of puppet style animation but I have a hard time imagining such a program haha.

Thanks again 

We can not show much since we are not releasing the software yet. Once we are preparing for a release date, there will be proper documentation.

The short answer to your workflow scenario is, yes, you need to draw the Keys within the software. Then freely create as many in-between as needed.

The potential release of the software commercially is nearing

[32]

I'm sure you probably answered my question but the claim is pretty spectacular if I understand correctly. In my usage scenario I could as a person having no familiarity go into the software and hand draw say two key poses of the same character and the software would in-between these? By hand draw I mean as you would with traditional pencil and paper animation.

Keep us posted on release, you've got me interested.

[CACANI Team]

The software, does have limitations also. There is always limitations to how much the software can in-between 2 images.

Characters that topology change too much will require some planning adjustments. The aspect that animators have to keep in mind is when there is "occlusion". This means when one body shape covers another. Occlusion is interesting because the software does not have a brain to determine missing data, so the user will need to think before moving into in-betweenig.
We have  ways to by pass this of course, but this was to give you some perspective.

CACANI is not a magical software, we simply figure ways to make a process that wasn't tackled by others software possible. But there is always limitations mind you.

[32]

Thank you for the extra detail, that's exactly what I was wondering . Will be interesting to see where those boundaries are, I didn't really expect an entire character would be possible cause that certainly does sound magical but even relatively simple hand drawn shapes can confuse other software (Harmony included) so any substantial advance in that department would be a truly disruptive innovation.

[CACANI Team]

Thank you for the extra detail, that's exactly what I was wondering . Will be interesting to see where those boundaries are, I didn't really expect an entire character would be possible cause that certainly does sound magical but even relatively simple hand drawn shapes can confuse other software (Harmony included) so any substantial advance in that department would be a truly disruptive innovation.

CACANI can do full characters, simply that the user has to know the caveats.

[32]

Interesting, do you have an example of the kind of complexity of design it could handle, assuming you knew the caveats? Is the user actually required to do anything extra in program to address these or is it more of a matter of understanding in what way to draw things?

At this point it's probably worth just waiting till you guys are ready to show off the program in more detail so I'll stop asking questions . I didn't think you were claiming the software was capable of these things initially because your website/ youtube channel didn't say anything specific to that effect so I had assumed the style of animation you wanted to facilitate was far different (as that's what it looked like to me in the videos and also I thought this kind of technology was still well out of reach). In any case I hope I continue to be proven wrong cause this might be something worth getting as excited about as Mathias was.

[CACANI Team]

Interesting, do you have an example of the kind of complexity of design it could handle, assuming you knew the caveats? Is the user actually required to do anything extra in program to address these or is it more of a matter of understanding in what way to draw things?

At this point it's probably worth just waiting till you guys are ready to show off the program in more detail so I'll stop asking questions . I didn't think you were claiming the software was capable of these things initially because your website/ youtube channel didn't say anything specific to that effect so I had assumed the style of animation you wanted to facilitate was far different (as that's what it looked like to me in the videos and also I thought this kind of technology was still well out of reach). In any case I hope I continue to be proven wrong cause this might be something worth getting as excited about as Mathias was.

I can not elaborate further. A consumer or beta should come soon enough.

[Mathias]

I have a very encouraging update on the CACANI situation!

A private, non-public beta testing program has begun. Certain individuals are being invited to participate.
This means the software is very far along and stable.

Stay tuned.

[Conzeit]

I think you should convince them that we should be among those certain indiviiduals   

This sounds very good, I might do my next personal animation project in cacani if it's as good as it sounds

[Rosse]

CACANi is out since a few days. Currently windows only. I think I read somewhere, that there will be an OSX Version later on, but I can't find the information again. Maybe @CACANI Team can say more about it?

Website: https://cacani.sg
There are also a lot of Workflow Videos on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/cagntu/videos

There's a short promo which lasts until Dec. 8th ($167 instead of $239 for a perpetual license).

It looks quite powerful, but requires some thinking/planning with more complex animations. I'm not sure how to handle situations which requires lot of geometry changes / new lines each frame. But with experience such situations can be automated as well, maybe just need more keydrawings.

@CACANI Team:
- In the perpetual license, will I have access to future updates for free?
- Will there be an OSX Version in the future?
- I saw you used Microsoft Surface Devices since the early days. How do Surface Pro 2 and Pro 3 compare to each other (especially Wacom vs. N-Trig in terms of palm rejection)? Can you recommend the Pro 3 for CACANi?

[edit]
@CACANI Team: Have you seen the ETHZ/Disney Research paper for "automation of thight inbetweens"? They use algorithms to determine which lines correspond to each other in different frames and have ways to manually re-connenect them when the algorithm fails:
https://graphics.ethz.ch/publications/papers/paperWhi10.php
https://graphics.ethz.ch/Downloads/Publications/PaperVideos/2010/Whi10%20-%20Eurographics2010%20-%20BetweenIT.mov
https://graphics.ethz.ch/disclaimer.php?dlurl=/Downloads/Publications/Papers/2010/Whi10/Whi10.pdf