Messiah Studio 5 Review

Messiah Studio 5 Review

messiah:studio’s surface displacement capabilities work well with sculpts from ZBrush and don’t fear high polygon counts. Image by Kursad Karatas (plecxus.com)

Price:
• Basic: $499 / £307 / €365
• Pro: $1195 / £736 / €874
• Basic Upgrade from 4.5 Basic: $199 / £123 / €146
• Pro Upgrade from 4.5 Pro: $249 / £153 / €182
• Pro Upgrade from 4.5 Basic: $449 / £277 / €328

Developer:

Platform
Windows / Mac (WINE) / Linux (WINE)

Main features:
• Powerful rigging tools
• Extremely fast animation feedback
• Mature expression engine
• Arnold-based rendering engine
• Community support

Celebrating its 10th anniversary under this brand, messiah:studio is an animation and rendering tool for artists who want raw access to the inner workings of their own creations, without having to learn programming languages or mortgage their house for a single licence.

Since its beginnings as a plug-in for LightWave 5.6, messiah’s interface has always emphasised giving animators direct access to what they need: the motion curves and dope sheet editor of the item or items currently selected.

Backing the interface focus is raw interactive performance that’s unmatched in any other application we’ve seen.

High-polygon meshes with extremely complex rigs respond to the animator’s nudging or gross movements that seem to magically ignore their complexity, giving you a direct experience and, for the most part, removing the need for constant playblasts to review your motion in real time.

messiah developer pmG has stayed busy in recent years, implementing new technologies such as direct ‘on the rig’ armature controls, soft body dynamics, hair, point-level animation, native endomorph support, auto-rigging, and a host of expressions that provide even more tools for your character rigging needs.

Building on the renderer’s ‘Arnold’ code base are huge improvements in Global Illumination noise reduction, a growing library of shaders, volumetric particles and render groups that have vastly improved the renderer into what is now a solid production-worthy tool.

Version 5 innovations

messiah:studio 5 includes new tools that are a boon to character artists. Image by Vegard Myklebust (usefulslug.com)

With the release of version 5.0, pmG has added a host of new features and improvements. Some of these are longawaited fixes to workflow issues, but a lot of them are innovative enough to push messiah:studio back into the spotlight.

2D animators often struggle with transitioning into 3D space, thanks to a lack of tools to help them utilise their existing skills: planning a composition, timing and providing feedback to other animators, which one gets when things are simplified down to a 2D plane and one sheet of paper per frame.

With the new Sketch mode in this release, animators can now plan out motion and block in where and, more importantly, when they want it.

The Sketch layer has several tricks to aid in that process, including being able to define colour, line thickness and layer transparency, whether it’s a foreground or background layer.

The most exciting feature of Sketch mode is the ability to save out a sketch independently of the scene file. This enables users to then simply email feedback to an artist in a tiny attachment, and they’ll know exactly what is needed from them.

Parent in Place enhancement

While it’s not a new feature, Parent in Place has been greatly simplified. Its previous multi-stage process was quite cumbersome. Add in the infuriating ‘feature’ of not supporting Undo, and it ended up as something to work around instead of using it to aid rigging.

That issue is resolved with the ability to simply middle-button-drag items in the item list: a much-needed simplification that’s Undo-friendly, making Parent in Place useful once more to rigging artists.

The Editsphere gets a lot of love in this release, with several fixes that make it far more intuitive to use.

It now tracks the intended rotation angle and speed of your mouse more consistently and accurately. Grabbing the middle of the sphere now allows you to move the object it’s controlling in 2D screen space.

The newly revamped parent mode enables animators to finally see the order of rotation and which direction the object will turn if a specific axis is adjusted.

It doesn’t solve the issues that plague Euler-based rotation systems or the more innovative approaches I’ve seen in other packages, but it’s a step in the right direction.

You can now visually see the actual position of the surface of your models after being translated by displacement – a welcome addition for heavy users of displacement map painting tools like ZBrush or 3D-Coat.

There appear to be a few kinks to work out, but it’s quite functional for a first version.

DelayPoints is a neat effect that emulates a more 2D approach to motion blur. It appears to be well-implemented and easy to control; a welcome tool in the quest to make 3D animation more dynamic.

Particles and hair

messiah:studio's hair guides combined with soft body dynamics allow for quite realistic hair motion

When you require a lot of elements, using particle simulations along with object-based instancing can often do the trick.

Think large flocks of birds, an avalanche of rocks and boulders, or blood cells. The tools for using instances as particles are quite easy to use, but this new feature could stand to be followed up with some added randomisation controls, like changing surface properties per instance or random offsets to the instanced animation.

As it stands, the flock of birds would all flap in unison, and new bird instances would have to be manually

added for each required variation.

Hair Instancing is a fantastic new feature that will spawn countless ideas for its potential use: feathers on birds, spikes on cacti, trees in a landscape or lint on a sweater, for example.

The tools for controlling the placement, length and direction of hair in messiah have always been powerful, and utilising those controls with instanced geometry is fantastic.

It does suffer a little in that there’s no way to control the randomisation of anything but the most basic scale, position and rotation of the instances, but that’s fairly easy to work around.

Dynamic renders

messiah:studio boasts a capable rendering engine alongside its polished animation tools. Image by Taron (taron.de)

Dynamic Update Render is a fantastic addition to messiah:studio. The ability to see the changes made to surface properties in near-real time makes transitioning to messiah’s built-in renderer a much more viable option.

On top of that, new tools really let you focus in on specific elements of a scene. Turning on Limited Region Follow mode enables you to track a specific object throughout your animation without having to waste CPU cycles rendering things you’re not currently working on.

This is by far the strongest release to date of messiah:studio. pmG has packed in many fixes and enhancements to appease its current user base, while delivering an ample serving of innovative new features to attract a new audience.

The software isn’t perfect: there are still quite a lot of antiquated or poorly implemented features that occasionally rear their ugly heads when using the software, but with this release, you can tell that pmG is tackling them head-on, and is not ignoring its user base in any way.

Verdict

Pros

• Fast interactive performance

• Dynamic Update Render

• Handy Sketch mode

• Displacement view in OpenGL

Cons

• Euler rotation gimbal lock

• Mac port performance is iffy

• Unattractive OpenGL view

• API is still undocumented

This release won’t disappoint long-time users, with improved cross-application support to complement anyone’s toolset.

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