Anark Studio 2.0

By Jeff Mottle (jmottle@cgarchitect.com)

Jeff Mottle is the President and Founder of CGarchitect.com and is the North American Creative Director for Smoothe.


As many of us in this industry know, to stay competitive you need to be able to offer a quality product and something unique that your competitors do not have. This week we review Anark Studio 2, a multimedia authoring software, that may possibly be able to give you the edge in the originality category.

In the arena of multimedia authoring there are several players that offer similar products. The first and most obvious are Macromedia Director and Flash as well as Adobe Livemotion. Anark Studio (AS) is very similar to these programs and offers much of the same functionality, but from what I have seen though the course of doing this review is that AS excels in the area compelling 3D presentation graphics.

Anark Studio2 ships with the program CD and a 412 page users and tutorial guide which is one of the better laid out and written manuals I have seen. Roughly half the book is dedicated to the user reference section that goes through all of the program functionality. As Anark 2.0 is a cross-platform application the manual covers both mac and PC workflows through detailed application specific explanation within each section. The manual also includes numerous black and white images and diagrams to help illustrate program usage. The second half of the book is dedicated to Learning AS and features seven lengthy lessons covering everything from Adding interactivity to incorporating live motion video and writing custom behaviors. There is also a small How to section at the end that explains how to create various effects that you might be looking to add to your presentation.

If you have never used a program like AS you may be asking yourself how this program applies to you and how you can use it in your every day work. The purpose of multimedia authoring software is to enhance the way your present your work. Whether you present your work online, through animations and video or distribute your work on CD, AS has something in there for you. As I’m sure most of you will agree, a web page with a simple listing of images, or a basic CD with an architectural walkthough in the form of a QuickTime MOV is pretty boring and does not do much to spruce up the presentation of your hard work or enhance the image of your company. This is where Anark Studio can help, by delivering your content with interactivity and compelling graphics. AS is able to deliver your presentations in one of several ways, which include:

- Microsoft Windows Applications
- Apple Macintosh OSX Applications
- Interactive CD/DVD ROMS
- Windows Self-contained Screen savers
- Video
- Web through the Anark client for Windows and MacOSX.

When you first open Anark Studio the program opens in a tiled environment with six palettes that fit to you screen. This is particularly useful for reorganizing the program to suits your workflow or for multiple monitor setups.

The six palettes are the project window, the library palette, the assistant palette, the inspector palette, the timeline palette and the storage palette. The Library palette gives you quick access to all of the assets, lights, camera, materials that you have in your presentation. The project window is where you preview and edit your presentation content. The inspector palette is where you specify the parameters for the selected behavior, objects, lights etc. The Storage palette is where you access you built-in behaviors, sample files and lesson support files. Finally there is the assistant palette which is where you can access online help files, tutorials and references. One of the reasons I quite like the separate palettes is because it allows you to work and view tutorials and reference files at the same time. This is very useful for people who only have a single monitor and don’t like having to keep toggling between separate windows.

Adding Interactivity

This is where Anark Studio shines. Interactive developers that are already be familiar with Flash and Director know that you need to be quite familiar with Actionscript or Lingo in order to add complex functionality to a multimedia presentation. As most of us barely have time to complete the project, much less learn a new programming language, you will be happy to know that there is an entire library of behaviors that you can quickly use to add basic and intermediate functionality to your presentation, without having to start programming them yourself. Of course those of you that are so inclined can program your own custom behaviors and custom functionalities with JavaScript. The manual does a decent job of exploring how to do this, but I think some previous experience in programming would be a definite asset as it’s beyond the scope of the manual to thoroughly cover JavaScript.

So what sort of functionality can you add from the included library? There are quite a few, but include everything from rotating objects, adding click functionality, scaling, camera orbiting and sound control to name just a few.

As I alluded to earlier, Anark Studio excels in the area of adding and manipulating 3D content. Whether you want to do a simple walkthough or add interesting 3d elements to the presentation interface you can do so though the various import options.
By default AS can import 3ds files created in 3ds max 2.5 or later, but other applications are also supported through export plugins. If you use 3ds max 4.2 or latter, plasma, Maya, Lightwave or Deep Exploration you can export to the .amx file format that can be read by both the PC and Mac versions of AS. Mac users can export to the .amx format from Maya, Lightwave and Cinema4D.

There are a few limitations and guidelines that need to be followed to export 3d data, but there is a detailed section in the manual that describes what needs to be done in each application.

With your 3d content imported you have quite a few tools to create some impressive looking pieces. The How To section mentioned earlier show you how to create light maps to simulate photo-realistic lighting, how to create opacity maps from images and how to add specular highlights and reflections. There is even a section that details how you can bake textures onto your models for use in AS.

Once you have imported your images, 3d models, video into the workspace you can arrange everything on layers and animated with the timeline adding whatever interactive functionality you require. Anyone that has worked in 3d in the past or with layers will have no problems getting quickly up to speed.

Creating applications

Once you have created a presentation and have added functionality to your presentation you will need to export to a presentation file. As I mentioned earlier there are several formats available to you, and each compresses data you have created and exports to the chosen format.

The first option is to export to the Anark Player format, which creates an anark media file with a .am extension. This format is used to distribute via the web by embedding the file into your webpage or if you want to distribute a standalone file. This option gives you the flexibility to control how exactly the file is viewed but there are a few more options that automate this for you as well.

If you are not very well versed at creating and embedding objects into webpages, fear not as they have also included a default Brower export which exports the .am file mentioned earlier with an HTML page with the Active X control already embedded. You simply need to upload the two file to your website and your done.
I do see a few potential pitfalls with this format. First is penetration. As almost 90% of the computers in the world already have Flash installed and is what most online interactive content is created in, your viewers will need to download a 1.8 MB viewer first. With most high speed connections this should not be a problem, but be aware that your content can not be viewed without it. Also there seems to be an issue with backward compatibility. I visited several websites with the latest version of the IE viewer installed but was prompted to download an earlier viewer version in order to view the content. Lastly the plugin currently only works with IE so Mozilla and Opera users are out of luck until viewers are out of beta. If you are on a mac Netscape, Safari, Opera and Mozilla based browsers are supported.

If you do not have any interactivity you can also export your presentation to an AVI video file. I do question the usefulness of this export capability however as no audio is exported with the file and quite frankly if I wanted to create an AVI file I would probably be more inclined to use a program like Adobe Premiere which is more suited to video editing.

Another format that you can export to is a windows screen saver which creates a .scr file that includes both the Anark player required to view it and the media itself. I can see this being useful for kiosk presentations or something to wow the client when they come to your office or your laptop goes into standby during a presentation, but other than that I’m not sure it is all that useful for everyday work. I should also mention that this format is only available for the PC and will not work on the Mac.

The last format is a projector file which should be familiar to most developers who have created interactive content with Director in the past. A projector file comes in two flavors: either an .exe file for windows users or an .app file for Mac users. A projector file bundles the viewer and media content into one file that can be easily launched from a DVD, CD or harddrive.

Conclusions

For anyone looking to create an impressive interactive presentation with a minimal amount of work, I’d highly recommend Anark Studio. This is an easy to learn and powerful too for interactive CD and DVD content producers. If you are looking to create web based content I would hesitate to recommend AS unless you needed to add realistic 3d content or did not want to learn a new scripting language. My reason for this is simply based on browser compatibility and market penetration. If you are only going to add a few buttons or basic interactive imagery you have a far better chance of ensuring your site visitors are going to see it if you use Flash. I’m not sure if I visited a website I would download another plugin to view a menu system for example. From a price standpoint I think the $995 price point it is a pretty good deal when you consider that you would need to pay $499 for Flash MX and $1199 for Director to get much of the same functionality. There is no doubt that the Macromedia counterparts are far more robust and powerful, but for the average user who just wants to get a great looking presentation done and out the door, Anark Studio is the way to go.

Visit http://www.anark.com for more information