Xpressionist 3.5

What does Xpressionist 3.5 do?

If you have ever switched your project window in Animator to frame mode, you have seen that each value for each channel for each frame of an object is stored in a single cell.

When you use the fill tools in the project window you can take offset and animation action directly to the values in the cells. If you do so you create custom frames that are displayed with underlined values.

Xpressionist 3.5 (now bundled with EIAS 7.0) works like the fill tools — it creates custom frames. You can imagine Xpressionist as a sophisticated pocket calculator inside of EI Tech. Group's EIAS. It uses math formulas you create and feeds the results as a value (or values) into the cells of the desired animation channel. If you need a value from another animation channel in your math formula you can tell Xpressionist to read that value, do some math with them and feed the result back to the cells of other animation channels. It performs this action for every frame in the animation.

So, when your source channel changes, the output of the calculator changes, resulting in user defined behavior of the object animated with Xpressionist. Because Xpressionist is a modern pocket calculator you have the ability to write very complex scripts. These scripts are called expressions.

Since the world around us can be represented by math formulas you have a tool to simulate every aspect of that world. You are only limited by your imagination and your mathematical skills. But even if your mathematical skills are limited you can be quite successful. Xpressionist is easy to understand and to use.

Click here for some free Xpressionist scripts

What's new in Expressionist 3.5?

Xpressionist 3.5 is the advanced scripting engine from ramjac Software for the Electric Image Animation System (EIAS). It enables the user to script every animatable parameter that is available in the EIAS Animator. Uses range from basic object parameter linking-like advanced constraints or set driven keys to the creation of custom interfaces, controller objects for your animation needs or custom programming of entire animation software modules for the most demanding animation and simulation needs. It uses ENOCH as an expression language. ENOCH was designed as a flavour of C and was designed to be easy to understand an to learn. As a unique feature in the industry Xpressionist offers direct compiling of ENOCH scripts. The animator can bypass the bottleneck of a file translation of his script by the interpreter of Xpressionist, but instead compile an executable program, that will do the same task in a fraction of the time other systems require. That allows for the programming of custom runtime applications and makes Xpressionist a complete and full featured software development environment. Xpressionist comes with an additional Plugin "Kontrolleur". Kontrolleur gives users a basic but fully customizable interface to drive their scripted animation. Xpressionist 3.5 also offers an SDK for 3rd party plugin developers, who want to use or better communicate with Xpressionist. Xpresssionist gets used all over the world in day to day animation production.

Realtime scripting!

XP now works in real time as you work with objects interactively in your scene. Set up a simple script, close the XP window, and the script operates as you work with your models, lights and Cameras. Realtime support for transforms, deformations and skinning.

Additional Conditional Statement based on object existance

XP now lets you execute expressions based on the existance of an object in the project

New functions

look at: works like a lookat constraint
create object: lets you create objects for your scene. Objects are: Cameras, Lights, effectors, Bones, Illuminators, Smokers.
setup: lets you specify starting conditions of objects only on the first keyframe

Addressing of Xpressionists relatives.

XP can now adress objects based on its relative hierarchical level to Xpressionist. you can link XP to an object i.e. and make and expressions for it's parent.

New constants

totalframe: the total amount of frames in the project
start time: the start time of your project

New channel structure (virtual channels).

XP now can combine single flotingpoint channels to one vector channel. If you use this option you will get only one rotation channel instead three channels for X, Y and Z rotation.

Get Channel Value.

With an alt double click on any channel in the active Channel List the current value af the channel will be inserted into your expression.