Industries

Overview and Challenges

Technology advances over the past decade have enabled rapid innovations in animation and video games. Effects which may have been implausible just a few years ago can now be achieved quickly and inexpensively. The quality of visual effects has improved such that distinguishing live action from computer generated scenes is sometimes difficult. Although the animation we experience in theatres and in video games may appear simple, digital animation is a complex and nuanced process that involves large-scale asset and configuration management.

Each sequence in an animated film requires coordinating thousands of objects and their relationships. The graphic artist must consider assets such as models, textures, storyboards, design drawings, animatics, lighting, and production notes. All of this information needs to be stored, categorized, analyzed, and sequenced in an organizational framework that is intuitive and flexible. It must be possible to access a particular process, model, or flow based upon the context required at that moment.

Scene and dependency graphs are often the preferred underlying implementation data structure for these contextual flows, models, and processes. A scene or dependency graph is a specialized data structure, usually adopted from an application data structure or database, from which the graphics system can efficiently render a scene and perform first-level interaction handling.

Tom Sawyer Software Solutions

Complete with a robust graph and drawing model, Tom Sawyer's visualization solutions provide an underlying engine for representing objects and relationships in a compact logical architecture. Along with a customizable graphical user interface, our solutions provide a complete diagramming framework that enables users to interactively create visual models.