Chaos acquires AXYZ design
Chaos has acquired AXYZ design, the developer of crowd animation software anima and the metropoly range of stock 3D characters. The financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed.
Access to anima will “remain unchanged for all new and existing customers”, and there are no changes to the other products. The entire AXYZ design team will join Chaos.
Chaos’s latest acquisition in the architectural software market
The buyout is Chaos’s latest within the architectural tools market, following its acquisition of Corona and merger with Enscape.
In this case, the software it has bought complements, rather than competes with, its own products, which include production renderer V-Ray and real-time renderer Vantage.
Anima: an AI-assisted crowd animation tool targeted at architectural visualisation
On its release in 2011, anima became the first crowd animation tool specifically intended for architectural work, being designed as an intuitive way to add animated characters to visualisations.
Since then, the software has received a steady stream of updates, with last year’s anima 5.0 adding a new AI-based crowd simulation system.
Anima now integrates with key DCC applications including 3ds Max, Cinema 4D, Maya and Unreal Engine.
Chaos recently added the option to import anima scenes directly into Vantage and is now “planning how to best integrate the software” with its other products, including V-Ray and Corona.
According to Chaos, “access to anima will remain unchanged for all new and existing customers”.
AXYZ design human characters are also used in a range of other visualisation tools
There’s no mention in Chaos’s announcement of AXYZ design’s other major product line, its metropoly range of posed and animated scanned human characters.
AXYZ design characters are available as stock content in a number of rival architectural rendering tools, including Lumion and Twinmotion.
We’ve contacted AXYZ design to ask whether the metropoly characters will remain available, and whether it will continue to supply characters to other software developers, and will update if we hear back.
Updated 17 July: AXYZ design told us that “there are no changes to any of the current AXYZ offerings”, and that the metropoly characters will remain available.
The firm will continue to provide stock characters for the same renderers as before.