Chaos ends perpetual licenses of crowd animation tool anima
Chaos has discontinued perpetual licenses of anima, its crowd animation software, along with individual sales of its metropoly 3D stock characters.
The firm ended sales of perpetual anima Pro licenses in favor of anima All subscriptions, which include access to the entire metropoly 3D library.
Users with anima Pro licenses will be able to buy more character models until July 2025, but will not be able to upgrade to future versions of anima itself.
Anima is the latest Chaos product to go subscription-only, the firm having ended perpetual licenses of V-Ray and Phoenix in 2022.
So what is anima?
Intended primarily for architectural visualisation, anima lets users to add animated characters to a scene without the complexity of a traditional crowd simulation workflow.
It has integration plugins for 3ds Max, Cinema 4D, Maya and Unreal Engine, and animated scenes can also be exported in FBX, OpenCollada or V-Ray’s .vrscene format.
How was anima licensed?
Original developer AXYZ design introduced €649/year anima All subscriptions alongside perpetual €279 Pro licenses three years ago.
AXYZ design was then acquired by Chaos last year.
At the time, Chaos said that “access to anima will remain unchanged for all new and existing customers”.
Why has Chaos ended perpetual licenses of anima?
In its FAQs on the discontinuation of anima Pro, Chaos now says:
“Over the past three years, the adoption rate of anima All has far outpaced that of anima Pro, reaching a point where it is no longer practical for Chaos to continue anima Pro or sell individual models.”
Chaos has also discontinued upgrades for existing anima Pro licenses, so new features in the software will only be available to anima All subscribers.
Existing Pro licenses will “continue to operate for currently supported operating systems and digital content creation application versions”.
However, Pro users now get unlimited network rendering, with yesterday’s anima 5.6 update removing the need for licenses for anima Render Nodes.
What is happening to the metropoly 3D characters?
The AZYZ design online store, which used to sell individual metropoly 3D characters, including for use in DCC applications not supported by Anima, has now been removed.
Anima Pro users will be able to buy new character models from within the software until July 2025.
Price and system requirements
Anima 5.6 is compatible with 64-bit Windows 7+. The integration plugins are available for 3ds Max 2016+, Cinema 4D R17+, Maya 2018+ and Unreal Engine 4.26+.
Anima All subscriptions cost $121.80/month or $717.60/year (€109.80/month or €645.60/year). The free anima Lite edition is still available.
Read Chaos’s FAQs on the discontinuation of perpetual Anima Pro licenses
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