Horror aficionados and industry professionals were privy to the first public debut of AnimServo at Monsterpalooza 2017 at the Pasadena Convention Center. Presented by The Stan Winston School of Character Arts(SWSCA) at their booth and hosted by none other then Matt Winston himself, what followed was a demonstration of AnimServo’s ability to use Autodesk Maya to create animations that drive animatronics. Using a animatronic head that Craig Caton had previously created for a course for SWSCA, the demo showed an animation created inside Autodesk Maya that was transferred to a Pololu USB Servo Controller and played back on the animatronic head.
The presentation lasted about twenty minutes and drew a fairly good sized crowd followed by a Q&A that lasted about thirty minutes. It was also broadcast live on Facebook and garnered over twenty thousand views in the first one and a half hours. One thing that was noted was the ability to animate a head in Maya and transfer it to an animatronic of a totally different design. Also of note was the ability of the software to use motion capture performances in Maya. The animation used in the demonstration was created by Fabio Ribak courtesy of The New York Film Academy Media Lab in Los Angeles.
