[miketwalker]

I've been a big fan of the Animusic series since I ran into them on PBS a few years back. For the animation gurus of FIRST, they need to check this out. As was stated before, this is 3d studio max at it's finest. The 2 primary animators and music creators have developed a midi-powered animation system. The system actually takes individual channel inputs from midi files (each instrument having its own file) and create an animation algorithm to play the instruments as they'd like.

The final animation actually just becomes a rendered music file. They input the track and the animation automatically generates all of the movements that you see. So, for example, if you see it hit one drum then the drum next to it... there was no person animating that. The system actually takes the input and thinks like a musician would and gets into position to play it, and it'll hit it at the strength of the beat and such just like a real person would.

So, if they wanted to completly change the entire animation all they would have to do is plug another track in and every movement would sync with it perfectly. The only by-hand thing in the end product animation is the camera angles and lighting.

The technology behind it is incredibly impressive, I'd highly suggest people interested in animation and just the algorithms that do this so some research because it's one of the most impressive things in computer animation, and you'll respect the animations so much more when you can actually see how amazingly well it's constructed.