A web gallery with AI-rigged and animated 3D models
If you ever had the need to find good animated 3D models to use in your own games or other 3D content experiences, you have probably searched for some online — especially if you don’t have 3D modelling and animations skills to create the content on your own. There are many websites that offer this type of content under redistributable licences. It’s easy to find good animated humans, but things get a bit trickier for less common animals. Sure, most animals aren’t used as frequently as humans, but whenever you want a specific type of insect, bird or an uncommon quadruped, your only choice may be a paid asset, if you want high quality content (and sometimes, even that option isn’t available). Even if you pay for it, the type of rig and animation may be very different from one model to another similar species (for example, an ant made by an artist and a termite made by another one may walk quite differently), so it may not look very consistent in your game.
At Anything World we want to increase the offer of rigged and animated assets, including many sorts of animals, going beyond the most common ones. Rigging and animating 3D models has traditionally been a manual time-consuming process, but we have developed a custom system to automate the process using different types of algorithms, including AI and Machine Learning. We have applied it to static models to get them rigged and animated, and the first batches are available for you to use: sets of humans, quadrupeds, flying and walking insects and arachnids. Birds, snakes and fish will follow in some months. Whilst these rigs and animations are still in early access they are continually growing in quantity and quality, and you can start using them right now. Currently you will typically find animations such as idle, walk, run; some categories also come with attack or jump animations.
Some time ago we released an early access version of a Unity package that allows users to browse through 3D models and add them easily to Unity projects, and a similar plugin will be soon available for the Unreal Engine. However, we realised that many 3D creators (for example non-game developers) do not use these game engines. Therefore, and to make it easier for anyone to discover our library of animated models without having to sign up, we created the Anything World web gallery.
In the landing page the user can search for anything they want, follow one of the suggested searches (such as “human” or “insect”) or scroll down to see some initial sets of models: a selection of featured animated models, as well as the models that our users are using more often in their projects, and the ones with the highest number of likes.
In a search results page, results are organised by default from the most to the least relevant, but you can change the sort criterion or filter by category or animated state (for instance, to find only the animated ones).
Each model button in the landing page or in a search results page can be clicked to open a 3D viewer page where the user can see the model from any perspective using 3D camera controls. For animated models, you can switch between different animations. You can upvote it, flag it, add it to one of your collections (accessible later in the “My World” section of their profile) or download it (once you set up a subscription). The animated models are available in common formats such as FBX, GLB or Collada, and we also have a significant number of static models, some of which will be processed in the future to get animated as well. If you use a model in your project, please attribute the original author (shown in our viewer page) in compliance with its licence, and please mention Anything World if it is said that we generated a new rig and animations for that model.
We are looking forward to seeing what users create using the animated 3D models offered by Anything World!
