When the process is painful, artists will naturally be less inclined to experiment creatively, Premo was design to not hold back the artist. This encourages new ideas to be explored. The workflow was design to allowing the scrubbing of shots and to animate as quickly as an animator can think. But to the artist, Premo was designed to hide the technology, putting the pen back in the animator’s hand.

The program was built to scale effectively as the number of cores increased. Early Premo screenshots from How to train your Dragon2

A software architectural component called the Graph System manages the Libee graph through various interfaces and caches, enabling high performance in all animation workflows. A heavily multithreaded graph requires not just that individual expensive nodes in the graph are internally threaded, but that multiple nodes in the graph can evaluate concurrently.

Inside Premo is the LibEE engine that can handles both graph and node parallelism across multiple CPU core units. LibEE is designed from the ground up to be very heavily multithreaded, and is thus able to deliver high performance characters for use on films. The platform is comprised of an animation tool, character technologies, and a high-performance multithreaded dependency graph. A direct-manipulation user interface that is decoupled from a highly-parallel evaluation engine has enabled DreamWorks engineers to provide the full computation power of their multi-core workstations to the animators, resulting in animators seeing tweaks immediately and in context. Premo is DreamWorks’ animation platform, built with fluid, intuitive, and interactive artist experiences in mind. Alex Powell, Martin Watt, Jason Reisig and Alex Wells during the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Scientific and Technical Achievement Awards The awards recognize individuals that have added value to the filmmaking process. For their key contributions to Premo’s development, Alex Powell for the design and engineering, Jason Reisig for the interaction design, and Martin Watt and Alex Wells for the high-performance execution engine of the Premo character animation system, they received Academy Certificates in the Scientific and Engineering Awards. Premo started life in 2008, and was first used in production on How to Train Your Dragon 2 and most recently on this year’s Oscar-nominated Boss Baby. Sir Patrick Stewart during the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Scientific and Technical Achievement Awards

DreamWorks’ Premo development team was honored by The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences at the annual Scientific and Technical Awards on Saturday night.

Premo animation software download