Prior to this acquisition, Chaos has already made several acquisitions in the architectural tools market, including Corona and the merger with Enscape. In this case, the acquired software complements rather than competes with the company's own products, which include V-Ray for rendering and Vantage for real-time rendering.
Released in 2011, anima became the first crowd animation tool specifically designed for architectural work, providing an intuitive way to add animated characters to visualizations.
Since then, the software has been continuously updated, and in the previous version, anima 5.0, a new AI-based crowd simulation system was introduced. Anima now integrates with major DCC (Digital Content Creation) applications, including 3ds Max, Cinema 4D, Maya, and Unreal Engine. Recently, Chaos added the ability to import anima scenes directly into Vantage and is currently "planning how to best integrate the program" with their other products, including V-Ray and Corona. According to representatives from Chaos, "access to anima will remain unchanged for all new and existing customers." The announcement from Chaos does not mention AXYZ design's other main product line, metropoly, which focuses on scanned human characters.
AXYZ design's characters are available as stock content in several competing architectural rendering tools, including Lumion and Twinmotion.