Tencent’s Animation Tool PAG Now Open Source, Used Widely in WeChat
On Friday, Chinese tech firm Tencent officially announced the the open source status of PAG (Portable Animated Graphics), its core animation tool. This product has been widely used in dozens of the firm’s apps, such as WeChat, mobile QQ and Honor of Kings, as well as other applications outside the company.
PAG is a complete animation workflow solution independently developed by Tencent‘s AVGenerator OTeam. It can effectively reduce or eliminate R&D expenses in animation, significantly speeding up the process from designer creation to material delivery, and continuously delivering high-quality animation content that can be edited at runtime.
Compared with animation workflow solutions commonly used in the industry, PAG supports more AE features, features a wider platform availability (macOS, Windows and Linux), and delivers a highly optimized performance. It supports text and placeholder editing and replacement, and can be closely integrated with video editing scenarios.
Adobe After Effects (AE) is the most widely used animation design software. While this may work for animation production and app presentation, AE comes with high communication costs and it’s difficult to guarantee performance.
Compared with traditional methods of R&D and restoration, Tencent‘s PAG scheme significantly improves the efficiency of online animation material. Designers can directly produce animation files after design, free from code restoration in R&D. They only need to access SDK once to make materials go online on their own. It also avoids the joint adjustment time cost of repeated effect confirmation, and can also produce materials in batches, directly replace the traditional small workshop form from the process, and greatly improve the design and R&D efficiency by using industrial production methods.
