“morpheme is about raising the quality of in-game animation by providing intuitive, graphical control and a flexible programming framework,” said Torsten Reil, ceo of NaturalMotion. “With morpheme, animators and programmers can work hand-in-hand to create in-game animation that truly reflects the quality of the source data. morpheme is also designed to run fully integrated with our flagship DMS technology, euphoria, which allows players to experience unique moments every time they play a game.”

Key features include:

morpheme:runtime

• lightweight run-time animation engine
• optimized for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC
• fully customizable blend nodes
• full hierarchical state machine
• IK support
• rigid body dynamics support
• euphoria support
• full source code supplied

morpheme:connect

• modern, fully scriptable application
• 2D and 3D viewports for authoring and visualization
• graphical authoring of transition graphs and blend trees
• realtime manipulation through sliders and other UI elements
• support for live game pad control
• script support (Lua)
• fully extensible through plug-ins
• euphoria support

Massive has moved from a visual effects tool into being used on animation productions like Renaissance. Massive image © Massive Inc. Renaissance image © Onyx Films/ Millimages/ Luxanimation/ Timefirm Ltd./ France 2 Cinema.

Refinements for the Present
Massive Software demoed version 2.6 of its artificial life-based 3D animation software, which is now shipping. Version 2.6 builds on Massive’s Academy Award-winning technology, providing increased pipeline flexibility, expanded rendering options and smarter agents that allow studios of any size and scope to create highly realistic and emotive performances using autonomously responding characters.

Lately Massive has been adopted for animation (Happy Feet, The Ant Bully and Renaissance) with very successful results, according to founder Stephen Regelous. “It works really well with keyframe, better than MoCap. It’s cleaner with better transitions.” Massive offers an artist interface for creating reactions and responses earlier on in production, and characters are now closer to the camera. For Ant Bully, subdivision support was very helpful. Regelous was actually unaware of Massive’s use in Renaissance’s urban shots, since the filmmakers required no support. He said even Pixar is now using Massive.

Key features of the Massive 2.6 release include:

• Fast and efficient rendering on the GPU: The new integrated Velocity renderer is able to render epic shots at film quality up to 30 times faster than supported software renderers. Massive 2.6 also lets customers use their own custom shaders.

• Render Passes enables flexible pipeline integration: Now Massive agents can be assigned render attributes and shader visibility on a per-render basis, allowing customization of how Massive handles render attributes such as ambient occlusion, shadow pass, depth pass, etc.

• More detailed characters: Support for sub-division geometry allows higher-quality geometry so that characters close to the camera can be rendered in greater detail.

• Smarter Agents: Enhancements to Massive Smart Stunts expand what’s possible in a digital stunt. Artists can now create “hybrid stunts” with increased realism by applying Smarts Stunts to specific parts of a Massive agent. With the new grab constraint agents can grab objects, other agents and even climb rope.

At SIGGRAPH 2006, Massive also expanded its Ready-to-Run Massive Agent Library with mayhem and ambient agents. Ready-to-Run Agents make it easy to almost immediately simulate scenes with characters pre-built with all of the attributes needed for locomotion, combat (including swords), spectators and other typical crowd scenarios.

REALVIZ introduced its own Mocap solution, Movimento, at SIGGRAPH 2006, a state-of-the-art video-based motion capture solution, powered by SMART, REALVIZ’ automatic 3D tracking engine. Drawing on REALVIZ’ long-standing expertise in 2D and 3D motion tracking, and the solid eight-year success of MatchMover Pro within the special effects industry, Movimento is a new software that captures the motion of any non-rigid object from multiple image sequences. Movimento offers users a complete and flexible solution for facial, hand, arm and full-body motion capture across a wide range of applications, from special effects, bio-mechanical research, sports science, orthopedics and engineering to behavioral analysis. Movimento offers users the possibility to combine 3D camera tracking and motion capture processes for applications requiring non-static cameras (on-set MoCap motions spanning a very wide area, or a complex environment) and to automatically reconstruct 3D meshes from the tracked data. Capture is non intrusive, as it can be realized in natural or ambient lighting and requires no specific hardware in the scene.

Movimento requires a minimum of two cameras, which can be either fixed or moving. Any frame rate and/or resolution may also be used. MoCap data from Movimento can also be exported to Autodesk MotionBuilder, 3ds Max, Maya and SOFTIMAGE|XSI for further manipulation. Custom computations and/or exports can be realized through scripting (Python, Perl, TCL/TK). REALVIZ Movimento will offer users an affordable, accurate and highly flexible motion capture solution, without the need for a motion capture studio.

REALVIZ Movimento will run on Windows, Mac OS X & Linux and will be available for purchase at the following prices: Software only from 16.000 Euros / $19,000 U.S. Movimento Total Solution, including Movimento software and 4-camera capture system (640x480 CCD calmeras at 200 fps) from 37.000 Euros / $ 45,000 U.S.

In addition, REALVIZ partnered with Autodesk to offer 3ds Max and Maya users the opportunity to obtain copies of REALVIZ’ automatic 3D tracking plug-in software, MMTrack, free of charge. REALVIZ also announced the availability of three new versions of its acclaimed panorama creation software, Stitcher (Stitcher Express 2 for digital photography hobbyists, Stitcher Pro 5.5 for professional photographers & graphic artists and Stitcher Unlimited 5.5 for professional panorama creators). And REALVIZ users can now display panoramas, 3D models, virtual tours and other photorealistic material in Google Earth, pin-pointing exact geographical positioning, courtesy of the Google Earth 3D viewer.

Bill Desowitz is editor of VFXWorld.