At SIGGRAPH 2002, Discreet announced and demonstrated for the first time its character studio 4, the latest extension to Discreet's 3ds max animation software. character studio 4 includes significant enhancements designed to provide animators an easy-to-use system. Additions such as a non-linear animation mixer, an animation analyzer and fixer and Quaternion Function Curves were implemented to help expand users' character animation techniques and capabilities.

SplutterFish, LLC, a 3D software solutions provider, announced at SIGGRAPH 2002 the launch of its Brazil Rendering System v1.0, a fully-integrated rendering suite for Discreet's 3ds max and Autodesk VIZ.

At the SIGGRAPH 2002
conference, Side Effects Software has announced Houdini Halo, a
stand-alone compositing and image-editing application, which will be
available in the fourth quarter of 2002. Houdini Halo is the newest
addition to the Houdini family of 3D software products, which also
includes Houdini Master, Houdini Select and Houdini Escape. Halo's
features include an interactive, visual way of creating custom
shaders, composite operators and more, without the need to write

At New York's MacWorld Expo,
Alias|Wavefront announced Maya 4.5, the seventh major release of its
popular Maya 3D animation software. With this new release, Maya for
Mac OS X will be synchronized with Maya on other supported hardware
platforms. Current Maya for Mac OS X users will benefit from a
substantial number of feature additions and enhancements including
new modeling tools, integrated 3D Paint, multi-processor support for
rendering and numerous UI and workflow enhancements. "Maya 4.5 for

This week at SIGGRAPH 2002, 3D animation software developer Kaydara,
Inc. has announced that both Discreet and NewTek products will
support Kaydara's FBX file format. Discreet will integrate support
for FBX into upcoming versions of its 3D animation and visual effects
software, including 3ds max, inferno, flame and flint. FBX is a 3D
file interchange format that allows for the universal interchange of
3D data between every major 3D package and a number of second-tier
applications. "Discreet is excited by the numerous opportunities

NVIDIA Corporation announced from SIGGRAPH 2002 that it is open sourcing the NVIDIA Cg
Compiler technology under a nonrestrictive, free license. Available
in August 2002 for download from the developer.nvidia.com and
www.cgshaders.org Websites, this code will contain the parser that
reads the language and creates intermediate code for compilation, as
well as a generic back-end. Together, these components provide
everything required to create optimized Cg compilers for other

This
week at SIGGRAPH 2002 (Booth #8062), Discreet announced new product
releases for its visual effects and compositing systems inferno 5,
flame 8 and flint 8. According to Discreet, these latest versions
include software architecture modifications designed to improve
post-production workflow by offering digital artists increased
freedom, flexibility and speed. New features include support for
mixed resolutions, enabling artists to combine various film, video,
graphics and other multimedia formats within one project at any

Belmont, California-based LifeMode Interactive, Inc. has released LifeStudio: Head, a complete facial animation solution for interactive game and multimedia developers. Created using LifeMode's Macro-Muscle proprietary technology, LifeStudio: Head Tools allows artists to quickly create a wide variety of characters, complete with photo-realistic textures, real-time animation and lip-syncing.

LIPSinc, a provider of voice-to-animation speech technology for talking digital characters, has launched LIPSinc Impersonator, a software tool created specifically for game developers. LIPSinc automatically creates animation data files for talking characters by using an audio file as the only input. These data files are then interpreted by the game engine at runtime and played in synch with the audio for more convincing game characters with realistic facial animation.

Animation software developer face2face animation will be at SIGGRAPH to demonstrate its new streaming MPEG-4 animation player, the face2face Player. The face2face Player enables animators to output streaming facial characters over any wireless network or device, including laptops, digital cell phones and wireless PDAs. face2face has announced that its demonstration of the Player will be on a laptop with a wireless cellular modem, streaming high-quality facial animation with perfect lip sync. "This is the era of everyday animation.