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ANIMATION WORLD MAGAZINE - ISSUE 5.11 - FEBRUARY 2001

The New messiah's Details (continued from page 1) A screen shot showing the sliders being used for facial animation. Added Control and Ease The look of messiah:studio should appear similar to current users of messiah. Many of messiah:studio's parameters, windows and menus are adjustable and configurable. Windows can be resized, while menus can be resized and even hidden. Control of the interface will enhance the utility of the software on your desktop or laptop. All of the features for messiah were developed with the user in mind, with much of the next version's features implemented because of feedback from current users. OS X Mac capability will be available with the new release too. Linux is also a future possibility. messiah has motion-capture capabilities that allow loading of the most common capture files. Just one key can automatically create a skeleton from motion-capture data. The bones of the skeleton can then be adjusted to better fit the model. pmG has found that using the Web affords great access to its user base. Using the Web to distribute the initial release of the software worked out very well and will continue. It's a unique idea, and has brought tighter communication between the messiah developers and users. An animator can log on to the messiah e-group, post a question and get feedback very quickly, either from the developers themselves or other experienced users. Also, CD based documentation turned out to be more efficient and practical for updates and will continue. Voluminous collections of manuals will not be a part of future releases of messiah. A single CD holds the present version of messiah, and hopefully future releases and documentation will continue to be able to fit on a single CD as well. The MotionBlender panel where you can select which effect you want to apply and showing a description of how each effect works. The SaveMorph panel where you set up to save out object sequences of animation. A panel showing the camera reticle settings. Another panel showing some of the motion editing capabilities. To learn more and get involved in project:messiah's community, simply visit their Website and await the arrival of their new product line starting in the second quarter of 2001. Mike Amron is a computer graphics instructor at DHIMA. He has worked for a number of leading visual effects companies, including Digital Domain, VIFX and Industrial Light & Magic.

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