Kaydara announced that Ubisoft has licensed HumanIK|Middleware, an advanced in-game character animation and rigging library, for its upcoming release of TOM CLANCY'S SPLINTER CELL 3 (working title). With HumanIK|Middleware, Ubisoft will be able to easily embed the same award-winning character animation and rigging technology found in MOTIONBUILDER directly into its game engine. Ubisoft is demonstrating SPLINTER CELL 3 using HumanIK|Middleware at E3, May 12-15, 2004, booth #1046.
"With SPLINTER CELL 3, we are setting a new industry benchmark in terms of cutting-edge visual and sound effects, and Kaydara's HumanIK|Middleware is a key component of this," said Martin Tremblay, president of Ubisoft's Montreal studios. "We were able to easily and quickly integrate HumanIK|Middleware as part of our game engine and found that it drastically improved the quality of our characters. It enabled us to create more natural character movements and removed problems such as feet sliding. Using HumanIK|Middleware, our animators can reuse animated content and better adapt that content to the game environment it allows us to do more with less."
"Since our HumanIK|Middleware announcement last month, we've received a tremendous amount of interest from the game development community," added Michel Besner, president of Kaydara. "Game developers need to be able to improve their productivity levels and the quality of their games by using the same character animation rig and behavior across the entire production pipeline. We're finding that HumanIK|Middleware provides the solution they've been looking for."
HumanIK|Middleware is a small footprint library with solving fast enough to run on today's game consoles and PCs, but designed to evolve with next-generation platforms. Key benefits to HumanIK|Middleware include flexible character definition, animation reusability, improved animation quality and increased productivity.
The integration between MOTIONBUILDER and HumanIK|Middleware is made possible by using the industry standard file format FBX. Kaydara's FBX file interchange format is a powerful format for 3D data that allows users to quickly and easily transfer their 3D assets and media from MOTIONBUILDER into their game engine.
Over the course of the past decade, Montreal-based Kaydara Inc. (www.kaydara.com) has become a leader in the development of realtime 3D animation software solutions for the entertainment industry. Kaydara's product portfolio serves a vast and varied range of clients in the TV, film, game development and Web content industries.
Bill Desowitz, former editor of VFXWorld, is currently the Crafts Editor of IndieWire.
