Granny 3D
Animation toolkit selected by Twisted Pixel for Comic Jumper.
July 15, 2010
For Immediate Release
AUSTIN, TEXAS — RAD Game Tools, Inc., and Twisted Pixel Games, LLC, today announced that RAD’s animation toolkit, Granny 3D, will be used as part of the development of Twisted Pixel’s new action game, Comic Jumper, and will be integrated as a key component of Twisted Pixel’s BEARD game engine. Comic Jumper, whose release date has not been announced, follows the adventures of the Super Hero-for-hire, Captain Smiley, and his sidekick, Star, as they travel through comic books from various genres and styles to battle evil and restore readership.
“Comic Jumper will be our third title using RAD’s Granny3D. Granny3D has become a valuable part of our production pipeline that helps us reduce development costs and leverage our IP across multiple platforms, an essential requirement in support of our new BEARD engine,” said FrankWilson, Chief Technology Officer at Twisted Pixel, “Granny’s highly optimized runtime and suite of tools for both art and engineering provide our development team and our engine licensees the ability to create a highly optimized pipeline for the unique requirements of their games.
Built around a core of animation decompression, playback and blending functions, Granny3D’s animation components are designed to fit easily into the production pipeline. Granny’s new blend graph editor enables artists to graphically create complicated blend operations—without the need for a programmer.
“Granny’s excellent support for setting up animation blending saves our programmers hours of time,” saysWilson, “allowing artists to iterate without programmer involvement.”
“Twisted Pixel keeps innovating and creating fantastically fun games.We are thrilled to be able to support their creative team with our products,” said Mitch Soule of RAD Game Tools, “Now that Twisted Pixel is offering their tools—with Granny3D integrated—to the larger game community, the innovative engine can be utilized by production teams over a wide array of projects.
Granny 3D features full exporting support for 3ds Max, Maya and XSI, in both 32- and 64-bit versions, as well as an optimizer with over 40 built-in transformations to speed game development. Available on major game platforms, and featuring a common file format across all of them, Granny 3D can be licensed from RAD at 425-893-4300 or sales3@radgametools.com.
RAD Games Tools, Inc. has been serving game developers worldwide since 1994. Privately held, and located in Kirkland,Washington, RAD was originally known for Smacker video technology. RAD also produces the ubiquitous Bink video codec, the Miles Sound System for game audio, and the Telemetry application profiling tool, in addition to Granny3D. To date, RAD’s tools have been used in more than 15,000 games.
Founded in 2006 by industry veterans, Twisted Pixel is an independent game development studio that operates in two capacities: 1) Inventing innovative original IP concepts then developing them into premiere console titles; and 2) Providing top-flight contract games development work to leading publishers on their highly-anticipated titles. The company’s mission is to become a leading developer of digitally distributed console games with ambitious and inspiring games that exceed consumer expectations.
Learn more about Twisted Pixel at www.TwistedPixelGames.com.
###
Contact: Brian Kearney
briank@radgametools.com
425-893-4300, ext. 114