Lifemode Interactive exhibits at SIGGRAPH 2005 and previews LIFESTUDIO: HEAD 2.7 and LIFESTUDIO:LIP SYNC

Thursday 21st July - Lifemode Interactive, who are leading developers of facial animation and head modelling tools, will be exhibiting at SIGGRAPH 2005 in August and will be showing two products: LIFESTUDIO: HEAD 2.7 and LIFESTUDIO:LIP SYNC.

The LIFESTUDIO:HEAD technology has been designed for computer character animation in real-time. The software contains an impressive set of features supported by the original Macro-Muscles technology. These include easy modelling, realistic texturing, automated lip-synch, comprehensive animation library and many other. Data exchange with 3ds max and Maya is supported giving the possibility of working with own models and scene rendering. LIFESTUDIO:HEAD 2.7 will be available in three box shipments: Editor, Artist, and Pro packages later this year. Version 2.7 has several new exciting features and these are:

• Quality of lip-synch can be enhanced by using text files in addition to a speech record in a sound file. The phoneme editor also allows generating phonemes from any entered English text files. The new phoneme editor interface makes editing much faster and easier.

• Movie films can now be used as a reference for animating. Comparing character animation with the record of an actor face motion on a frame by frame basis makes animation more accurate and reduces time greatly.

• Realistic texturing becomes easier with a new feature of baking a face texture from several photos. Photos can now be used both for head modelling and for creating face texture.

• Full featured Undo/Redo has been implemented so that artists need not make snapshots manually. More than a hundred history levels are available. Recovery from a system crash is also supported.

LIFESTUDIO:LIP SYNC is a new product that is an automatic lip-synching tool and can be used within the Maya package to save time for animating speaking characters. The pipeline is very straightforward: the plug-in prepares lip-synch data according to a record of speech. These data can be used as an input to a deformer of user's choice that affects the character face mesh: it may be blendshapes, driven keys, etc. Scripts may be effectively used thanks to a simple data structure.

Lifemode welcomes all visitors to their booth 2263 to preview LIFESTUDIO:HEAD 2.7 and sample their incredible facial animation technology. For information regarding the SIGGRAPH show, please visit www.siggraph.org/s2005

Lifemode will also be conducting a demo tour of Californian Studios after the SIGGRAPH show in early August and have already lined up some top prospective game developers and publishers. Lifemode team will brief customers with the main features of LIFESTUDIO:HEAD package including multi-platform SDK. If your studio is based in California and you would like to see the demo, please contact Lifemode Interactive at sales@lifemi.com to make an appointment. Lifemode would be happy to come and visit you.

About Lifemode Interactive:

Lifemode Interactive is a privately owned independent software company specializing in development of games-related technologies, high-end software tools and SDKs for game developers, 3D art studios and web designers. Lifemode employs a 20-dev team of skilled art, programming and game design specialists. Lifemode has 13 worldwide distributors including Digimation, Novedge LLC, Graphics Domain, Freehand Limited, 3DLinks and others. Recent projects include Russia's best strategy game of 2003 JoWood/Nival, Interactive's "Silent Storm" and FireFly Studios' "Stronghold 2" released in 2005 and published by 2K Games, a publishing label of Take2 Interactive.

Contact details: www.lifemi.com

Tel: +7 (095) 236 59 67; Fax: +7 (095) 959 74 46

Press: Alexandra Selezneva selezneva@lifemi.com

Marketing and Sales: Natalie Polikarpova Natalie@lifemi.com

"LifeStudio:HEAD" is a registered trademark of Lifemode Interactive Ltd.