morpheme
Version 2.0 now available complete with NVIDIA PhysX integration.
SAN FRANCISCO and OXFORD - Jan. 27, 2009
NaturalMotion, the animation technology company behind the euphoria engine, today announced the immediate availability of morpheme 2.0 together with integrated NVIDIA PhysX™ technology.
morpheme is robust animation middleware designed to give developers and animators intuitive, creative control over the look of their final in-game animation by allowing them to author and preview blends, blend trees and transition graphs in real time. Since its launch in 2007, morpheme has seen rapid adoption in the games industry, including customers such as Bioware, Eidos, Disney, and CCP.
morpheme 2.0 introduces full integration with NVIDIA PhysX technology, encompassing both graphical authoring in the morpheme:connect tool, as well as the animation runtime engine.
In morpheme 2.0, NaturalMotion believes it has solved several fundamental problems holding back the combined application of physics and animation. As a result, morpheme 2.0 allows for the seamless mixing and matching of animation and physics methods within and across animation skeletons, thus providing a whole new toolset for creating lifelike characters.
“In previous animation solutions, physics has often been an afterthought, often only allowing for the addition of ragdolls or other basic physics methods as an ‘all-or-nothing’ effect at the end,” said Torsten Reil, CEO of NaturalMotion. “With morpheme 2.0, we have developed a method to give programmers and animators much more targeted and differentiated control over physics and animation. It is now possible to add arbitrary physics modes to different parts of the same body – all graphically. We’re also giving animators intuitive 3D tools to graphically author physics joints, joint limits and parameters. We believe this new method of treating animation and physics in tandem will become a fundamental requirement for more believable characters.”
morpheme 2.0 is a major release featuring many enhancements in addition to physics. In summary, version 2.0 provides the following new features:
• Physics integration powered by NVIDIA PhysX™ technology
o Graphical authoring of physics skeletons, collision shape and joint-limits
o Mixing of animation, hard- and soft-keyframing and active animation in the same skeleton
o Support for different physics modes on different body parts
o Transitions between animation and physics
• Enhanced multithreading model for runtime performance
• Enhanced animation compression methods
• LiveLink library to simplify connecting application to remote runtime target
• Pass-down pins provide support for animation network referencing
Availability
morpheme 2.0 is available starting immediately.
NVIDIA PhysX is licensed separately, and is not required for licensing morpheme 2.0.About NaturalMotion
NaturalMotion Ltd. is the first company to create 3D character animation software based on Dynamic Motion Synthesis (DMS), a technology that utilizes Adaptive Behaviors and artificial intelligence to simulate the human-nervous system. Based on research conducted at Oxford University on the control of body movements, NaturalMotion’s euphoria synthesizes 3D character animation in real time on PLAYSTATION®3, Xbox 360® and PC. Having debuted in Rockstar Games’ record-breaking Grand Theft Auto IV, euphoria is also featured in LucasArts’ Star Wars: The Force Unleashed.
NaturalMotion’s off-line DMS product endorphin creates animation an order of magnitude faster than traditional techniques, and is widely used in the film and game industries, with customers such as Sony, Giant Killer Robots, The Mill, Capcom, Namco and Konami.
NaturalMotion’s third product, morpheme, is the industry’s first graphically authorable animation engine designed to give animators full control over the look of their animations in-game. Announced morpheme customers include Ninja Theory, IO Interactive, Bioware and Red 5.
For further information please visit NaturalMotion’s website www.naturalmotion.com, or join the 140,000 endorphin LE users at community.naturalmotion.com.
©euphoria, endorphin and morpheme are registered trademarks of NaturalMotion Ltd.
Xbox, Xbox 360, and Xbox Live are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. "PLAYSTATION" is a registered trademark of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc.
About NVIDIA PhysX Technology
NVIDIA PhysX technology is designed to give developers and animators unprecedented creative control over the look of their final in-game interactivity by allowing them to author and preview physics in real time. PhysX technology works across all major gaming platforms, including Nintendo Wii, Playstation 3, Xbox 360, and the PC, and can be accelerated by both the CPU and any CUDA™ general purpose parallel computing processor, including NVIDIA GeForce® GPUs.
Wes Phillips, TriplePoint for NaturalMotion
(415) 955-8500
wes@triplepointpr.com