NaturalMotion unveils morpheme-PhysX compatibility

Animation technology company NaturalMotion has announced that its morpheme platform is now compatible with Nvidia's PhysX software, and believes that the integration solves a number of long-standing problems with the combination of physics and animation.

"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."

According to a company statement the new release highlights include:

• Physics integration powered by Nvidia PhysX technology
• Graphical authoring of physics skeletons, collision shape and joint-limits
• Mixing of animation, hard- and soft-keyframing and active animation in the same skeleton
• Support for different physics modes on different body parts
• 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