NaturalMotion Ships morpheme 1.3

New Version of Powerful Animation Engine Offers Unreal Engine 3 Integration, Inverse Kinematics, and More.

News by GamesIndustry International Contributor

Published on Feb. 19, 2008

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SAN FRANCISCO, CA and OXFORD, U.K. - February 19, 2008 - NaturalMotion Ltd., the developers behind the highly acclaimed euphoria and endorphin motion synthesis technologies, today announced the release of morpheme 1.3, the latest version of its animation middleware. morpheme is a robust middleware solution designed to give developers and animators unprecedented creative control over the look of their final in-game animation by allowing them to author and preview blends, blend trees and state machines in real time. morpheme is available on PlayStation ® 3, Xbox 360 TM , Nintendo Wii TM and PC platforms, and version 1.3 for the first time offers developers integration with Epic's popular Unreal Engine 3.

"morpheme has been proven by our users as a robust and intuitive animation solution for developers," said Torsten Reil, CEO of NaturalMotion. "Version 1.3 is even more accessible, offering an unprecedented set of features that shifts the process of animation development from tedious lines of code to an easy-to-use graphical interface, whilst maintaining maximum code flexibility."

morpheme 1.3 features a host of new functionality, including:

Animation sets allow the creation of multiple characters or LODs Inverse kinematics (IK) nodes for a range of common tasks Automatic constraint matching for detection of events such as footsteps Support for live debugging of remote runtime targets Fully scripted user interface

About morpheme

morpheme consists of two components: morpheme:runtime and morpheme:connect. morpheme:runtime is a run-time engine optimized for PlayStation3 ® , Xbox 360 TM , Wii TM and PC, and ships with full source code. morpheme:connect is a powerful 3D authoring application that allows animators to graphically author blend trees and transition logic (based on Hierarchical Finite State Machines), modify and edit parameters through sliders and view the results in real-time. morpheme is designed as a flexible and open system and does not require the licensing of any other product. morpheme is also designed to seamlessly integrate with other middleware and DCC applications.

Availability

morpheme 1.3 is available on Wii TM , Playstation ® 3, Xbox 360TM and PC. For more information, please contact Rhian Mulcrone at NaturalMotion at +44 (0) 1865 250 575 or via email at contact@naturalmotion.com. For additional information on NaturalMotion, euphoria, or endorphin, please visit www.naturalmotion.com.

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 Behaviours and artificial intelligence to simulate the human-nervous system. Based on Oxford University research on the control of body movements, NaturalMotion's euphoria synthesizes 3D character animation in real time on PLAYSTATION ® 3, Xbox 360 ® and PC, and will debut in Rockstar Games' Grand Theft Auto IV and LucasArts' Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. NaturalMotion's other DMS product endorphin creates off-line animation an order of magnitude faster than traditional techniques, and is widely used in the film and games 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.

For further information please visit NaturalMotion's website www.naturalmotion.com, or join the 80,000 endorphin LE users at community.naturalmotion.com.

® euphoria, endorphin, morpheme and Dynamic Motion Synthesis 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.

Wii is a trademark of Nintendo.

All other brand names, product names, service marks or trademarks belong to their respective holders.

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