***Kinetix Ships Character Studio
by Rob Glidden

One of the most talked-about products of SIGGRAPH 95 is finally shipping.
Kinetix has announced that Character Studio is now shipping, price $995.
Character Studio includes the Biped and Physique plugins that created the
wonderful walking characters for the Max launch at last year's SIGGRAPH.

Character Studio was developed for Kinetix by Unreal Pictures, Inc of
Palo Alto, CA, led by Michael Girard, Susan Amkraut and John Chadwick.
Girard and Amkraut headed development of the BiPED software component,
Chadwick directed the development of Physique.

BiPED features:

Footstep-Driven Keyframe Animation. Patented. Once footsteps are in
place, keyframes are generated automatically to produce an initial sketch
of the 3D character's motion. Throughout edits and revisions, the
original nuances of the character are preserved.

Motion mapping of one character to another. Apply a duck walk to a child,
and the child will walk like a duck (but no, it won't talk like a duck).

Foot-to-Ground Collision Response. Automates the reactions that occur
when a character's foot makes contact with the ground - particularly
powerful since foot-to-ground contact causes a reaction throughout the
character's entire body.

Motion splicing. Allows animators to splice together character motions by
simply splicing the footprints associated with those motions.

Advanced Inverse Kinematics. Blends forward kinematics (such as a
swinging motion) with inverse kinematics (such as directed motions, like
a punch).

Physique features:

Kinetix claims "Physique provides animators with control over extreme
levels of detail, to the point where characters' veins bulge and roll
across their muscles".

Detailed Muscle Deformations.

Precise Skin Behavior.

Realistic Tendon Behavior

Vertex Level Control

Multipedal Character Development. "For animators wanting to define the
skin and muscle behaviors for a character with more than two legs,
Physique works with the bones system built into 3D Studio MAX to create
animated crabs, starfish, squid or any other multipedal character."


Wave Issue 9603 7/19/96 Article 3-01