I have been a big fan of NaturalMotion and their animation technology ever since rumor’s surfaced about the company’s possible involvement with 2K Sports on their All Pro Football title. Those rumors proved to be untrue, but Natrual Motion’s products have since been used in many well known games such as Star Wars: Force Unleashed and Grand Theft Auto IV.

The latest version of their Morpheme platform, to be shown at the NVISION 08 convention in San Jose, boasts several enhancements that should prove beneficial to animators.

In addition to Morpheme, the puffy blue football tackle animations we once assumed were part of a top secret Madden or All Pro Football integration, proved to be early footage of NaturalMotion’s own American Football game titled “BackBreaker”.

I had a chance to talk with NaturalMotion representatives briefly regarding the game at GDC a few months ago, but to the best of my knowledge, NVISION 08 (taking place between August 25-27) will mark the first time the game will be shown in public.

The full press release is available after the jump.

NaturalMotion Launches Morpheme 2.0 at NVISION 2008
The powerful animation engine takes a leap forward with NVIDIA’s character-grade physics engine.

August 21, 2008 – NaturalMotion, the animation technology pioneer behind the revolutionary euphoria motion synthesis engine, today announced it will launch morpheme 2.0 at the NVISION 08 convention in San Jose. The new version of morpheme, the company’s multiplatform, graphically authorable animation engine, features tight integration of NVIDIA PhysX technology.

The integration of PhysX gives programmers and animators direct graphical control over how characters and objects interact in their games, whether it be through ragdolls or animation-driven physics. Continuing morpheme’s ultra-flexible paradigm, animation and physics can be blended and combined across body parts, authored via graphical nodes and controlled by user-defined parameters.

Moreover, morpheme 2.0 introduces a powerful graphical character authoring tool, allowing users to set up and edit physics rigs including collision surfaces and joint angles.

morpheme is currently licensed by an array of top-tier developers, including Bioware, Eidos, Ninja Theory, 38 Studios, Futuremark, Total Immersion Software, CCP, Gearbox Software, and many others.

“The goal of morpheme has always been to streamline the animation production pipeline, offering faster development times and higher fidelity,” said Torsten Reil, CEO of NaturalMotion. “We selected NVIDIAs PhysX technology because out of all commercial physics engines, it offers the highest character-grade fidelity, an essential requirement for creating believable characters.”

“NaturalMotion’s technology marks a turning point in gaming. Its fidelity of movement makes characters seem so real that you want to touch them. And the PhysX integration lets you do just that,” said Manju Hedge, vice president of PhysX technology at NVIDIA.

In addition to unveiling morpheme 2.0 at NVISION, NaturalMotion is also demonstrating Backbreaker, the company’s upcoming American Football game powered by euphoria, morpheme and PhysX.

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 will also feature in upcoming LucasArts’ upcoming 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 IO Interactive, Bioware and Red 5.

For further information please visit NaturalMotion’s website www.naturalmotion.com, or join the 100,000 endorphin LE users at community.naturalmotion.com.

About NVISION 08

Taking place on August 25-27, 2008 in San Jose, California, NVISION 08 is a three-day mega-event for professionals and enthusiasts who are passionate about visual computing. Thousands of engineers, designers, developers, researchers, artists, enthusiasts, gamers, film makers, business professionals, and consumers from around the world are expected to attend

Tags: Grand-Theft-Auto-IV, Morpheme 2.0, naturalmotion, nvidia, NVISION 08, Star-Wars:-Force-Unleashed

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1 Comment » streetsweeperz on August 22, 2008 6:08 pm would love to know when backnreaker will be released and hope that they show more game play other than “tackle alley” RSS feed for comments on this post. Comment Now Note: Commenting on Ripten does not currently require registration, however to be eligible for contests on the site, you must be a registered user. Name (required) Mail (will not be published) (required) Website Commenting Rules: No hate speech allowed. If you must argue, please debate intelligently. Comments containing selected keywords or outbound links will be put into moderation to help prevent spam. Ripten reserves the right to delete comments and ban anyone who doesn't follow the rules. Thanks. Notify me of followup comments Tired of the Goomba? Upload your own custom comment avatar.