Breakthrough with Character Studio 3

<%=company1%> has begun worldwide shipment of Character Studio 3, the newest version of the extension to 3D Studio MAX for 3D character animation in games, film, video and interactive entertainment.

Character Studio 3 provides animators with new capabilities, including crowd and behavioral-based animation, fast physique skinning and enhancements to the inverse kinematics (IK) tools--with animatable pivot points for smooth, natural hand and foot movements. Other enhancements improve studio workflow, including advances in nonlinear animation and track operations.

"The beauty of working with Character Studio, is its multi-layering features and the ability to hand-edit motion capture files," said Dave Thompson, senior 3D designer, at FOX Sports Graphics.

"Character Studio 3 provides me the flexibility and creative power to get perfectly customized actions for my animated 'cyborg' looking NFL players--running every Sunday during football season, before the FOX Studio Show. The new Crowd feature will allow me to create a large group of 'fans' with customized behaviors," added Thompson.

Crowd introduces a toolset designed to animate large groups of both human and non-terrestrial entities such as the 'flocking' of a swarm of bees, a school of fish, or any group of creatures. Crowd members may be assigned a blend of customizable behaviors such as wandering, seeking goals, avoiding obstacles, or following surfaces or paths. Animators may either use the broad selection of built-in behaviors or optionally write their own using Maxscript.

Behavioral-based animation and integration for Bipeds allows groups of humanoid characters to be motivated by a combination of animations: either hand-designed animations, motion capture, or a mix of both. The close integration between Biped and Crowd allows the artist, for example, to quickly populate an entire battlefield with characters that advance, retreat, avoid obstacles and wield their weapons in an intelligent and individualistic way.

Additionally, Character Studio 3 raises the bar for inverse-kinematics technology by introducing the capability to precisely manage animated transitions between IK pivots across different parts of the feet and hands. Animators will no longer have to struggle with awkward ad hoc methods to animate a foot's changing pivots as it rolls from the heel, to the ball, to the toes. The new Biped IK system provides an intuitive method that gives animators direct control over shifting IK relationships.