All-new Morpheme 3 released

Animation specialist NaturalMotion has today launched Morpheme 3; an all-new addition to its tools lineup.

Kinect and PlayStation Move integrations are just some of the new features in this major update to the previous edition of Morpheme.

NaturalMotion promises the tech delivers “a new standard of character animation quality for triple-A games”. Morpheme 3 is added with ‘active state transitions’, which is said helps allows devs to build responsive characters in a rapid and straightforward manner.

NaturalMotion, the Oxford based middleware group, has already licensed its Kinect-based motion-control middleware module to “multiple studios”, and is optimistic about the tech’s future.

The company adds that Morpheme 3 includes a new preview facility better-suited for easy prototyping and testing of interaction between multiple characters.

A new asset management system, meanwhile, is said “efficiently organises animation clips and speeds up the building of physical characters.”

Morpheme 3 is also more customisable, the group said, thanks to the inclusion of a new animation Node Wizard.

An all-new deep debugging visualisation tool offers better insight into runtime executions, it said, before claiming that “substantial reductions in runtime memory usage” make it easier for devs to work with the usually-large asset libraries of AAA games.

CEO Torsten Reil said Morpheme 3 is “a great leap making the task of creating rich, natural character animation for AAA games simpler, faster, and easier than ever before.”

He said: “Morpheme 3 puts unprecedented control in the hands of both animators and programmers, allowing believable character performances to be quickly created and tested, and then executed in-game with the incredible efficiency.”