GDC: EA licences Autodesk’s HumanIK

HumanIK is a customised development library that enables animated game characters to interact more realistically with digital environments – it has already been used in EA’s DEF JAM: ICON, FIFA Soccer 07 and NBA STREET Homecourt titles.

“Through our partnership with Autodesk, we were able to achieve a new level of character animation in DEF JAM: ICON, FIFA Soccer 07 and NBA STREET Homecourt,” commented Glenn Entis, EA’s chief visual and technical officer.

“Part of the reason EA consistently delivers innovative hit game titles like these is because we rely on extensive internal and external R&D. Autodesk HumanIK middleware allowed efficient porting of game data to the various platforms on which we shipped our games. Autodesk R&D team was highly responsive, quickly providing us with customised builds of the HumanIK solution.”

Entis continued: “With HumanIK, the character behaviors we created remained intact when exported to the video game engine. That was a huge benefit; it eliminated the usual time-consuming and costly tweaking and toggling between the development software and the game engine. Autodesk HumanIK is the ideal solution for our next-generation game development.”