Massive Software Launches Massive Jet

Massive Software has announced Massive Jet, a new agent 3D animation application designed to aid in the creation of large-scale, believable digital crowd shots "out of the box," with high quality and a low learning curve. A full-functioning package priced less than $6000, Massive Jet leverages the company's Academy Award-winning artificial life-based technology, pre-built Ready-to-Run Agent library, and GPU-accelerated rendering support to enable animators and artists to quickly and easily produce realistic Massive scenes.

Massive Jet takes advantage of Ready-to-Run Agents, which Massive customers can use to shortcut the pre-production process and create animation automatically for typical crowd scenarios in just a few steps. Each agent is pre-built with skeletons, geometry, cloth, rigid body dynamics, textures, shaders, controls, and motion-capture actions provided by industry leaders Giant Studios and House of Moves.

Users simply load terrain and camera from their 3D package, drop in a Ready-to-Run Agent -- or a custom agent built with a license of Massive 2.0 -- and then light the simulation and render the scene.

Ready-to-Run Agents are currently being rolled out for: Locomotion Extras -- for digital background characters that run, walk, stand and sit; Spectator Set -- for the actions and reactions of arena crowds; Background Extras -- for low-key background activities such as milling around in a plaza or mall; and Combat -- for fight scenes with characters such as the Medieval Swordsman.

With GPU-accelerated rendering recently launched for the Massive product
line, huge-scale shots can be rendered 30 times faster at film quality without a render farm or additional software. Massive Jet customers can use desktop-based OpenGL solutions, currently including Nvidia's Quadro FX 3000 or higher, for a cost-effective crowd-creation pipeline.

Massive Jet includes the same artificial life-based responsive agent technology in the company's premier product, Massive 2.0. Massive Jet includes Smart Stunts for responsive digital stunt moves, Massive's Cloth tools, rigid body dynamics, terrain adaptation, and high-level controls to create life-like animations. As in Massive 2.0, users can generate unlimited numbers of characters with virtually limitless variation and a wide range of human and non-human-specific skeletons -- whether birds, insects, aliens, cars or fantasy creatures.

Massive Jet is expected to be available in Q4 2005 for $5990 per license. Massive 2.0 is available now, with licenses priced at $18,000.

Massive Jet and Massive 2.0 run on Red Hat 7.3, 9.0, Fedora Core 2. For optimum performance, a 2GHz to 3GHz Pentium Processor, 1GB to 2GB of RAM, and an Nvidia Quadro graphics card are recommended. Visit www.massivesoftware.com for more details.

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SHOUTmag 2005