Endorphin 2.5 Ships

November 7, 2005--Natural Motion is now shipping Endorphin 2.5, the company's 3D animation software based on Dynamic Motion Synthesis Technology. Beta testers such as Giant Killer Robots and CIS Hollywood have added the software to their respective production pipelines, and the results both companies excited about the enhanced productivity it offers.

"Endorphin 2.5's new active animation features have proven invaluable for creating believable character performances," said Jason Porath, effects technical director at CIS Hollywood. "We've been able to take the realism of motion capture and mold it into a completely different environment, while maintaining the same fidelity of character movement.

Endorphin also allows us to finish animation work much faster than motion capture or keyframe animation. We recently used it for an entire sequence of shots, with each shot requiring between five and 20 background characters, whose performance had to match to live action. We'd initially estimated a month or two for this sort of work based off our experience with motion capture and keyframe animation, but using endorphin we were able to finish it in around a week."

"endorphin 2.5's new motion transfer events and balance behaviors allow us to create realistic custom character animation much faster than the previous version," said Tim Coleman, character set-up supervisor at Giant Killer Robots. "Endorphin 2.5 is also very effective when it comes to developing multiple variations on complex animation sequences, such as several characters interacting with one another dynamically - and the time involved in editing these complex performances is a fraction of what it would take with hand keyed or motion capture animation.

Endorphin also integrates seamlessly into our pipeline; we treat it as we would processed motion capture, importing the motion into and out of Alias Maya via the FBX format. By adding a few additional custom scripts, it's very easy to work with endorphin and Maya side by side."

Endorphin 2.5's feature list is hefty, offering Dynamic Blending, Motion Transfer and Active Animation Events, an Enhanced Collision Mode, Enhanced Character Edit Mode, and more. The software is priced at $9495, or it can be rented on a monthly basis for $1595 per month. Natural Motion is planning to offer a free Endorphin 2.5 learning addition later this month. Visit the company web site at www.naturalmotion.com.

endorphin Siggraph 2005 Show Reel (2:37) AVI (6.6MB)