NaturalMotion, the animation technology company behind the euphoria engine, today announced that publisher THQ has licensed its morpheme animation middleware for use on future projects, including an unannounced title by Kaos Studios. The publisher recently announced that it has also licensed NVIDIA PhysX technology, which is tightly integrated with morpheme's character animation to produce dramatic results.
morpheme is robust animation middleware designed to give developers and animators unprecedented creative control over the look of their final in-game animation by allowing them to author and preview blends, blend trees and transition graphs in real time. Since its launch in 2007, morpheme has seen rapid adoption in the games industry, including customers such as BioWare, Eidos and Disney.
Kaos Studios, the development team behind Frontlines: Fuel of War, will be one of the first THQ studios to make use of morpheme. The studio recently announced that it will be expanding its workforce as it continues development on an unannounced project.
"morpheme offers unprecedented control over run-time character animation. With version 2.0, its graphical authoring capabilities extend to physics, and character interactions with physical environments," said Christian Staack, vice president of sales for North America at NaturalMotion. "THQ sees value in this powerful combination, and we will work closely with any of the publisher's studios that take advantage of this deal."
"NaturalMotion's technology is invaluable to animators and developers, and the seamless integration of morpheme and PhysX helps to cut down production times and costs on these parts of the development process," said Roy Tessler, vice president of production, worldwide at THQ. "Kaos Studios chose morpheme as their character animation solution after an in-depth evaluation, and we are glad to be able to make this purchase part of a wider licensing deal across THQ."
