NaturalMotion, the animation technology pioneer behind the revolutionary euphoria motion synthesis engine, today announced it will launch morpheme 2.0 at the NVISION 08 convention in San Jose. The new version of morpheme, the company’s multiplatform, graphically authorable animation engine, features tight integration of NVIDIA PhysX™ technology.
The integration of PhysX gives programmers and animators direct graphical control over how characters and objects interact in their games, whether it be through ragdolls or animation-driven physics. Continuing morpheme’s ultra-flexible paradigm, animation and physics can be blended and combined across body parts, authored via graphical nodes and controlled by user-defined parameters.
Moreover, morpheme 2.0 introduces a powerful graphical character authoring tool, allowing users to set up and edit physics rigs including collision surfaces and joint angles.
morpheme is currently licensed by an array of top-tier developers, including Bioware, Eidos, Ninja Theory, 38 Studios, Futuremark, Total Immersion Software, CCP, Gearbox Software, and many others.
“The goal of morpheme has always been to streamline the animation production pipeline, offering faster development times and higher fidelity,” said Torsten Reil, CEO of NaturalMotion. “We selected NVIDIAs PhysX technology because out of all commercial physics engines, it offers the highest character-grade fidelity, an essential requirement for creating believable characters.”
"NaturalMotion's technology marks a turning point in gaming. Its fidelity of movement makes characters seem so real that you want to touch them. And the PhysX integration lets you do just that," said Manju Hedge, vice president of PhysX technology at NVIDIA.
In addition to unveiling morpheme 2.0 at NVISION, NaturalMotion is also demonstrating Backbreaker, the company’s upcoming American Football game powered by euphoria, morpheme and PhysX.
Full Press Release & other NaturalMotion News.
Several new chapters from GPU Gems 2 have been made available online since our last newsfeed notification, the new chapters cover GPU-based high-performance computing beyond typical graphics issues:
- GPU Flow-Control Idioms
- Mark Harris
- NVIDIA Corporation
- Ian Buck
- Stanford University
- GPU Program Optimization
- Cliff Woolley
- University of Virginia
- Stream Reduction Operations for GPGPU Applications
- Daniel Horn
- Stanford University
- Octree Textures on the GPU
- Sylvain Lefebvre
- GRAVIR/IMAG – INRIA
- Samuel Hornus
- GRAVIR/IMAG – INRIA
- Fabrice Neyret
- GRAVIR/IMAG – INRIA
- High-Quality Global Illumination Rendering Using Rasterization
- Toshiya Hachisuka
- The University of Tokyo
- Global Illumination Using Progressive Refinement Radiosity
- Greg Coombe
- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
- Mark Harris
- NVIDIA Corporation
- Computer Vision on the GPU
- James Fung
- University of Toronto
PerfHUD 6.1 Beta, the latest version of NVIDIA's powerful real-time performance analysis tool for Direct3D, is now available on the NVIDIA Developer Zone.
Major new features in PerfHUD 6.1 Beta include:
- Support for GeForce GTX 200 Series GPUs
- More robust mouse and keyboard interception
- Several bug fixes
Download it here.
At the end of the full day on packed-room NVIDIA Technical Presentations at SIGGRAPH 2008, we've added a bonus: immedaite support for the newly-announced OpenGL 3.0 in NVIDIA Windows drivers. See http://developer.nvidia.com/object/opengl_3_driver.html for the details, along with the documentation for the new version of nvemulate, to be found at http://developer.nvidia.com/object/nvemulate.html
The NVIDIA Direct3D and OpenGL SDKs have been updated with several all-new samples:
- Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion
- Instanced Tessellation
- Percentage-Closer Soft Shadows
- Skinning with Dual Quaternions
- Instancing Tests
- Parallax Mapping
- Volume Light
- Instanced Tessellation [OpenGL]
The Cg Toolkit Beta 2.1 is now available at http://developer.nvidia.com/object/cg_2_1_beta.html -- this new version adds Cg translation support to HLSL10 for Cg usage in Direct3D 10, while maintaining complete code compatability with all previous profiles for DirectX and Open GL.
NVIDIA researchers and engineers will be presenting nine different developer-oriented talks at SIGGRAPH 2008, beginning next week in Los Angeles.
http://developer.nvidia.com/object/siggraph-2008.html contains detailed descriptions and times for the following presentations:
- Next-Generation Hardware Rendering of Displaced Subdivision Surfaces
- Real-Time Rendering of Realistic Hair
- Adaptive Terrain Tessellation on the GPU
- Getting Physical: Solutions and Case Studies for Creating Scalable PhysX Content
- A New Generation of Performance Analysis and Shader Authoring Tools
- CUDA: The Democratization of Parallel Computing
- Interactive Ray Tracing with CUDA
- To Trace or Not to Trace: Image-Space Horizon-Based Ambient Occlusion
- Let's Get Physical: Real Time Hair Simulation and Rendering on the GPU
Missed XNA Gamefest in Seattle? The slides from both NVIDIA Gamefest presentations are now available:
