Liquid Motion - realtime character animation

[red_oddity]

Nice, but a bit of a weird site...
When you read through the features you get treated with screenshots of some GI rendered characters...wtf does that have to do with animation?..no screenshots, no interface shots...no nothing...

[Buckshag]

It's a system to be used for example in games.
It's not an artists tool, however artists work with it too of course, but you do all animation in Max or Maya for example.

p.s. the character pictures have are not using GI :)

[red_oddity]

Yeah, but they don't have anything to do with the product either, am i right?

Anyway, so it's a game engine?

[Buckshag]

That's right. But text-only is boring. Thats why we put pics next to it :) An animation system is also not something visual. People tend to judge things mostly on visuals though. And since the anim system takes care of the motion related things, it doesn't perform any rendering, so no direct visuals.

We still need to get some artists involved to make some cool demos which we can put online, but have been focussing on the system itself first. We can render the characters shown on the site though, but they are not rigged yet. So they cannot deform, which makes it not so great to show in a demo, since it should animate :)

[red_oddity]

Well, just let us know when you have some demo's, it does 'sound' like an interresting system.

[youknowjack]

So, is this a real-engine for testing animation?
Is it possible to blend with a game-engine(say like the unreal one) and have complex animation system(ik stuff, nla blending)?

It would be cool to add those features you mentioned into other
engines.

JACK

[Joviex]

Originally posted by Buckshag
That's right. But text-only is boring. Thats why we put pics next to it :) An animation system is also not something visual.

Interesting.

[MosaFacku]

sure the pics look nice, buts its kind of lame when a lot of people know that those models don't have anything to do with your product. if you're gonna use pretty pictures, at least have them posed with your software.

[Buckshag]

youknowjack:
You can see it as a highly specialized part of a game engine. You can plug it into any 3D engine or application. Imagine a company has already got a 3D engine up and running for their game, which allows you to fly through static levels. Such as Unreal. To add dynamic animated things such as characters, you can use this anim system.
Normally game companies put a few months of work into their character animation system, while we have already put in over two years. As you can imagine it is most likely more specialized than what you would do in two months.
Next to game companies there are also a couple of companies using it for the animation support in their 3D rendering/animation software. And I can tell you that you know these companies and you might even work with their software :)

About the images on the site, I don't think it is bad to have images next to it which are not rendered using our software. Sure, we will add screenshots/demos/movies later on, but for now it is just not really important. Sure, we have examples showing the features, but graphically they are just not impressive because the models and shading aren't that great, because we didn't focus on that. And because people judge things mostly on visuals, it probably is just a bad idea to put them online.

But, if you are a kickass animator and/or modeler and you are interested in making some neat character where we can make some demos with, please contact me :)

[youknowjack]

I focus most in real time gaming myself, but my
model isn't good enough yet. I would like to
help out in the near future if that's ok with you.

Sounds like fun to me!To implement a well done
animation system into other engines.

JACK

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