morpheme is robust animation middleware designed to give developers and animators intuitive, 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, Disney, and CCP.

morpheme 2.0 introduces full integration with NVIDIA PhysX technology, encompassing both graphical authoring in the morpheme:connect tool, as well as the animation runtime engine.

In morpheme 2.0, NaturalMotion believes it has solved several fundamental problems holding back the combined application of physics and animation. As a result, morpheme 2.0 allows for the seamless mixing and matching of animation and physics methods within and across animation skeletons, thus providing a whole new toolset for creating lifelike characters.

“In previous animation solutions, physics has often been an afterthought, often only allowing for the addition of ragdolls or other basic physics methods as an ‘all-or-nothing’ effect at the end,” said Torsten Reil, CEO of NaturalMotion. “With morpheme 2.0, we have developed a method to give programmers and animators much more targeted and differentiated control over physics and animation. It is now possible to add arbitrary physics modes to different parts of the same body – all graphically. We’re also giving animators intuitive 3D tools to graphically author physics joints, joint limits and parameters. We believe this new method of treating animation and physics in tandem will become a fundamental requirement for more believable characters.”

morpheme 2.0 is a major release featuring many enhancements in addition to physics. In summary, version 2.0 provides the following new features:

• Physics integration powered by NVIDIA PhysX™ technology
  • Graphical authoring of physics skeletons, collision shape and joint-limits
  • Mixing of animation, hard- and soft-keyframing and active animation in the same skeleton
  • Support for different physics modes on different body parts
  • Transitions between animation and physics
• Enhanced multithreading model for runtime performance
• Enhanced animation compression methods
• LiveLink library to simplify connecting application to remote runtime target
• Pass-down pins provide support for animation network referencing

morpheme 2.0 is available starting immediately.

* NVIDIA PhysX is licensed separately, and is not required for licensing morpheme 2.0.