THQ Licenses NaturalMotion's Morpheme For Kaos Studios Project

Animation tech company NaturalMotion says publisher THQ has licensed its Morpheme animation middleware for future projects, including an unannounced title by Kaos Studios. Morpheme lets developers and animators author and preview blends, blend trees and transition graphs in real time. THQ is also a recent Nvidia PhysX licensee, and Morpheme 2.0 features PhysX integration, allowing for graphical authoring of physics skeletons, collision shape, and joint-limits. It also enables animation fixing, hard and soft-keyframing, and active animation in the same skeleton, and adds support for different physics modes on different body parts, and for transitions between animation and physics. Morpheme 2.0 also features an enhanced multithreading model for runtime performance; updated animation compression methods; a LiveLink library designed to simplify connecting application to remote runtime target; and pass-down pins that support animation network referencing. "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," says NaturalMotion sales VP Christian Staack. "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."