Emergent

NaturalMotion morpheme

NaturalMotion morpheme™ is an advanced animation engine and powerful graphical authoring tool chain that gives animators unprecedented control over the look of their animations in-game. Morpheme consists of a run-time animation engine, morpheme:runtime, which  is a next-generation animation engine featuring advanced (and fully  ustomizable) blend techniques, hierarchical animation state machine, IK support, physics support, and compression algorithms.  All aspects of runtime animation including blends, transitions and compression can be previewed and modified graphically in morpheme:connect, and live on the target platform.

There are several benefits of using morpheme with Gamebryo LightSpeed, they include:

• The intuitive UI of morpheme:connect  lowers the barrier of entry for creating animation networks. morpheme:connect is designed as an artist-centric rather than programmer-centric tool.
• morpheme allows you to define the animation states graphically rather than through script.
• morpheme:connect one-click preview allows full testing of your animation network without the need to create special test scenes.
• The integration sits side by side with Gamebryo’s character animation system. Auxiliary animations can be activated alongside (and even blended with) morpheme animations.
• morpheme supports referencing of animation networks within a larger network. This allows multiple animators to collaborate or to section implementation in logical parts, re-using functional network components where required.
• morpheme provides a range of visual tools for organizing large or complicated networks.
• Advanced event-based animation blending eliminates foot skate and animation transition jerkiness.
• morpheme provides sophisticated transitions between animation states, with full event-based blending to prevent discontinuities.
• morpheme provides feathered blending, allowing per-bone control over blending of animations.
• morpheme takes advantage of console architecture to improve performance and is implemented on SPU for PS3, freeing up the PPU for game logic.

The integration between morpheme and Gamebryo LightSpeed was developed and certified by Emergent engineers.  Features of this integration include:

• All memory management in morpheme is routed through the Gamebryo memory manager, and all file access goes through Gamebryo functions, both of which can in turn be customized by Gamebryo users to suit the needs of any particular game.
• The integration also provides the glue that is necessary to take the output of the morpheme animation system and push it into the Gamebryo scene graph, so that a Gamebryo skinned character can be animated entirely by morpheme. This coupling uses the Gamebryo character animation sequence system, which allows other Gamebryo animations to be run simultaneously with morpheme animations, if desired.
• Rather than wrapping the interface to morpheme in a Gamebryo-specific class with only a subset of possible functionality, the integration provides direct access to the morpheme classes and interfaces, so a Gamebryo application has full access to all the power of morpheme.
• A custom component is provided for the Gamebryo entity system, along with a Scene Designer plug-in to allow morpheme-animated characters to be placed in Gamebryo scenes. This morpheme component can be easily added to entities in the scene to define the morpheme animation network files that should be used for that character, as well as which bones, if any, should be excluded from morpheme animation. Applications using the Gamebryo entity system can enable morpheme animation with just two lines of code, as the SceneApp sample shipped with the integration demonstrates.

For more information on the morpheme integration with Gamebryo LightSpeed, registered users can go to the morpheme integration thread on the Emergent Pulse community site.