Red 5 Licenses Morpheme for new Project

After hiring Tribes lead designer Scott Youngblood, Red 5 Studios selects an animation middleware for its new, unnamed title.

NaturalMotion Ltd., makers of the euphoria and endorphin 3-D animation technologies, have licensed its morpheme product to Red 5 Studios for an unannounced project. Known for its advanced in-game animation tools and collaborative developer set, NaturalMotion will highlight the middleware during SIGGRAPH 2007.

Mark Kern, President and Chief Executive Officer of Red 5 Studios, said, “We added morpheme to our pipeline because we wanted to give our animators more control over the final animations that would go into the game. In a lot of other systems, after the animators export their work, they don’t get to see how the animations interact until it is in the game. If they then need to tweak a transition between animations or states, they have to edit a text file and then run the game again, which usually tears at an animator’s soul. morpheme has an intuitive graphical interface that allows animators to go in and setup all these transitions and preview them without involving much programmer intervention. It cuts down on the time that a programmer and animator need to work together to get a system working within the game, and let’s the animator focus on what they were hired to do – animate.”

Torsten Reil, Chief Executive Officer of NaturalMotion, said, “The team behind Red 5 Studios has one of the most impressive track records in [MMOGs], be it commercial, creative or technical. We are aware how important Red 5 Studio’s technology decisions are, and are proud they have chosen morpheme as their animation engine.”