Heavenly Sword Dev Chooses NaturalMotion's Morpheme

Author: by Staff

Animation software developer NaturalMotion has announced that Ninja Theory, the developer of PS3 action title Heavenly Sword, has licensed its morpheme animation package for a yet announced title. NaturalMotion says the morpheme middleware is "designed to give developers and animators unprecedented creative control over the look of their final in-game animation by allowing them to author and preview blends, blend trees and state machines in real time." The package is available for the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii and PC, and, with version 1.3, was integrated with Epic's Unreal Engine 3. The company also recently announced that the package would be integrated with physics suite PhysX as of version 2.0. Said 'chief technology ninja' Mike Ball, “One of Ninja Theory’s genuine goals is to push the technology envelope and create gaming experiences that are immersive and truly next-generation. Today’s games require more than just realistic graphics – character animations need to be smooth, lifelike and convincing in order to really bring gamers into our worlds, and morpheme delivers the level of control required for that aspect of game development.”