Presenter 3D's KineMagics Multi-Target 3D Morphing builds on the existing 3D Digital Clay(tm) sculpting and Directional 3D Sound(tm) capability to provide powerful facial animation, muscle flexing, character reshaping, and lip motion synced to sound.

The key to Presenter 3D's Multi-Target Morphing is the ability to create an unlimited number freeform morph shapes, while using only a few hard-targets in a variety of blended soft-target combinations. To create facial expressions with other packages, the only alternative is to sculpt hundreds or thousands of key poses (hard-targets) individually.

One of the most difficult things to do in character animation is syncing the lips and other facial features to the words spoken. The movie Toy Story and the TV program ReBoot are prime examples of the use of 3D in character animation in films, TV, and games. Even with all the powerful equipment and software he had at his disposal, John Lasseter, the Toy Story director, found this to be a difficult task. Presenter 3D not only makes it doable on the Macintosh, it makes it easy.

"Inspired by computer animated effects in Motion Pictures, I often found myself asking the question, How could I do that?" says graphic artist, Perry Marks. "Recently after seeing Fly Away Home, I set out to model and animate a flock of geese with the goal of simulating their organic shape and natural fluid movement. With Presenter 3D's powerful spline-based modeling capabilities, Multi-target morphing, and KineMagics motion control animators, this project literally took flight. I was amazed to find that the fluid movement I wanted was achieved with only two morph targets. This together with the real time preview saved me a lot of time and made it an enjoyable and educational experience. "

"Presenter 3D's new morphing is ideal for creating and animating facial expressions, as well as showing 3D characters talking" says Peter Ratner, Professor of Fine Art and Animation at James Madison University. The new morphing capability is used in my animation class for generating facial expressions and muscle movement on computer-generated human models. Changing facial expressions in Presenter 3D was easy since, 'A smile is just a frown turned upside down'. You create a smile, or a frown, simply by dragging the slider for the frown target from the right to the left. I found this to be extremely intuitive and saved me a lot of design work."

Check the Morph, Flock, and Lip Sync Tech Reports on VIDI's web site to see various application of Multi-target Morphing and KineMagics motion effects plug-ins. For a users perspective of Multi-Target Morphing, visit VIDI's user site at http://www.webnation.com/vidirep/. There in the Animators section, you will find a description of the process used in simulating the flight of geese similar to the effect used in the movie Fly Away Home, except that it took only a few hours to create. To see how the 3D microphones are used in recording sound effects, check the Doppler Sound Tech Report located on this site.