"We're very pleased that VIDI has joined Strata in a strategic alliance and we give them a hearty welcome. The morph-instancing capabilities that VIDI brings will add a core piece of technology to our product line. This is one more example of StudioPro's extensibility and the flexibility and growth potential that are designed into the 2.x generation from the ground up." -- Ken Bringhurst, Strata CEO

VIDI's plug-in will work within StudioPro's existing animation framework as a dynamic object modifier. Independent facial movements, hand gestures, and any other body actions can be synched together into an "expression" and saved for future use. An entire library of such expressions that portray anger, joy, surprise, fear, etc. can be mixed and matched in any combination and applied to a character model to achieve amazingly lifelike results. This expression-based method of character animation is far less demanding of resources and time than traditional methods and greatly speeds up production. The plug-in will be developed first for the Power Macintosh platform, followed by a Windows version.

"Strata is clearly one of the winners in the 3D and DV worlds and we're thrilled to be onboard the fast-moving StudioPro train. Coupling VIDI technology with such a feature-rich package creates a sleek, muscled-up animation engine. Our instancing or "expression-based" character animation allows the definition of complex facial expressions and body movements. This new morphing technology provides the high-end effects previously found only with much more expensive workstation-based products, but at far less cost and with fewer headaches. Moreover, we see this as just the first in a series of sophisticated plug-ins working exclusively with StudioPro. There's a lot more on the track ahead." -- Nick Pavlovic, VIDI CEO

Character animation is one of the most difficult tasks facing a 3D artist. VIDI's first StudioPro extension features intuitive slider controls and instant preview capability to make it much easier for an animator to synchronize a character's facial movements with lip movement and other gestures.

"VIDI's new expression-based method is ideal for creating and animating facial expressions as well as showing 3D characters talking. Changing a character's expression is easy. It's simply a matter of applying instances in various combinations at selected keyframes." -- Peter Ratner, Professor of Fine Art and Animation, James Madison University

More VIDI-produced plug-ins are also slated during the coming year that will join a series of other StudioPro extensions either developed in-house or by other outside developers. All will be shipped in both Macintosh and Windows versions. Strata will be demonstrating the VIDI animation technology at San Francisco's MacWorld trade show in January in booth #1907.

Strata Inc. is a closely-held corporation based in St. George, Utah. The company is dedicated to sustaining and expanding its position as a leading developer and provider of powerful, easy-to-use 3-D design, animation and multimedia tools for the creative professional. StudioPro is a trademark of Strata, Inc.

Visual Information Development, Inc., a closely-held corporation based in Arcadia, California, develops and publishes 3D animation software. Established in 1986, VIDI has long been recognized for its technological vision in 3D modeling and multimedia.