Cryptic Animation Tool Released
"Our goal is to foster a community of animators by providing them the power to generate animations without having to worry about supporting a toolset. Since we were already developing the rig for our core technology team, we decided to release it to the public under the GNU GPL," commented Cryptic Studios art development director Shayne Herrera. "We feel that the development and gaming communities will benefit greatly from a professional tool like the Cryptic AR."
To make use of the Cryptic AR, one must have an installed copy of Autodesk's 3d Studio Max 8 or higher. More information can be found on the official site, and the plugin itself is up for download at FileShack.
At present, it does not appear that public Cryptic AR creations can be imported into Cryptic Studios titles. Shacknews has contacted Cryptic Studios for clarification on the matter.
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What are you supposed to use this for? Custom animations in CoV/CoH or something?
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That was my reaction as well. However, there is a thirty day free trial of 3d Studio Max: http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=5972446
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Nah, its just a rig. Animators can fix my busted terminology, but it looks like the idea is to make setting up a rig extremely simple. It also looks like it has a bunch of tools for proportion scaling.
Basically it is taking one step out of the animation/modelling process, as you don't have to build the skeleton and all of the in-Max animation controls yourself. You can jump straight to making animations in Max instead.
Most game companies either have a set of standard rigs based on how their animators work, or people build their own as people build models.
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