Skeletons - of any two-legged animal (such as humans, dinosaurs, monkeys, or ducks) are quickly created through parametric methods and interactive manipulation of the 3D character's body parts.
Biped Animations - can be combined with Physique to create 3D characters with seamless skin, naturally flexing muscles, and sliding tendons.
Custom Objects - can be used for any or all Biped body parts to better represent the character, or to animate jointed characters without using Physique.
Footstep-Driven Keyframe Animation
Place Footprints - and interactively compose the timing and position of a two-legged character to easily create walking, running, jumping, or any motion pattern such as a dance.
Keyframes - are generated automatically from the footsteps to produce an initial sketch of the character's motion. You can easily replace, delete, and insert keys to produce a unique
expressive motion without violating the footstep constraints.
Keyframe Adaptation - ensures that any edits you make to a footstep pattern preserve the nuances of your character's animation by adapting keyframes to match changes in footstep
timing or location.
Physically-Based Interpolation
Bipedal Mechanics - ensures your characters move, rotate, and dynamically balance about their center-of-mass, walk with biomechanically correct relationships between the ankle, leg,
and pelvis, and (by default) bank into turns as a function of speed and path curvature.
Gravitational Dynamics - interpolates vertical keyframes (up and down movement) using Newtonian physics and adjustable gravity for artistic control.
Suspended Dynamics Mode - allows you to turn Biped constraints off at selected times to easily animate non-footstep movements, such as flying and bicycling.
Advanced Inverse Kinematics (IK)
Natural IK for 3D Characters - allows you to animate limbs in a realistic, precise, and easy-to-use manner rather than depending upon arbitrary robotic-like linkages. You can quickly define IK paths for characters to follow, relative to themselves or the space around them.
Animatable IK Attachments to 3D Studio MAX Objects - gives you the power to dynamically attach and detach another object to a character's hands and feet during an animation. Catching and throwing a basketball, rowing a boat, and dancing with another character have never been easier.
Animated IK Blending - combines IK hand and foot-follow motions with the natural swinging movements of conventional forward kinematic joint rotations. Your character's feet gracefully swing as they move up the stairs, and their arms follow through naturally when throwing an object.
3D Character Motion Splicing
Biped Motion Copy/Paste/Insert - easily splices motions together by copying and inserting sequences of footsteps and their associated upper body movements.
User-Defined Motion Cycling - generates seamless motion cycles by copying and then repeatedly "reinserting" selected sequences of character animation.
3D Character Motion Mapping
Motion Mapping - you can apply the footsteps and animation of a Biped character to any other Biped character: Biped adapts the animation to account for differences in structure. Animation sequences can be copied between characters regardless of height, proportion, or even physical differences (changing from human legs with toes to dinosaur legs with webbed feet, for example).
Dimensional Scaling - Biped accounts for differences in character size by adapting the placement of footsteps in terms of overall leg and pelvis dimensions. Gravity can also be adapted to the relative stance of the Biped character. You can craft great motion sequences once and use them with all your characters.
Motion Over Uneven Terrain
Footstep Composition and Adaptation - any motion can be either generated, or adapted, to footsteps with varying heights and orientations, allowing characters to walk up stairs, jump off a building, or run up a hill.
Accurate Foot/Ground Collision Response - a Biped character's specific foot structure will accurately collide and roll over each footstep location in a natural way, pivoting between the heel, sole, and potential contact points of the toes (or claws).
PSYSIQUE TECHNICAL SPECIFICATION
Muscle Bulging
Use Articulated Structures - such as Biped characters or 3D Studio MAX Bones - to
create a skeleton that lies within an unjointed skin. Physique connects to and moves the skin as
you position the underlying Biped or Bones skeleton.
Animated Muscle Bulging - can be based on the behavior of the skeleton's joint angles and
their relationship to one another. Bulging biceps are easily created as the arm bends, for
example.
Animate, Sculpt, and Bulge Any Surface - including polygon meshes, surface patches, Boolean objects, and all procedural primitives.
Design by Cross Section - use Physique's Cross Section Editor to define a muscle's profile at any given point. Add as many cross sections as needed to give your model as much detail as you wish for any position.
Define Overall Muscle Movement - by establishing the relationship between various muscle cross sections and the joint bend angle. Control the influence, weight, and power of the animated bulge as joints bend.
Skin Behavior - can be controlled as the angles between limbs change. Adjust the sharpness of the skin at bending joints with continuity; control how skin twists around the joint as limbs move, and set the amount of skin folding as the joint angle changes. All controls allow for bias and tension adjustment, as well as deformation amplitude, squash and stretch, and joint intersection blending.
Tendon Action
Tendon Control - selectively assigns portions of skin to move with individual bones. Physique creates realistic tendon effects by linking muscle movement to arbitrary bones, deforming the muscles across multiple links.
Angular Pull - pulls skin based on the angular movement of limbs (for example, the chest rising as the arms are lifted upward).
Angular Pinch - pinches skin together based on the relative angle of a limb (for example, the pectoral muscles protrude forward as the shoulders are shrugged).
Radial Stretch - protrudes skin outward as other limbs move (for example, as when muscular arms' tendons appear when lifting weights) .
System Requirements for Character Studio
3D Studio MAX software
Pentium or Pentium Pro at 90 MHz minimum (full support of multiple processor systems)
Microsoft® Windows NT Workstation 3.51
48MB RAM (amount depends on scene complexity)
100MB HD Swap Space (amount depends on scene complexity)
Graphics card supporting 800x600x256 colors under Windows NT (1024x768x256 colors with PCI bus recommended. 1280x1024x24-bit double-buffered 3D accelerator ideal)
Windows NT-compliant pointing device
CD-ROM drive
Optional: Sound card and speakers, software and cabling for TCP/IP-compliant network, 3D hardware graphics acceleration, video input and output devices.
Your Authorized Dealer
Kinetix software is sold through more than 4,800 Authorized Autodesk Dealers, Distributors, and Autodesk Systems Centers (ASCs) worldwide.
To locate the nearest dealer, distributor, or ASC, call us at 800-879-4233. From outside the United States and Canada, fax your request for information to:
415-507-6110 Latin America Fax
415-507-6117 Asia/Pacific Fax
41-38-239-394 Europe Fax
To obtain more information about Kinetix software or to interact with other Kinetix software users, type GO KINETIX on CompuServe®.
For more-detailed information about Kinetix and its products and services, browse our World Wide Web site at http://www.ktx.com.
