Vital Idea Inc., a provider of technical products and services for broadcast, film, simulation, and game development, announced today that its revolutionary behavioral animation system, Crowd!™ 1.0, will be available for general consumer purchase in November 2003. Crowd!™ 1.0 delivers an intuitive, extensible, artist friendly interface designed to rapidly create animations that would take months to develop by hand. Instead of having to be a programmer to use Crowd!™, a node-based interface allows artists to visually develop complex behaviors for digital performers. By animating, or motion capturing, a set of animation cycles, performers within the scene can use non-linear animation to generate a number of unique movements. Thus, the crowd animation may seem "random." Additionally, events may be key-framed within the system to ensure maximum control.

Vital Idea Inc., a provider of technical products and services for broadcast, film, simulation, and game development, announced today that its revolutionary behavioral animation system, Crowd!™ 1.0, will be available for general consumer purchase in November 2003. Vital Idea is currently accepting pre-orders and early access users for the software who apply on the vital idea website, http://store.vitalidea.com/

Originally conceived in 2001 with the internal development name Doppleganger, Crowd!™ has been in development for over 2 years. It began as a plug-in to extend the power of an existing package; however, it rapidly “took on a life of its own.” Thanks to the advent of a distributed neural interactive simulation engine, Neuro!Machine™, Crowd!™ is capable of allowing many independent “intelligent” agents to communicate and interact across a network of machines.

Crowd!™ 1.0 delivers an intuitive, extensible, artist friendly interface designed to rapidly create animations that would take months to develop by hand. Instead of having to be a programmer to use Crowd!™, a node-based interface allows artists to visually develop complex behaviors for digital performers. By animating, or motion capturing, a set of animation cycles, performers within the scene can use non-linear animation to generate a number of unique movements. Thus, the crowd animation may seem "random." Additionally, events may be key-framed within the system to ensure maximum control.

The multi-threaded, rapid fire Neuro!Machine™ lives at the heart of the package, giving anyone the power to extend the system using a simple scripting language. Using the C++ SDK, Neuro!Machine™ may also be integrated into an existing real-time engine or be accessed via Crowd!Serve™ servers for interactive simulation and/or gaming.

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