Booth #2205 - Siggraph 2001
Create And Modify Realistic Human Characters Quickly And Easily
LOS ANGELES, Aug. 13 /PRNewswire/ -- Reflex Systems Inc. announces that
the company's flagship Reflex|DRAMA(TM) software and revolutionary patent-
pending Reflex|DNA(TM) technology will be made available for hands-on trails
at Siggraph 2001. Reflex|DRAMA(TM) is an off-the-shelf, 3D software package
for modeling, animating and rendering realistic human characters.
The software's unique capabilities -- officially unveiled at last year's
Siggraph -- have now been fully integrated and the software sports several new
features including a Skeleton Implants feature, complete Motion Capture
integration, and an improved model 'look' with bone, skin and muscle
manipulation tools. With these new additions -- which will be demonstrated at
Siggraph 2001 -- Reflex Systems is fulfilling its promise to provide 3D
content creators with an economically viable solution for producing photo-
realistic 3D human animation with a significantly higher degree of ease, speed
and realism than previously possible. The software is slated for general
availability in Q4, 2001 at a single user price of $17,000 U.S.
At Siggraph, Reflex also introduces the Reflex|DRAMA(TM) Human Development
Kit (HDK) -- a programming interface that provides access to the
Reflex|DRAMA(TM) environment enabling control of all human construction and
animation elements. This feature will dramatically accelerate the development
of a new class of application such as biomechanics simulators, genetics-based
crowd simulators, advanced clothes and hair systems based on a solid human
synthesis foundation. A white paper on this technology is available at the
Reflex web site http://www.reflex3d.com.
"Creativity aside, 3D filmmaking is a business," said Jean Nicholson
Prudent, President of Reflex Systems, Inc. "Films using 3D human characters
are extremely expensive to produce due to the time, effort and technical risk
involved with this type of animation. The Final Fantasy movie, for example,
cost an estimated $115M and took six years to complete. This kind of
investment is almost impossible to recoup. Reflex|DRAMA(TM) was designed to
encourage 3D filmmakers, or any content creator whether in the gaming,
scientific or medical industries, to continue producing the best in 3D human
animation, without putting their profitability at risk."
With Reflex|DRAMA(TM), a 3D human character can be built and ready to
animate in just 1 day, in comparison to up to 3 months using traditional
methods involving the manipulation of primitive geometric shapes and surfaces.
Furthermore, the Reflex|DNA(TM) technology, much like genetic DNA,
encapsulates the core definition of a human form so photo-realistic models can
be cloned or reproduced by simply manipulating the biological descriptions of
the human traits. In contrast, characters developed using traditional
methods, such as in Final Fantasy, are not re-usable.
New Skeleton Implant Feature, Motion Capture and Plug-in Interface
Reflex|DRAMA(TM)'s new Skeleton Implant feature enables users to insert
real-world data into the software and visualize the resulting human. This
enables -- for the first time -- the reverse engineering of 3D humans having
partial or missing data. The software also now features Motion Capture
Import/Export capabilities enabling motion capture data to be imported from a
number of common formats into a gesture library, or directly into an animation
script. Further blending and editing of keyframes can be done interactively,
and formats supported include Motion Analysis (HTR), Acclaim (ASF/AMC), and
Biovision (BVH). Additional new features include a Plug-in Interface that
enables users to access the default skin, clothing and scene editing tools to
augment the default behavior.
About Reflex|DRAMA(TM)
Reflex|DRAMA(TM)'s internal musculo-skeleton generation engine builds
successive layers of graphical human tissues-bone, cartilage, tendons and fat-
from scratch. By building human tissue models organically from the "inside
out," an accurate and dynamic representation of the human body, in close-up
detail, is made possible. Unlike current human modeling methods that treat
human models as geometric artefacts, Reflex|DRAMA(TM) uses a set of dynamic
modeling operations that are controlled using Reflex|DNA(TM) -- the company's
patent-pending technology for the design and description of 3D human beings.
Character traits like muscles, skin texture and hair are customized by
specifying their Reflex|DNA(TM) sequence descriptions through a simple visual
interface. The description is fed into the musculo-skeleton generation engine
that then builds human characters as a succession of underlying tissue --
bone, cartilage, muscle, fat, skin. A 3D human model is generated from these
processed descriptions, eliminating the labor-intensive work of building
geometric structures or setting up complex mechanisms to control them. The
character is now ready to animate and render using Reflex|DRAMA(TM)'s
animation tools. Reflex|DRAMA(TM) interfaces with other animation systems so
that data can be exchanged and existing assets preserved.
Availability
Reflex|DRAMA(TM) will be available from Reflex Systems in Q4, 2001 at a
single-user price of $17,000 U.S. The Reflex|DRAMA(TM) Human Development Kit
will be included with the purchase price of the software.
About Reflex Systems
Founded in 1996, Reflex Systems Inc. is a developer of high-resolution
human modeling, rendering and animation software products for the digital
content creation market. Reflex Systems is the first company to merge
concepts from bio-mechanics, genetics, symbolic programming, and 3D graphics
into a unified framework for human animation. Developed using these concepts,
and several years of intensive research and development, the company's Reflex
DRAMA(TM) human synthesis software is an economically viable solution for
producing photo-realistic 3D human animation with a significantly higher
degree of ease, speed and realism than previously possible. Reflex Systems is
a privately held corporation headquartered in Montreal, Quebec. For more
information about the Reflex Systems or its products, contact the company at
4200 St-Laurent Blvd., Suite 901, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, H2W 2R2, phone:
(514) 985-0695, fax: (514) 985-0645, or visit the company website at
http://www.reflex3d.com.
Copyright (c)2001 Reflex Systems Inc. All rights reserved.
Reflex|DRAMA(TM) is a trademark of Reflex Systems.
SOURCE Reflex Systems, Inc.
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Related links:
http://www.reflex3d.com
CONTACT:
Jean Nicholson Prudent, President of Reflex
Systems Inc., +1-514-985-0695, or fax, +1-514-985-0645, or
e-mail, jean@reflex3d.com; or Barbara Krzywoszanski, Verrecchia
Group Communications, +1-514-935-0166, or fax, +1-514-935-0162,
or e-mail, barbara@vergroup.com, for Reflex Systems
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