Morpheme is the industry’s first graphically-authorable animation engine for PC and gaming platforms. Morpheme 1.1 is a middleware solution designed to give developers and animators creative control over the look of their final in-game animation by allowing them to author and preview blends, blend trees and transition graphs in real-time. Morpheme consists of an animation engine called runtime and a powerful and flexible 3D interface called connect. You can read more about the latest version of Morpheme here.

The Blender Foundation announced a new project to create another open source movie codenamed Peach that will be created using Blender3D, the open source 3d modeling and rendering tool. The project is expected to be completed within six months starting October 2007. The open source movie Peach will be available for downloading for free upon its completion. The announcement could be found on Blender’s website here. If you have not seen the world’s firs open source movie, Elephant’s Dream, you can still view it here.

Trial versions of Adobe’s Creative Suite 3 applications can now be downloaded from Adobe’s download centre. The Adobe Creative Suite 3 was shipped last month in several bundles that include the latest versions of Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, Dreamweaver and other applications for print and web design. Creative Suite 3 supports Windows Vista and Intel based Macs. Visit Adobe’s website to try out the new CS3 applications.

Newtek has released the version 9.2 update to its Lightwave 3D modelling, animation and rendering software. The update is available for the Windows and Power Mac versions of LightWave 9, but the Intel Mac version is still in Beta. It’s release date has yet still not been annoucned. Version 9.2 of Lightwave introduces depth of field photorealistic lens effects, photoreal motion blur, global illumination and material shaders. There are also new modelling and selection tools including create rows, select entire loop, select entire surface, select Entire Part, select Path, loop expand and loop contract.

You can upgrade your LightWave 9 for free from Newtek’s site. Full versions costs $795.00 with printed manuals, click here to read more.

Toon Boom has released the latest version of its easy-to-use animation software for beginners, known as Studio Express. Version 3.5 freatures, Microsoft Vista compatibility, Drop Shadow effect to create rich looking animation, Export to PDF file format to preserve vector quality, Improved UI for ease of use and better efficiency. And its availablility in French and in English languages. Studio Express is up for online purchase for USD $99.99, or if you have the older version you can upgrade until a limited period for USD $19.99.

Adobe released betas of After Effects CS3, Premiere CS3, and Soundbooth in the Adobe Labs Web site. The three applications are available for Mac OSX 10.4, Windows XP, and Windows Vista. New tools are included in both applications and better compatibility with Adobe Flash, and Photoshop CS3. Soundbooth CS3 replaces Audition in Adobe’s collection, and it is competing directly with Apple’s Soundtrack Pro. Visit Adobe Labs website for more information.

Abvent recently released a new update to Artlantis Studio. This 3D visualization standalone tool features advanced rendering and animation options and is compatible with various CAD architecture tools such as AutoCAD, ArchiCAD, VectorkWorks, and even Sketchup. Artlantis can animate lighting, camera, and objects to create animations exportable as interactive Quicktime VR movies, AVI video, and JPEG or TGA image sequences. However, Artilantis Studio it is not capable of creating videos in web-friendly formats such as Flash video (FLV). You can learn more about this Mac-only render tool and try out the demo version via this link.

Avid Technology recently release the new edition its 3D Studio Max plug-in SOFTIMAGE | CAT. Version 2.5 of this character animation plug-in offers producers and game developers a better and faster work environment with additional features such as rigging, keyframing, motion capture and pipeline tools. Read the press release for more details.

The Amazon.ca online store revealed yesterday its listing of the upcoming Adobe CS3 products exposing package design, pricing, release dates, and feature highlights of CS3. The Canadian website confirms the pricing and bundle details recently published on AppleInsider and indicates that the majority of the the Adobe CS3 products will be shipped on the 20th of April 2007. You can view the listing on Amazon.ca via this link.

All the details of the Adobe CS3 products will be unveiled during a special event by Adobe to be held tomorrow the 27th of March.

[via No Comments

The new update to the 3D modelling, rendering and animation tool, Cheetah3D, was released today. Cheetah3D 4.0 features a new easy-to-use animation tool for creating short 3D films. The release of this new installment is accompanied by a special offer at which a single user license could be purchased for 109$ and the upgrade at 49$. This special offer ends on the 1st of April. You can learn more about Cheetah3D and try out the demo version via this link.