Messing around in Cryptics toolbox...

[RTTingle]

Now this is interesting...

http://www.crypticar.com/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=27

Cryptic Studios Releases Cryptic Animation Rig 

Free Cryptic Animation Rig Now Available Under the GNU General Public License
LOS GATOS, CA - May 11, 2007 - Cryptic Studios, Inc., an independent developer of massively multiplayer online games, announced today its proprietary Cryptic Animation Rig (Cryptic AR) is now available free for download under the GNU General Public License.

"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," said Shayne Herrera, Art Development Director for Cryptic Studios. "We feel that the development and gaming communities will benefit greatly from a professional tool like the Cryptic AR."

Cryptic AR allows animators of all experience levels to familiarize themselves with the same tools used in a professional development environment. Unlike other free animation rigs, Cryptic AR is not an approximation of production tools, but the very tools currently being used to produce next-gen game visuals at Cryptic Studios.

"We decided to add the ability to switch and create character skins called 'IDs' (identities), " said Sean Burgoon, animator and creator of the Cryptic AR. "Cryptic AR version 1.0 ships with three IDs and we plan to release more on a regular basis. We are encouraging user-submitted IDs through the animation community we are creating on our web site."

The Cryptic AR web site will also have forums to serve as the community home for aspiring AR animators. The forums will act as a place to inspire continued creativity in users and support animation needs.

Cryptic AR version 1.0 is now available for download at www.crypticar.com.

BAB had this to say about the tool.

Hey everyone.

Just a quick head's up about the new CrypticAR rig. This is not the rig we use for CoX. While this was in development we've been casually discussed the possibility of community created animations, especially for use as emotes in game. While we love that idea, there are some caveats.

We could, in theory, take animations done on this rig and port them over to one of our existing player model rigs, but none of us have really had the time to look into exactly how much work that would be. Could be turnkey, could take weeks of scripting. Even assuming we could get the animations onto one of our legacy rigs (it's all just moving bones around after all), we still have to go through the process of exporting, converting, setting up sequences, and tying those new sequences into an emote. Not a ton of work, but also not something we can just dump into a folder and call it done.

There's also legal issues with doing something like that that we haven't really investigated and I certainly don't understand.

So, feel free to download it and play around with it. If someone does something really amazing, then we might more actively look into what would be involved in incorporating it into the game. But no promises.

RTT

[DMenacer]

You need 3D Studio Max installed to be able to use this.