EON Human Takes the Avatar to the Next Level

EON Reality's, the world's leading interactive 3D software provider, today announced the release of the new EON Human with vertex skinning and skeletal animation support. A key component of playful learning aspects is the creation of high-quality interactive expressions and body movements in EON within virtual learning, simulation-based learning and edutainment. With EON 7.5, EON can now support vertex skinning and skeletal animations (animate the skinned meshes with bones). This allows you to create believable characters and other jointed objects where a hierarchy of bones (a skeleton) controls the deformation of the object mesh.

Main features of the new EON Human:

• Hardware skinning -- the vertex blending is completely done in hardware to maximize performance.
• Number of bones is only limited by the graphics hardware and chosen Cg profile.
• Maximum number of bone influences per vertex is 4.
• Biped and standard bones are supported.
• Animations can be layered (with weights). This allows you to have a base animation for a walking cycle and then trigger another animation on top of this such as waving the hand. The weight parameter allows you to determine how pronounced this additional animation has on the final skeleton animation.
• Animations can have fade-in and fade-out times to enable smooth transition between one clip to another, or when applying a second layer of animation on top of the base layer.
• The motion track (that animates the root of the bone hierarchy) can be filtered out component-wise to allow interactive control of the model. This can be used to e.g. allow the user to control the character forward/backward using keyboard or mouse, while the keyframed animation still can introduce subtle side-way bends and movements, for a more believable motion.
• End-transition animation clips can be specified to allow seamless transition to a follow-up animation state.
• Attachment points can be specified for any part of the skeleton. This can be used to allow e.g. a character to hold an object in the hand, and if the hand is being animated by the skeleton, the object is moved automatically so that it continues to stay attached to the hand.

EON Reality, Inc. is the world's leading interactive 3D visual content management and virtual reality software provider. For further information, please visit www.eonreality.com.