Volatile Games' next-gen zombie to feature NaturalMotion's AI real-time animation technology...

Volatile Games, the mature content division of Blitz Games has today announced the use of NaturalMotion’s endorphin 2.5 animation toolset in the production of the next-gen zombie title, Possession.

Making the announcement, Chris Swan, Project Manager of Possession for Volatile Games commented, “Incorporating endorphin 2.5 into the Possession animation pipeline has been one of those rare experiences where you receive a significant increase in quality and a saving in time all in one go!” He continued, “Our next-gen title relies heavily on our zombies and civilians attacking each other in very detailed and original ways. There’s only so far that you can go with real-life actors of course, which is where endorphin steps in. In minutes we can literally load in some motion capture footage, set up a few behaviours on the characters, and let endorphin work out the rest! The resultant animation is incredibly convincing (we haven’t had to touch up a single animation so far), while the save in hand-animation time is huge.”

Swan added, “Additionally, endorphin is very enjoyable to use, thanks to its intuitive layout, robustness and very close level of support. The speed with which it operates is also highly impressive. Using multiple next-gen character rigs we still find that endorphin only takes seconds to calculate the results of our complex attack scenes. This makes it very easy for us to quickly export multiple resultant animations from a single attack, and then choose which one is our favourite!”

We’ll have more news on Possession, which is currently being developed for Xbox 360, PlayStation3 and PC, in the future…