I’ve been looking at the latest version of IKinema, and I reckon those of you out there who work on game animation might want to take a look at it. If you don’t know what IKinema is, the official marketing description is “A full-body animation technology that allows effortless run-time control of characters during game play to achieve full adaptation to a scene giving users a new game animation experience”.

OK, so what does that mean exactly? Well, put simply, it is an animation tool that comes in the form of a plug-in for applications like Maya and which allows artists to customise creatures and characters in the pipeline. 

The IKinema Maya plug-in will allow you to work directly on your model in real-time and includes features like:

• Real-time solving from marker data
• Automatic balance features and force constraint tools
• Re-target any source to any target
• Real-time streaming and re-targeting from Vicon-Blade & Xsens-MVN software

The latest version supports Maya 2012.

Both Professional and Academic/Student licenses are available. The Academic/Student version has MoCap streaming from Vicon and Xsens, and IKinema Bake functionalities disabled.

Click here for more info.