project:messiah 1.5.(character animation software)(Software Review)(Evaluation)

pmG targets character animators

It's been said that the best character animation happens when animators don't have to worry about the computer sitting in front of them and, instead, can focus on the character they are animating. To get to this level of interactivity, the character must behave naturally and predictably, and the animator must be able to massage and manipulate the character's motion easily. project:messiah 1.5 from project:messiah Group (pmG) takes a noble stab at this problem. Created by pmG's Dan Milling, Lyle Milton, and Fori Owurowa, the software provides some excellent character setup and animation tools that make it one of the better solutions on the market today.

project:messiah 1.5 is sold as a $695 plug-in to NewTek's LightWave 5.6 and 6.0. In future releases, the company plans to sell the software as a standalone application, to be called messiah:animate. The company says the new product will support and enhance LightWave as well as Alias|Wavefront's Maya, Discreet's 3D Studio Max, and Avid's Softimage|XSI. When messiah:animate is combined with pmG's soon-to-be-released global illumination renderer, messiah:render, the combined messiah:studio package might well become a powerful animation and rendering tool that competes with these more established packages.

The word "plug-in" fails to describe the completeness of project:messiah, which is a full-blown application that resides alongside LightWave. You create all your animation in messiah and save it out as a LightWave scene. You then can load that scene into LightWave Layout, do whatever lighting, texturing, and so on that you want, and then render it. The program uses its own file formats and can even load and save objects independently of LightWave.

The package is fast. I don't remember any time during the review process when I had to wait for the screen to refresh on my humble 550MHZ machine. It should be noted that messiah is extremely OpenGL-intensive, meaning that a good graphics card with current drivers is important for performance. When I first loaded the software, I experienced a few incompatibilities, but I solved them by updating my copy of LightWave from version 6.0 to 6.0b.

I like the interface a lot, which vaguely resembles LightWave in that it uses tabbed panels, and the buttons look similar. One cool feature is a gizmo called the Edit Sphere, which enables you to move and rotate an object within one ...