Kaydara's filmbox becomes Motionbuilder. (product spotlight).(animation software)(Product Announcement)

Filmbox, Kaydara's six-year-old character animation package, will ship under a new name at the end of the summer. The company is calling the software Motionbuilder 4.0, and the name change emphasizes the product's new drag-and-drop interface, which has been designed so that users can apply animation to 3D models without having to understand much of the underlying math.

In developing the upgrade, "We looked at what makes 3D hard to use," says Kaydara president Michel Besner, "concepts like math, IK, and constraints." He says the company then borrowed a clip art concept used by relatively user-friendly 2D graphics packages such as Adobe Systems' Photoshop. Under the new workflow, a user can search the Motionbuilder browser for a jump clip, for example, then drag and drop the clip to the ...