Great strides have been made on all fronts the past few weeks. Aubrey's awesome character models, David's hardcore animation editor work and Jeff's fancy UI's have come together to create some great new functionality in Overgrowth's Phoenix Engine. It's been a little while since we've done a tech demo, and I've heard some clamoring on IRC and elsewhere for an explanation of how our new features work. So without further ado, here is an initial rigging and animation editor tutorial.

Be sure to watch it in HD!



Press the triangle button for captions ( Press the triangle button for captions ( download transcript

This is just the beginning, I've only shown off part of the functionality. If you think the characters look kind of gooey, you'll be happy to see the more advanced joint functionality that David has made possible. Also, the bones will eventually become physics objects that are linked to capsules and then we will have 3D character meshes that can collapse like ragbot.

In conclusion, the end of the beard is nigh. Thanks again to Mikko Tarmia and Anton Riehl for their amazing musical contributions which helped make this video possible.