The People Power team and I are pleased to finally make Project Geppetto available to you all. In this initial Labs release, you'll find some things that are amazingly simple and some things too limiting for your use. Basically, you can now paint "flows" of people into your scane and bring them to life with a few simple mouse clicks. However, there are a bunch of limitations that will prevent you from using this in every way you could imagine. That's not a limitation of the technology, just a limitation of this Labs release.

We've been working on a core technology that we call "Ocean of Motion" and it represents a data-driven approach to animation. This approach is completely general and can be driven by motion data coming from anywhere (mocap or keyframes or dynamics). However, what we focused on in this Labs release was proving to ourselves (and you hopefully) that we can:
a) Create completely believable pedestrian motion (free of common motion artifacts when the characters intersect and mingle)
b) Make the process incredibly simple to use

Now, we chose to release this in a way that only supports two segmented characters. That is a major limitation and something that we acquired Evolver.com to address. We now have a team and a technology for randomized and parametric body parts along with a large library of clothes. We decided to move forwards with the Labs release before the research to integrate with Evolver because we didn't want to hold up the feedback on the motion and workflow that we had already developed. This should give you some idea of where we're hoping to push the research work in the future.

Remember, this is just research and is only temporarily available on Autodesk Labs. There is no commitment on our part to make this a feature of any product in the future. However, we do value your feedback.

Anyway, check out the Labs page:
http://labs.autodesk.com/utilities/geppetto/ 

Also, we have set up a forum to discuss Geppetto:
http://area.autodesk.com/forum/autodesk-3ds-max/project-geppetto/

And if you have a feature request for Geppetto, go here:
http://3dsmaxfeedback.autodesk.com/forums/134765-public-project-geppetto-feedback