As you read in an earlier post, I wasn’t to attend GDC this year, but the MotionBuilder team was there in force, meeting with customers and partners, and of course sneaking into as many parties as they could find. Reports from the front lines? “MotionBuilder is everywhere!” The team was surprised to see how many partner booths were showing MB, as well receiving a huge amount of attention from studios, interested in knowing more about the product. And for those of you who missed our Product Advisory Council meeting, the message delivery by the MB team on where we are taking MB:

It’s all about real-time. Capture your data, visualize your performances and interact with your animation, all in real-time.

We are going back to the roots of what makes MotionBuilder such an awesome tool. And we will be adding some features that are going to blow your socks off. We haven’t been this excited about a release for years. I wish I could give up more, but the legal-ninjas keep me quite until we are ready to release. More on this in over next few months.


What I wanted to highlight from GDC 2008 was the number of hardware capture systems being shown at the show. Here is a list of the ones the team visited with:

1. Intersense
2. Nexus
3. NaturalPoint
4. Xsens (Moven)
5. PhaseSpace
6. Natural Point (Optitrack)
7. Wacom
8. Mova
9. Motionanalysis
10. Organic Motion
11. MetaMotion

What hits you right away is when you compare this to last year or the year after which had half as many motion capture vendors. The trend is a positive one and we are working to keep the momentum building. All of these vendors had either MotionBuilder as part of their demonstrations or had signage that talked about MotionBuilder support. All in all, a huge showing of MotionBuilder and we expect things to get even bigger @ Siggraph. Looking forward to seeing what our hardware partners will be showcasing at the show.


Cheers,

Curtis Garton