Overview of the general features in morpheme:connect such as graphically author-able blend trees and transition logic (based on hierarchical finite state machines).

Advanced features include IK support and native physics integration with NVIDIA PhysX. Includes voiced audio track.

This example shows how a basic blend tree can be used to control one aspect of your game character’s behaviour, in this case is his speed.

The blend type chosen is a BlendNMatchEvents which ensures that the foot step events of the inputs to the blend are matched up. This means that our cycles match up well and that we have minimal foot sliding. The advantage of event matching becomes particularly apparent when blending something like a limp with a walk.

A setup of a basic state machine. Each of the states is a blend tree with between 1 and 15 animations. The transitions in the state machine control how the character moves around the network and therefore what animations are being played at any one time.

The control parameters and requests panel control the character in realtime. Triggering ForwardLeadLeft or ForwardLeadRight will get the character moving. Once in the forward state the speed and banking to control parameters modify the character’s movement. The heading is used to control the angle of the turn when triggering the turn requests.

This example shows the HeadLook node, which is an IK node for looking and pointing behaviour. The node modifies the orientations of the spine joints to ensure the character is looking at a target.

The scene shows an idle animation connected to the Headlook node where the target is rendered to the viewport using the runtime scripting interface, which provides debug line drawing. Smoothing is applied to blend over time; AutoTarget assigns random target values through script.

This example shows the GunAimIK node, which is an IK node for aiming a single or two-handed gun. The node modifies the orientations of the arms to ensure the character is aiming at a target and keeps the secondary arm attached to the gun.

The scene shows the character playing an aiming animation that is connected to the GunAimIK node. A HeadLook node is also used for the head to aim at the target. The target is rendered to the viewport using the runtime scripting interface, which provides debug line drawing.

This example demonstrates how you can use animation sets to help visualise your character in morpheme with different accessories, in this case, guns. The scene contains five animation sets, each one consisting of the same character with a different gun.

Five separate rigs of the character were created in a DCC package and imported into morpheme where they were individually used to create five separate animation rigs. Each weapon also has an idle aiming animation specific to that weapon and animation rig. The network also uses the HeadLook and GunAimIK nodes.

In this example we show how the MirrorTransforms node takes an input set of transforms and mirrors them through a specific plane. It is useful in situations where you want to take a set of animations and produce a mirrored set without any additional authoring required (i.e. Take an existing right turn animation take, and turn it into a left turn animation take).

This example demonstrates the use of the BasicUnevenTerrain node, which is an advanced IK filter node that lifts and aligns a character's feet with the shape of the terrain directly under foot.

Each foot is lifted vertically to adapt to the changing height of the terrain, and the ankle joint rotated to align the foot base with the surface. The node also provides pelvis height control in the vertical direction to extend the possible reach of leg lifting, enabling the feet to better reach their IK targets.

This example makes use of the HardKeyFrame and SoftKeyframe nodes to demonstrate how they work together.

The HardKeyFrame node moves the physical rig so that it matches the animation rig bones in world space exactly. Dynamic objects in the scene, such as the boxes, will react to the movement of the hard key framed bones.

The SoftKeyFrame node applies forces to the physical rig bones to match them to the animation rig bones in world space. However, if there are collisions or the input weight, the soft key framing is reduced and the physical bones will react to other objects in the scene, both dynamic and static.

In this example network, a state machine of horse animations clips is blended together with event matching. The horse starts in an Idle animation and transitions to its walk cycles with banking blended in. Note how the transition to a jump animation ensures events are being used to match up the feet.