Maxiamo – Automated character designs and rigging
March 2013 – At GDC 2013, we met with Stefano Corazza CEO of Maxiamo (http://www.mixamo.com/ ) which has brought a new dimension to character design and rigging to the game development community. Their cloud based service utilizes standard and custom 3D character generation complete with rigging for motion, going into the games and animation.
Starting with their understanding of Motion Capture (MoCap) from their fundamental research they developed at Stanford, they have created a system for capture of realistic movement for real and imaginary characters. The service they created is a build once- sell many model. They have a range of prices based on the complexity of the character detail and movement, that are customizable for use by multiple customers. As they develop new characters, they are posted on their cloud server and anyone can download them for use. Most of these characters and creatures are fully customizable for color and look, and the basic complete cores and skins are part of the licensed IP.
This model makes a large variety of objects available for a little cost (in some cases free) for developers. The IP is a royalty free data set under the condition of no resale of the asset outside of use in the game. This makes a large variety of content available to independent developers of games, and allows them to focus on story and game play rather than the character rendering.
The high artistic quality of the designs has brought AAA game developers to use their services. For specialty characters, they offer a service where they will utilize their own studio and custom develop the creature, animal or character and integrate MoCap for specific motions. These designs are turned around on a short (sub 1 week) calendar schedule and create the IP in FBX and Colata formats which import to just about all the game development workflows including 3DMax and Unity.
One of the major challenges on MoCap and mobile gaming development is the creation and tracking of facial expressions. They have also released a real time single camera kit for facial expression and it provides an end to end solution for the animation creation. This includes support for optimized polygon generation for handheld devices.
