Interactive Multimedia Solutions, Inc. (www.IMS3D.com), a leading provider of voice-to-animation solutions for the multimedia market, is pleased to announce that Activision, Inc. (Nasdaq: ATVI) and Troika Games licensed the IMS V2A MDK to assist in the lip-synchronization and facial animation sequences in the newly released Vampire: The Masquerade – BloodlinesTM. Currently available for the PC at retail outlets nationwide, Bloodlines is an all-new RPG adventure driven by a devious and intriguing storyline, where gamers become creatures of the night, wandering the dark and gritty vampire world of modern day L.A. while a mysterious plot reveals itself.
"We are very excited and pleased that Activision and Troika chose our product to help them create lip-synchronization and facial animations for Vampire," says Donovan Moxey, Ph.D., founder & CEO of IMS. "This is the type of relationship that shows the real value of our technology and products, and gets us noticed by other prominent game publishers. We have products that add value, and reduce costs associated with game development. Studios that have to manage tight budgets and short production schedules see what we offer as an excellent investment."
The IMS V2A MDKTM is a file-based analysis engine that takes as input a human recorded voice file, or one generated from a text-to-speech (TTS) engine, and automatically creates precise mouth, jaw, and lip position data. The audio files can be in any language. The IMS voice-to-animation engine is ideal for English, but because of its unique proprietary co-articulation algorithm, quality animation data can be generated for French, Italian, German, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin, and a number of other languages. This is a significant time and cost-savings advantage to game developers that want to localize their game titles for multiple markets. The IMS V2A MDKTM also produces corresponding automated speech gestures that are generally associated with speaking including head, eye, eyebrow movement, and eye blinks. These automated speech gestures in combination with the lip synchronization data can be use to automatically animate secondary game characters without the need for additional tweaking. Additionally, the product’s flexible API supports the use of text in combination with audio files to generate more precise lip synchronization data, and makes it a must-have for serious game developers and game publishers.
"We wanted to use the best phoneme analysis and extraction technology to help us create lip-synchronization and facial animations for Vampire," said Graham Fuchs, Executive Producer at Activision. "This product in combination with Sourceâ„¢ – Valve’s next generation engine technology, provided us the ability to create high-quality facial animations for all the characters in Bloodlines. Integrating the MDK’s phoneme analysis engine as part of our game production process was simple, and allowed us the flexibility of creating as many dialog scenes as we wanted at costs significantly lower than what we have experienced in the past."
The IMS V2A MDKTM product is licensed to game developers on a per/title basis.