Home :: Products :: ActiveMotion ®

Until now, motion capture has been the only alternative to produce realistic motion for animated characters. LDI is unveiling a new service based on its ActiveMotion ® technology and we’d like you to give it a try.

ActiveMotion ® is the first automated tool to generate arbitrary and realistic motions for any multi-articulated character in any environment.

It produces clean motions (no jitters) in minutes rather than weeks and at a fraction of the cost of mocap. It also makes it easy to modify characters, terrains, and props, and eliminates expensive post-processing and character retargeting.

Based on physics and advanced Artificial Intelligence technology, ActiveMotion ® uses a proprietary search algorithm similar to world-championship chess programs. It searches through billions of possible motion sequences to find those that are the most realistic and that meet the intended motion targets.

In short, ActiveMotion ® harnesses the power of CPUs to automatically generate motions in standard mocap file formats—without the cameras, without the studios, without the actors, without the endless re-shoots, without the time and expense.

Our service can be used to generate basic human and animal motions such as walking, running, tackling, and jumping. But it is especially good for generating realistic motion for those applications that are hard or impossible to do with motion capture:

• Complex terrains: no need to reconstruct the terrain in a mocap studio.
• Dangerous stunts: no worries about losing real limbs or lives.
• Specialist stunts: no need to hire an Olympic gymnast.
• Non-humans (e.g. quadrupeds, snakes, centipedes): ever try to give acting instructions to a centipede wearing a mocap suit?
• Imaginary creatures (e.g. multi-armed, multi-legged, intelligent balls): no painful retargeting from mocap humans to such creatures.

Our service can also be used to modify existing motion capture data while maintaining realism (e.g. realistically add a stagger to a character) and to generate rapid prototypes of motion that can then be stylized with standard key-framing methods.

For the first 10 customers only, we’re offering our service at a “can’t miss” introductory price of $500:

• You provide:
  • A description of 1-2 characters (in English or a skeletal structure file).
  • The environment (in English or a terrain file).
  • The intended motion (in English or a video/mocap file).
• We generate: a mocap file format with up to 10 seconds of animation.

We’ll also include a free one-year subscription to our software (when released) so that your animators can make direct use of a professional-grade version of ActiveMotion ® for their needs.

We don’t expect you to try our service in your current production pipelines, but we would like you to give us a try so we can show you what’s possible with ActiveMotion ®. If you are interested, please drop a note to info@lookaheaddecisions.com to let us know your needs and how best to contact you.