Marvel Universe Online, the upcoming comic book based MMO from Cryptic Studios, is every X-men and Spider-man fanboy's dream. Although City of Heroes/Villains series, which is also from Cryptic, partially fulfilled the urge to don a pair of tights and soar, climb, or sprint your way around a city, Marvel Universe Online hopes to completely satisfy the primal need of those now-grown men and women who held a flashlight in their young hands to read their comic books even after their parents told them to go to bed.
While little official information has been released about Marvel Universe Online, that doesn't mean Cryptic Studios hasn't been hard at work preparing the tools and engines necessary to run the comic book MMO. To prove this, the development company released the Cryptic Animation Rig (Cryptic AR) on May 9, 2007. The rig is free to download and use, and the devs at Cryptic are anxious to see the sort of community that forms around their new technology.
"Our goal is to foster a community of animators by providing them the power to generate animations without having to worry about supporting a toolset. Since we were already developing the rig for our core technology team, we decided to release it to the public under the GNU GPL," said Shayne Herrera, Art Development Director for Cryptic Studios. "We feel that the development and gaming communities will benefit greatly from a professional tool like the Cryptic AR."
Cryptic AR allows animators of all experience levels to familiarize themselves with the same tools used in a professional development environment. Unlike other free animation rigs, Cryptic AR is not an approximation of production tools, but the very tools currently being used to produce next-gen game visuals at Cryptic Studios.
"We decided to add the ability to switch and create character skins called 'IDs' (identities), " said Sean Burgoon, animator and creator of the Cryptic AR. "Cryptic AR version 1.0 ships with three IDs and we plan to release more on a regular basis. We are encouraging user-submitted IDs through the animation community we are creating on our web site."
The Cryptic AR web site will also have forums to serve as the community home for aspiring AR animators. The forums will act as a place to inspire continued creativity in users and support animation needs.
To learn more about the new program, simply download the toolset or browse the Cryptic AR forums.
