Big-brained Andy Murdock has gone mad, I tell you, mad! with a deep discount on Automatron, his enormously powerful character animation system for 3DS Max (version 8 or later). It’s a system he designed based on what he needed for his ongoing film project Lots of Robots and it’s chock full of useful features and subtle enhancements.

I was one of the beta testers for the system and although I’m not the smartest tester in the world I was excited by the way it works.

Automatron uses a custom character rig that’s controlled through Maxscript. Once you’ve skinned your character to the rig you can use the Automatron controls to create custom walk and run cycles, pose all or part of a character, load and save any of those settings, and apply post-processing adjustments (like “Harryhausen”, a simulated stop motion effect). There are loads of options for additional IK targets and IK blending.

But wait! There’s more!

Automatron also has a crowd control system that’s been tested with up to 500 characters, and can animate characters moving across surfaces that are also animated. Now how much would you pay?

Normally you’d pay $149.00, which isn’t a bad deal, but through April 30th Andy’s dropped this to the low, low price of $49 - and although Automatron doesn’t require a license on a render farm’s nodes, the program can be licensed on two separate machines.

And if you haven’t seen Lots of Robots, well, you should, you slacker. The DVDs include Max tutorials for many of the techniques and effects he uses.

Technorati Tags: computer graphics, character animation, 3ds max, automatron, lots of robots, andy murdoch, walk cycle, crowd animation, plugin, maxscript

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