Meet 3D-IO games, a German based software company specializing in advertising and high quality 2d and 3d game design. We had the chance to sit down with Igor Posavec, the Creative Art Director for 3D-IO, to ask him about his experience with our software’s.

When we asked Igor to give us a brief synopsis of their latest project he could barely contain his excitement: “Perry Rhodan - the Myth of Illochim -or "Immortals of Terra” is a thrilling adventure game, situated in the far future and covering the happenings around the legendary race of Illochims (Angels), who once came to the Earth. Since they disappeared and all proofs that they were ever here vanished, they became a legend. Fast forward 5000 years later, the discovery of a crashed space cruiser containing the bodies of this "angels" has been found in a distant asteroid field. In a game full of puzzles and tasks, you are asked to solve many mysteries and conspiracies that twist and turn at every corner. This is one of the rare games that comes with over 20 minutes of rendered CG cinematics. Not only  do we reward player for his achievements, but we also portray events that would be impossible to show as in game cinematics.”

He went on to present the hero: “Perry Rhodan is one of few immortals in the universe, alive for more than 3000 years his job is to defend and expand the Solar System Human Empire against all dangers. He’s a good guy, a hero and at the forefront of the action with friends and helpers, fighting against the other races.”

The adventures of Perry Rhodan, although little known in the United States and Canada, are an institution when it comes to science fiction in Europe.  Originating in the 1960’s, this cult classic has over 2500 books written about it and its realism is found in its complexity, which goes far beyond the Star Trek universe.  This game presented itself as a great opportunity to spread the iconic Perry Rhodan across the Atlantic and truly make it bigger than our world.

During the development of Perry- the Myth of the illochim, 3D-IO used two of Di-O-Matic’s best known products.  “A very important aspect of this game was obviously going to be facial animation and lip-synchronization. Seeing as we had over 240 minutes of spoken dialog in several languages, we decided to use Voice-O-Matic and Morph-O-Matic as the main production tools to help us spend as little time as possible while assuring great results.” explained Igor.

We were curious as to why 3D-IO picked our products over others  to create the cast of Perry Rhodan. Igor was quick to make it clear it was the natural choice for him: “I’ve been using Morph-O-Matic for many years. Most of its features are what programmers and artists like me prefer. It’s simple and it’s logical. Something as basic as the save/load feature is a huge time-saver. One click replaces the whole long process of copying and pasting a whole scene into another.  We’re talking about saving days of work here, and with all that copying and pasting you are bound to have a glitches and crashes, so this was a huge advantage. Since both products are fully compatible and are made to be easily integrated into an already existing pipeline, we were able to have speedy and quality results without a single integration issue! “

He goes to elaborate about the immense amount of dedication 3D-IO had for the project: “We started off as a team of 10, but because of the amount of work required, we were 22 at some point and there was work done around the clock. When you have 75 characters to create from scratch, 12 facial expressions and over 240 minutes of dialog, you learn how beneficial something like a floating window for morphing is. No more searching for a channel.”

There could be no better testimony to the easiness behind our products then when a Creative Art Director like Igor tell us bluntly that: “Voice-O-Matic is not a product that requires much effort: for the Perry Rhodan game, we simply selected a head, loaded a sound file and after a few seconds we had our animation. In most cases it required no modification, but it was useful to have the possibility to tweak when we needed the extra dramatic effect.”

When we asked him if he was satisfied with the results, Igor answered without hesitation: “We’ve received great reviews, above 80%, so all of us are glad that we had Morph-O-Matic and Voice-O-Matic to help us out. The game is at the moment a top-seller on the german market, with the USA, UK, French, Italian, Polish and Russian versions coming out soon. We spent a lot of sleepless nights, but since Di-O-Matic software did 90% of the lip-synching work we probably would have had many more if it weren’t around.”

Once again, Di-O-Matic technologies helped artists bring unique CG characters to life, this time the team at 3D-IO easily exported all their animations to their game engine to offer gamers a unique gameplay and visual experience. More than 120 movie-like scenes with over 250 shots were created to achieve the striking visual depth and gameplay of this work of art, adding Perry Rhodan to our list of famous CG characters like Spiderman and Lara Croft that used Di-O-Matic products to come to life and entertain audience worldwide.

Web Links
Visit the website of 3D-IO : www.3d-io.com
Perry Rhodan - Game website : www.perry-rhodan-game.de

Morph-O-Matic is available at $249, for more info visit Morph-O-Matic's webpage or get the FREE trial here.
 
Voice-O-Matic is available at $349, for more info visit Voice-O-Matic's webpage or get the FREE trial here.
Voice-O-Matic is also available for Softimage and Maya.