Messiah (software)

Messiah (also known as messiah:studio) is a 3D animation and rendering application developed by pmG Worldwide. It runs on the Win32 and Win64 platforms. It is marketed to run on Mac OS X and Linux via Wine. Messiah's fourth version, messiah:studio was released April 2009 and version 5.5b as messiah:animate was released November 2006. messiahStudio6 was released in April 2013.

Messiah was developed as a commercial plugin for Lightwave 5.5 to 7.5, by principal programmers Fori Owurowa, Dan Milling and Lyle Milton. In 2000, pmG released messiah:animate; a stand-alone application that provided animators with an advanced rigging and animation toolset geared towards the animation of complex organic characters and shapes. This new package offered an Animation Host Connection which allowed users to transfer animation data into a variety of packages including Cinema4D, Lightwave, 3D Studio Max and Maya.

In 2001, pmG announced messiah:studio, a stand-alone package comprising messiah:animate and messiah:render, boasting numerous animation enhancements coupled with an all new render engine. Previously, messiah:studio stored license information on a HASP hardware dongle, but now stores license information on a USB stick.

Messiah:studio offers a realtime full motion and deformation-based character animation toolset. Features include:

Messiah's setup mode allows for non-destructive animated character modifications. This means a character's rigging setup can be edited even after it has been fully animated.

Creating bones is a "point and click" operation and the bones can be modified interactively. Weighting eliminating the need for direct weighting. Muscle Bones are possible in Messiah with a single click, providing squash and stretch on arms, legs, bodies, tails and tentacles.