NaturalMotion
| Subsidiary | |
| Industry | Video games |
| Founded | 2001 |
| Headquarters | Oxford, United Kingdom |
| Parent | Zynga |
| Website | Official website |
NaturalMotion is a British software company with offices in Oxford, London, Brighton and San Francisco. Founded in November 2001 as a spin-out company from Oxford University, NaturalMotion specialises in creating animation technology for the game and film industries. In January 2014, NaturalMotion was acquired by Zynga for US$527 million.
Their main technology products are Endorphin (for the film industry) and Euphoria (for the gaming industry), in addition to videos games such as Backbreaker and CSR Racing.
NaturalMotion commercialized their procedural animation technology, which they call Dynamic Motion Synthesis (DMS). DMS is based on a real-time simulation of biomechanics and the motor control nervous system. As such, it has roots in biology and robot control theory. NaturalMotion states that DMS allows for fully interactive 3D characters, as it is not based on canned animation. DMS is used in two of the company's products: Endorphin, a 'tool for creating virtual stuntmen' and Euphoria, a runtime engine. The first commercially released title to use Euphoria was Grand Theft Auto IV by Rockstar Games.
NaturalMotion's other middleware product is Morpheme - an animation engine for Wii U, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PC, PlayStation Vita, Android, and iOS. Unlike the company's other packages, Morpheme does not use DMS and instead provides tools for blending animations, inverse kinematics and rigid-body simulation. Some of the games that use Morpheme include BioShock Infinite,Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, Eve Online and Pure.
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