04/29/96 HOW TO MAKE TOONS BOOGIE LIKE BIPEDS

HOW TO MAKE TOONS BOOGIE LIKE BIPEDS

PITY THE POOR COMPUTER animator, staring into a monitor till 4 a.m. and creating frame after frame of a parsnip that sprouts legs and begins to dance. With each frame, every limb of the edible ballerina has to be nudged into a slightly different position. Autodesk Inc.'s newly formed Kinetix unit aims to spare animators most of that grunt work with a new program called Biped.
Biped, a plug-in module for Autodesk's new 3D Studio Max software, knows how bipeds move. It understands biomechanics and the center of gravity. An animator has only to specify where the parsnip's feet are supposed to land, step by step, like a Fred Astaire dance manual. Biped does the rest--figuring out how the arms would swing and the head would bob as the character follows the prescribed footsteps. For dance, the animator can specify where the hands should go, too.
Biped works with stick figures. A second plug-in module, Physique, dresses the stick figure with the wire-frame form of the character. Physique remodels the wire frame as the character moves--bulging the biceps when the elbow is bent, for instance.
The just-released 3D Studio Max runs on the industrial-strength Windows NT operating system, in contrast to predecessor 3D Studio, which ran only on DOS. That, plus the program's new features, should make it a strong competitor to higher-priced software from Silicon Graphics Inc., whose Wavefront unit has a similar program, Kinemation. Dataquest Inc. analyst Kathy Klotz calls 3D Studio Max ``pretty amazing.'' Klotz says SGI has recognized the threat and is cutting its prices.
EDITED BY NEIL GROSS By Peter Coy