In Brief

NaturalMotion (Oxford, UK) has announced VMC Action, the first product based on the company's Active Character Technology, which creates character movements based on artificial intelligence. VMC Action software is designed to enable 3D character animators to create action scenes without using a motion-capture facility....Softimage (Montreal, Quebec), a subsidiary of Avid Technology, has announced new tools for transporting data between Softimage and 3D applications including Alias|Wavefront's Maya, 2d3's boujou, Kaydara's FilmBox and MotionBuilder, and various gaming platform tools. Several of the new dotXSI 'Connect' strategy components are now available for download at no charge from SourceForge.net....Cycore (Uppsala, Sweden) has announced Version 5.3 of its Cult3D product visualization engine, which now comes with automated stereoscopy capability....DAZ Productions (Draper, UT), a developer of characters for the Poser 3D modeling package, has announced that it will acquire the facial animation product Mimic from LipSinc (Morrisville, NC), which has ceased developing software. —JD