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Unity Technologies Acquires Canadian Animation Technology Firm Mécanim to Bolster Its Development Platform
SAN FRANCISCO, CA and MONTREAL - Sep 28, 2011 - At Unite 11, Unity Technologies, provider of the Unity development platform for awesome games and interactive 3D on the web, mobile, console and beyond, announced its acquisition of animation technology startup Mécanim. The addition, now known as Unity Canada, further reinforces Unity Technologies' commitment to democratizing game creation and delivering cutting edge technology.
"Adding the amazing Mécanim team to Unity Technologies is a huge win," said Joachim Ante, CTO of Unity Technologies. "Integrating what we believe will be the future of computer animation into Unity is exhilarating, and I look forward to showing it to our users. We're confident they'll be blown away."
In their careers, Mécanim Co-Founders Robert Lanciault, Sonny Myette and Pierre-Paul Giroux were principal engineers developing animation related technology in Motion Builder, HumanIK and the FBX SDK. Mécanim's visionary Lanciault began his career working for Kaydara Inc. as a software developer in 1994 where he met Myette and Giroux when they joined Kaydara. All three continued on together when Kaydara was purchased by Alias to improve the animation technology in the popular Maya 3D modeling and animation software. In 2006, Alias was acquired by Autodesk where Lanciault and Myette remained until they left to found Mécanim with Giroux in late 2009. The three came together to use their combined 30 years of experience as animation technologists to build the perfect animation system from the ground up.
"Seeing Mécanim animation technology tightly integrated in the Unity game engine is an exciting culmination of years of experience and development," said Unity Canada's Robert Lanciault. "Becoming an integral part of Unity gives us direct access to internal animation asset representation, a run-time evaluation engine and even a game editor! Unity will be the first game engine to ship with a deeply integrated next-gen animation solution. We're proud to be part of a company like Unity Technologies that so actively looks to improve its own technology."
The Unity developer community can look forward to learning more about Unity Canada's technology in 2012.
About Unity Technologies
Unity Technologies is revolutionizing the game industry with Unity, its award-winning breakthrough development platform. Unity Technologies has more than 650,000 registered users worldwide -- including Bigpoint, Cartoon Network, Coca-Cola, Disney, Electronic Arts, LEGO, Microsoft, NASA, Nickelodeon, Ubisoft, Warner Bros., large and small studios, indies, students and hobbyists -- all using Unity to create games and interactive 3D, like training simulations and medical and architectural visualizations, on the web, mobile, consoles and beyond. Unity Technologies is aggressively innovating to expand usability, power and platform reach along with its Asset Store digital content marketplace and Union game distribution service so that it can deliver on its vision of democratizing interactive 3D technology. Unity Technologies is headquartered in San Francisco and has development offices worldwide. For more information, visit: http://unity3d.com.
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About Unite 11
Unity Technologies is holding Unite 11, its fifth annual developer conference, September 28 - 30, 2011 at the Masonic Center in San Francisco. Unite 11 is an event for developers, publishers, enthusiasts and others interested in Unity to come together to learn more about the market-leading platform for creating high quality video games, training simulations, medical and architectural visualizations and other 3D interactive content -- and how to get the most out of it.
Unite 11 offers three days of learning including advanced hands-on class tutorials, technical sessions and an opportunity to attend awesome parties. David Brevik, the President and COO of Gazillion Entertainment and Co-Creator and Lead Programmer of Diablo and Diablo II, gave the opening guest keynote. This year's sponsors include AikenLabs, Allegorithmic, Autodesk, design3, Electrotank, Exit Games, Intel, Kongregate, Luxology, Massive Black, Mixamo, NVIDIA, OpenFeint, Qualcomm, SoftKinetic and Sony Ericsson. Unity Technologies hosted a Flash Day on September 27, the day before Unite 11 kicked off to give Flash users a crash course in Unity development. For more information on Unite 11 and Flash Day, visit: http://unity3d.com/unite/.
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