What is Life Forms 1.01?

If you’ve ever tried to describe human movements in words, you know that showing beats telling every time. And if you want to show complex human motion on a Mac, Life Forms is the way to go. The program, originally developed for choreography and priced at $ 1,200, has been acquired by Macromedia and released at the much more reasonable price of $495.

Life Forms works by interpolating motion between keyframes — that is, it fills in the motion necessary to create smooth transitions from one body position to another. The interface for positioning each body part is intuitive, so even beginners can enjoy virtually instant gratification. Although the program can’t address minute details of human anatomy (hands, for example, are fingerless, and you can forget about facial expressions), it gives you enough control to simulate fairly intricate motions, as the sample files of dancing and running demonstrate.

If you want your animated humans to look as realistic as their movements, you need to do some exporting; Life Forms' humans are strictly wire-frame figures. Fortunately, Life Forms is compatible with Swivel 3D Professional, Macromedia's 3-D-modeling software. You can save a Swivel animation script that drives an included set of Swivel body parts, and you can modify the Swivel files to create your own. more lifelike, 3-D-rendered humans. You can also save your animations in PICS and QuickTime formats, but then you can play them only as wire frames.

The program’s interface, although fairly straightforward, sometimes feels slightly cluttered. There are so many menus and submenus that the tear-off-menu feature can actually be a minus instead of a plus, because it adds to the clutter. However, once you've gotten used to the program’s interface, you'll probably spend hours trying out strange moves that would break the back (and other body parts) of a real Homo sapiens. If your world requires animated people, Life Forms is a necessary and fun tool.

Biedny, David. (September 1992). Life Forms. MacUser. (pg. 97).

Download Life Forms 1.01 for Mac

Architecture

Motorola 68K

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Basilisk II