It's cliche I know, but... it all began back in 1991, with a little $30 kit called CycleMan. Designed (with some encouragement from members of the TurboSIG) for Imagine's forward-looking Cycle editor, CycleMan made one of the first commercial forays into simulating articulated human movement on PCs.

And its potential brought Crestline Software into existence.

With the plethora of character animation options available today, it's easy to forget how difficult movable humans were to come by in those days.

While high-end users had tools to make this a reality almost from the outset, other 3D users rarely had access to such things. Were it not for the driving force of products like CycleMan and Humanoid (it's successor 2 years later), these capabilities might not be so widely available to users of all means and skill levels today.

Early on, products like Humanoid mapped out many of the fundamental principals involved in simulating human behavior which are widely employed in other 3D products today; And offered a potent example of what was possible in desktop packages of the day, with a little patience and ingenuity.

What started out as a curiosity to many in the industry quickly developed into an essential tool for forensics, simulations, and FX work. Humanoid's credits rapidly grew with appearances like a Simpson trial reenactment on the CBS Evening News, Babylon 5, the Tonight Show and a JFK assassination reconstruction.

Humanoid helped to shape the look of things to come by offering such things as morphable facial expressions, libraries of hand gestures and motion cycles long before players like MetaCreations, Credo, and Zygote even came on the scene.

And Crestline made these tools available to users at prices substantially below what other similar, and often far less full-featured models were going for at the time.

Times change though.

And, being the small company that it is, Crestline has largely been relegated to begging for scraps on the fringe of the very market it helped to invent, now that more dominant players in the industry have moved in and recognized it's `upside-potential'.

Unlike other innovations in the field of 3D, Crestline's developments did not involve the use of any proprietary programming, and hence no special technology or patents on which to negotiate lucrative contracts. Instead, Crestline has relied exclusively upon it's small (and sometimes very dedicated) Imagine, Lightwave and 3D Studio userbase for support, and has consequently struggled to make ends meet for almost its entire existence.

In a sense, by illustrating the usefulness of tools like this, Crestline probably helped to hasten it's own obsolescence. At the same time that it was helping to inform a new generation of artists about the processes of character animation, it was also gradually chipping away at it's own competitive edge.

In any case, it shouldn't come as too much of a surprise that the loss in market share to so many other players in the model industry necessitated a shift in emphasis at Crestline; And that this shift to other income-generating efforts resulted in a corresponding slowdown in our software releases.

`Down' does not mean `out' though.

Lest ye think otherwise, development at Crestline still continues...

So stay tuned.