Dancing baby

The original baby model file, Viewpoint Datalab's commercially available "Toddler with Diaper" Model #5653, was distributed in Character Studio, a plug-in for the Autodesk 3ds Max application (known as "3D Studio Max" at the time) from a division of Autodesk, Kinetix.

Robert Lurye, who was animating at Rhythm and Hues Studios, was hired by the software company Unreal Pictures and told to make more samples for their animation program prototype, the future Character Studio. Lurye started changing the choreography of a dancing adult skeleton that had been made by the team (the "chacha.bip" file). He added more dance moves, such as making it "play air guitar for a second and bend over and shake its shoulders." The program had multiple renderings of creatures that could be animated, including an alien, a dinosaur and a baby. The 3-D model of the baby had been developed by Viewpoint DataLabs' Tony Morrill, and was based on a scan of a plastic doll. Team member John Chadwick, by using the Physique software, made the baby model perform the skeleton's dance. He stated that it was his idea to load the dancing animation on the baby. Vulture reports that the animation was also developed by Paul Bloemink, John Hutchinson and Adam Felt.

The result was a file with the name "sk_baby.max". Kinetix exhibited a demo of the Dancing Baby in the 1995 SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference. Character Studio was released in August 1996. According to The New York Times, Unreal Pictures co-founder Michael Girard had discarded the Dancing Baby, opining it was "disturbing" for its realistic nature.