What Autodesk plug-in distributed the original Dancing Baby model?

Character Studio was the Autodesk plug-in that distributed the original Dancing Baby model.

The model was Viewpoint DataLabs’ commercially available “Toddler with Diaper,” model number 5653. It was distributed with Character Studio, an animation plug-in for Autodesk’s 3D Studio Max, then associated with Autodesk’s Kinetix division. The baby model itself was based on a scan of a plastic doll.

For the famous animation, artists combined the baby mesh with a skeletal cha-cha routine. Robert Lurye developed and expanded the choreography, while John Chadwick used Character Studio’s Physique software to make the baby perform it. The resulting file was called “sk_baby.max,” and Kinetix demonstrated it at SIGGRAPH in 1995.

The meme’s later Internet popularity came from a different stage of the story. Ron Lussier recombined the baby model and dance file and circulated an AVI, while John Woodell later converted the animation into an animated GIF. Thus Character Studio was the source of the distributed 3D asset and animation tooling, not the website or format that eventually popularized the meme.