Yahoo! Music and NVIDIA Corporation announced “Yahoo! Artist Mods,” a new program that lets consumers create unique animated music videos by combining music titles with interactive digital animation.

Yahoo! Artist Mods showcases music video artists using digitized models of the artists, stage sets and instruments. To become “virtual directors,” with control over backgrounds, lighting, and camera angles, users can download the ModMaker rendering engine from the NVIDIA nZone web site. Once a new video is finished, users can replay their creation and share it with friends over email.

Yahoo! Artist Mods premiered with two videos: “Just Stop” by Disturbed and “Good Times” by Tommy Lee. Three more videos, including ones featuring platinum artists Sean Paul and Lil’ Wayne, will follow in the upcoming weeks to complete the five-part series. “Yahoo! Artist Mods is the perfect blend of two favorite pastimes – watching music videos and playing video games,” stated Dave Goldberg, general manager of Yahoo! Music. “We’re excited to be the first to bring this cutting-edge technology online and give users control of their music content experience.”

ModMaker was developed for Yahoo! Music by Big Bear Entertainment using NVIDIA Quadro^® professional graphics technology. ModMaker achieves optimal performance when played back on PCs equipped with NVIDIA^® GeForce^® graphics. Tony Shiff, president of Big Bear Entertainment, commented: “NVIDIA gave us the power to create fully animated music videos in weeks, rather than months.”