[Bf-committers] 3D character engine

[Toni Alatalo]

Tom M kirjoitti:
>> A brief overview of our requirements:
>> -Able to render high quality human and non-human characters in real-time
> While Blender GE might be able to do this, when the OGRE 3D
> integration is complete that might be a better option.
This caught my eye, as real-time use of character animations was the 
thing that brought me to Blender many years ago. Used the internal GE 
then, but also ended up in considering other engines for later use, and 
have mostly used other engines now. For me the keypoint was 
programmability - the logic brick system does not result as a nice API 
for a programmer..

Does the ogre3d-integration include pyogre btw?

My early work on this is available as my master thesis at 
http://an.org/gradu2/ (no html now, will export at soon, but there is a 
PDF download). That work is really old already but perhaps there is 
something of interest, dunno, feel free to check quickly without 
spending too much time in reading all the blah blah.

>> -Character is able to act out certain pre-set animations on command 
>> (yawn, dance, clap, etc)
> That would all be based on the person who created your animation.
Yep, playing back Blender actions is straightforward with both the 
internal engine and others like Ogre.
> Makehuman model and using lattice deforms inside of Blender could
> fairly easily replicate faceputty.  Alternatively the makehuman
> standalone can be used similarly to Poser.  However asside from the
> body and body morphtargets there isn't content such as clothing and
> props.  You cloud use either the standalone player or could update t
i was unable to deduce the need for users to be able to create their own 
avatars from the requirements in the original post. i dont know Haptek 
from before so may be misunderstanding something, though, but am 
thinking that the characters could be just modelled, rigged and animated 
normally in Blender, with the clothing and props as needed (i guess some 
avatars can also be non-human, like animals perhaps?). but depends on 
the needs (like: is it important for one person to be able to make 30 
new human like chars in a day, or 3 very different kind of avatars in a 
week (or two), or do users indeed need to create their own).
> if makehuman only then poser style slide based changes can be done) 2)
> then export to Ogre3D format and have Ogre3D as your display engine.
> Since Ogre3D is LGPL you can use their C API to communicate with your
> AI and speech software.
that is our plan in another project, too (are now waiting for the final 
word on the funding there, so still unsure if it happens) - there we 
probably have one non-human character in a relatively rich & changing 
environment. that thing would/will be an installation for visualising 
sensor data, with animations being triggered by changes in the room &/ 
actions of ppl there. there also is another company doing the raw sensor 
data analysis and the plan is to call functions in the lib they provide 
from the game engine (probably ogre). oh and if that project happens the 
code will be GPLd.
>> man hours? Are there interested developers willing to take on this
>> project? If so, what is your hourly rate?
> It will probably take a lot more information to determine a man hours
Right - but I can at least say that am interested and that our group 
here will be perhaps working on a somewhat similar project soon (within 
weeks) too. So would like to keep in touch - I guess some other forum 
should be used tho to not flood this list with the details.
> Tom M.
> LetterRip
~Toni