[Bf-committers] Blender and SmartBody character animation integration

[Ari Shapiro]

All,

My team and I have been working on SmartBody (http://smartbody.ict.usc.edu). It's a real-time character animation system that provides capabilities such as locomotion, steering, lip synching, facial expression, retargeting, reaching and grabbing and other character-centric capabilities like that. The source code is LGPL and freely available. It's written in C++ with Python bindings via boost.

I would like to try to integrate it or some parts of it with Blender. I see two potential areas:

1) Integration with the Blender game engine - this is a natural fit
2) Integration with Blender as an integrated set of tools - parts of the system could be extracted and used as plugins for various purposes, i.e. automated lip syncing, crowd movements, locomotion along a path, etc.

Does anyone have any thoughts or advice about this?

Regards,

Ari Shapiro
http://www.arishapiro.com