[Bf-committers] Blender and SmartBody character animation integration

[Patrick Shirkey]

On Thu, August 1, 2013 11:48 pm, Ari Shapiro wrote:
> 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?
>

My colleagues and I have similar thoughts for Makehuman and some other 3d
engines.

Our plan is to add a 3d model format to JACK

http://jackaudio.org

It's already the defacto opensource standard for professional audio and
midi data sharing and is well supported across the open source multimedia
as well as being ported to several platforms including linux, mac, win,
iOS. Tizen support is also in the development stage. Android might happen
if they ever fix the issues with low latency audio.

I plan to use the iqm binary format as the data format. It is already well
supported in many open source game engines and blender too.

http://lee.fov120.com/iqm/

Please feel free to contact me directly if you would like to discuss offlist.


Cheers

--
Patrick Shirkey
Boost Hardware Ltd