SmartBody - a character animation engine for Irrlicht

[Granyte]

this looks really interesting does it support "climbing" or how dows it work on non flat terrain?

[arishapiro]

this looks really interesting does it support "climbing" or how dows it work on non flat terrain?

We have some partially working code that adjusts the IK target according to the terrain height, but it does it on a frame-by-frame basis, so there are likely to be pops. It needs a little work. We have also experimented with adding another dimension (up/down) to the locomotion system, which works on sloping terrain, but not stairs.

This feature is on our short list of things to do - perhaps in the next couple of months when we have a little time to work on it.

Ari

[dialNforNinja]

I don't think I've ever seen a game that uses the visible model of stair steps for its walk cycle - just count them as a ramp for the pathfinder's purposes. Maybe make it so you can set a stride length and step height, and have it consider anything within that vertical and horizontal range as being a ramp between the end points? Probably easier to say than do, like so many things are.

[arishapiro]

I don't think I've ever seen a game that uses the visible model of stair steps for its walk cycle - just count them as a ramp for the pathfinder's purposes. Maybe make it so you can set a stride length and step height, and have it consider anything within that vertical and horizontal range as being a ramp between the end points? Probably easier to say than do, like so many things are.

If that were the case, you would see feet penetrating the horizontal and vertical part of the steps. Also, the feet would never be flat as they should be when landing on a step.

[dialNforNinja]

Which would obviously be why that simple-appearing route hasn't been taken already. (sigh) I'll just be over here in the artists' corner, waiting while the smart people figure code issues out.

[arishapiro]

All,

We've added automatic skinning and rigging in SmartBody. Here are two videos, one showing the autorigging/autoskinning feature, and the other showing the automatic registration of a character from Mixamo:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... ZDIB83VE6s

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... IhAVpGvDBk

Regards,

Ari Shapiro

[roxaz]

Yesterday i saw video about euphoria middleware: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKLaMN9dnjQ
Immediately thought of SmartBody. Is anything like this planned/considered?

[arishapiro]

Regarding Euphoria-like capability, SmartBody has integrated character physics that let's you create rag dolls, track kinematic motion, and interact with dynamic objects. It's not well tested, and could probably use a bit more attention from my group. But the basics are there.

What's missing from SmartBody, and what you need to create a Euphoria-like experience is a set of dynamic controllers that allow the characters to do things like balance, take a protective step, fall down in a natural way, and so forth.

Unfortunately, those take a lot of development time and are difficult to make robust (I spent 1/2 of my PhD working on such things, you can look at my DANCE software http://www.arishapiro.com/dance/ for an exploration into that area). In the past few years there has been a lot of research into dynamic control for computer graphics, and perhaps some of these control algorithms can be more easily implemented nowadays).

Unfortunately, I don't have the resources to do that right now (but perhaps I can get a summer intern next year). That, a Kickstarter, or a 'Donate to the SmartBody project' paypal button.

Ari

[arishapiro]

All,

We've posted a SmartBody SDK for Windows which includes the Irrlicht example code on the SmartBody SourceForge page:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/smartbody/

This includes prebuilt binaries, libraries, source code and Visual Studio 2010 projects to build on Windows.
We will be posting OSx and Linux versions soon.

We welcome feedback on the SmartBody forum:
http://smartbody.ict.usc.edu/forum

Regards,

Ari Shapiro

[arishapiro]

We've posted a new version of the Windows SmartBody SDK that fixes several bugs and crashes.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/smartbody/files

SmartBody-r5218-windows.exe

Regards,

Ari Shapiro

[thanhle]

Looks great mate.
Will be using your engine in my work soon.

[arishapiro]

All,

We have packaged a SmartBody SDK for windows and linux, which is available for download here:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/smartbody/files

This includes an integration example using Irrlichtcalled irrlichtsmartbody.

The Windows SDK (240 mb) is prebuilt, and also includes source files so that the code can rebuilt locally.

The linux SDK is 120 mb and consists of the full source code for SmartBody, which can be built using cmake and make according to the README.txt instructions.
This has been tested on Ubuntu 12.10, and requires other packages to be installed as a prerequisite, but we expect that it would work on later versions of Ubuntu and other linux flavors as well.

Please feel free to send me email or post on our forum for comments:

http://smartbody.ict.usc.edu/forum

Regards,

Ari Shapiro

[arishapiro]

All,

We now have the SmartBody SDK available for OSx (210 mb) downloadable here:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/smartbody/files/

For OSx, download the file with the .dmg extension.

Regards,

Ari Shapiro

[arishapiro]

All,

Here's a link to a Gizmodo article that talks about our fast avatar capture system using SmartBody:

http://gizmodo.com/this-dead-simple-rig ... 1520325904

The output from the scanning process is a .ply model (standard 3D model format) which is then brought into SmartBody, then autoriggered, autoskinned, retargeted. The autorigging, skinning, animation and control mechanisms are already in the SmartBody distribution.

Regards,

Ari Shapiro

[user-r3]

First of all:
This looks awesome!
Seriously I cannot describe what I'm feeling about it.

Now to my questions (which may seem pretty lazy, sorry for that, but I want to hear or rather read what other people went through when implementing it):
How easy (or hard) is it to implement this in an existing (and rather big) irrLicht project?
How easy (or hard) is it to use my own 3d models (or maybe a brand new one made with makehuman)?
How much impact has it on performance? Are there some benchmark demo applications available?

^These questions may be outdated as I just (while writing this post) discovered the MASSIVE 234 pages manual. If someone wants to reply to those questions, go ahead, otherwise ignore them.
I guess I am still posting this at least for the thanking words at the beginning and I want to read people's experiences with existing irrlicht projects

Have a wonderful day!