SmartBody - a character animation engine for Irrlicht

[arishapiro]

You can use your own models in Irrlicht that are powered by SmartBody, which only needs to know the skeleton topology and bone lengths (as well as a mapping from your own bone/joints names to the SmartBody internal naming scheme).
Makehuman models should work as well - I think there is a standard skeleton that could be mapped to the SmartBody one.
Performance is reasonable (on windows using our application, we can run 40-50 characters at 60k polygons each in real time), although I haven't tested it extensively with the Irrlicht interface. It handles mostly animation, which is relatively light as compared to rendering and other such aspects. Others have asked for faster scripting languages (such as Lua) instead of Python for performance reasons, although I haven't had a chance to create an interface that would allow you to connect an arbitrary scripting language to it.

The SmartBody SDK contains an irrlicht example - you can try it out and give me some feedback. It shows a simple interface between Irrlicht and SmartBody.

Ari

[user-r3]

Ah, nice, I will try the irrLicht example and play around a bit and publish my experiences here, when they are settled

[Christi258]

I can't get it working.
To build SmartBody with VS 2008 doesn't work because the project is older, to build it with VS2012 returns errors (most are LNK2038, any value from _MSC_VER "1600" does not fit to the value of behavior_scheduler_gesture.obj "1700")
What have I to do, to get it work?

[arishapiro]

I've been using vs2010 as the development platform, the vs2008 version is a bit out of date (although I could probably get it working easily...)
I haven't tried porting to vs2012 yet ; I'll need to build the dependency libraries for vs2012 for apps like boost to make it work.
Do you have vs2010?
Ari

[Christi258]

well i'm going to download it

[thanhle]

Hi Ari,
Will there be a version without Boost dependency? E.g. Can C++11 features be used to totally remove boost?

Thanks
Thanh

[arishapiro]

Boost is used in SmartBody in a few different places:

1) Boost-Python binding
2) filesystem access; standardized way to handle files across multiple platforms
3) string and tokenizer handling; utility functions for fast string processing
4) smart memory pointers; reference counting, I'm trying to eliminate all of these

You can eliminate (1) building with the preprocessor directive SB_NO_PYTHON
I'm sure there could be a non-boost filesystem access (2), as well as utility string/regular expression matching boost replacements, and apparently C++11 has smart pointer functionality.
So, yes, this is possible without too much work, but I don't have the bandwidth to do this right now.

Is the use of boost problematic for your use?

Ari

[thanhle]

Hi Ari,
Using boost is not an issue. I only get discourage in using too many dependency libs in development .

Cheers,
Thanh

[Christi258]

It's me again.
Tried to compile it with vs2010 now I get following error:
error MSB3073: The command "copy /Y ..\src\irrlichtsmartbody\irrlichtsmartbody.py ..\data
copy /Y ..\irrlicht-1.8.1\bin\Win32-VisualStudio\Irrlicht.dll ..\bin
:VCEnd" exited with code 1. C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft.Cpp\v4.0\Microsoft.CppCommon.targets

[arishapiro]

That's the post build script. It's looking for a file called irrlichtsmartbody.py that it wants to put in
the data directory.The good news is that if you got to that point, then the code was built successfully. Make sure you are building in release and not debug mode.

Do you see that .py file in the distribution?.if so, you can manually put it in the data directory, then run irrlichtsmartbody.exe from the bin directory, and let me know if that works.

Ari

[arishapiro]

It's me again.
Tried to compile it with vs2010 now I get following error:
error MSB3073: The command "copy /Y ..\src\irrlichtsmartbody\irrlichtsmartbody.py ..\data
copy /Y ..\irrlicht-1.8.1\bin\Win32-VisualStudio\Irrlicht.dll ..\bin
:VCEnd" exited with code 1. C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft.Cpp\v4.0\Microsoft.CppCommon.targets

I've tested the latest SmartBody SDK (http://sourceforge.net/projects/smartbo ... e/download) and I don't get the error. Are you using this SDK version or an earlier one?

Ari

[Christi258]

Yes I'm using this version. Now I got it working. Very great work.
But funnily enough, visual studio imports irrlicht 1.8 (I also have the old versions of irrlicht). So I changed it to irrlicht1.8.1 and now there is the error that SmartBody.lib can not be opened.

EDIT: Problem solved, i only had to compile the SmartBody Project first. But the other Problem still exists... strange

[arishapiro]

Your initial problem may have been related to project dependencies. I unloaded the irrlichtsmartbody project sine not everyone would want to tie SmartBody to irrlict, but doing so kills the dependencies on the other projects. So, as you figured out, you need to build SmartBody first.

The lastest SmartBody sdk is set up to use irrlicht 1.8.1, not 1.8.
So the C++ header settings (Propertes->Configuration->C/C++->General) should have a reference to ..\irrlicht-1.8.1\include, and the linker settings (Properties->Configuration->Linker->General) should have a reference to ..\irrlicht-1.8.1\lib\Win32-visualstudio

If your Visual Studio automatically brings in irrlicht-1.8, is there some kind of global header directory that points to the older irrlicht versions on your computer that is automatically added to the project headers?

Ari

[Christi258]

How can i see that?

[RonnieNeeley]

Just popping in to say great work on this. Excited to look into it.