SmartBody - a character animation system for Ogre

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oiram
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Re: SmartBody - a character animation system for Ogre

Post by oiram »

Very funny!
arishapiro
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Re: SmartBody - a character animation system for Ogre

Post by arishapiro »

All,

We have added autorigging and autoskinning capability to SmartBody. This allows you to effectively drag-and-drop a humanoid model into SmartBody, save that configuration, and load it into an Ogre simulation at a later time. We've posted two videos:

This one shows the autorigging and autoskinning capability:
[youtube]sZDIB83VE6s[/youtube]

This one shows the automatic registration of a rigged character (from Mixamo) and the online retargeting of a number of behaviors:
[youtube]MIhAVpGvDBk[/youtube]

We've also changed our default renderer to use Ogre.

Regards,

Ari Shapiro
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Re: SmartBody - a character animation system for Ogre

Post by Jabberwocky »

It's pretty amazing to see that in action. Great work!
Image
arishapiro
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Re: SmartBody - a character animation system for Ogre

Post by arishapiro »

Thanks!

We've also posted a Windows SDK (270 mb) on the SmartBody Sourceforge site:

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

which includes prebuilt binaries, libraries, source code, and set of Visual Studio 2010 projects to build the library.
We've also included the example Ogre integration code in the SDK.

We expect to post an SDK for OSx and Linux shortly (and you can always download the source directly).
We welcome feedback on this on our forum:

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

Regards,

Ari Shapiro
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Re: SmartBody - a character animation system for Ogre

Post by 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
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Re: SmartBody - a character animation system for Ogre

Post by arishapiro »

All,

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

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

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 includes an integration example using Ogre called ogresmartbody.

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
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Re: SmartBody - a character animation system for Ogre

Post by nickG »

arishapiro wrote:All,

We have added autorigging and autoskinning capability to SmartBody. This allows you to effectively drag-and-drop a humanoid model into SmartBody, save that configuration, and load it into an Ogre simulation at a later time. We've posted two videos:

This one shows the autorigging and autoskinning capability:
[youtube]sZDIB83VE6s[/youtube]

This one shows the automatic registration of a rigged character (from Mixamo) and the online retargeting of a number of behaviors:
[youtube]MIhAVpGvDBk[/youtube]

We've also changed our default renderer to use Ogre.

Regards,

Ari Shapiro
that you using for ui?
arishapiro
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Re: SmartBody - a character animation system for Ogre

Post by arishapiro »

nickG wrote: that you using for ui?
The interface is our own that we include as part of the SmartBody code base, called sbgui. You can use it to run simulations (we use Ogre as a renderer, surrounded by FLTK widgets).

Ari
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Re: SmartBody - a character animation system for Ogre

Post by hydexon »

Sorry SmartBody developers, but when i want to access in their forums but when i want enter in a specific forum, always gives me an '401 Authorization Required'.Even when i back the main page also appear blocked with the same response.
arishapiro
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Re: SmartBody - a character animation system for Ogre

Post by arishapiro »

hydexon wrote:Sorry SmartBody developers, but when i want to access in their forums but when i want enter in a specific forum, always gives me an '401 Authorization Required'.Even when i back the main page also appear blocked with the same response.
Sorry about that - we are getting spammed in that forum and we put up some protections against it, but maybe those protections are locking people out. We'll try to fix that. In the meantime, you are welcome to post your question here.

Ari
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Re: SmartBody - a character animation system for Ogre

Post by hydexon »

Ok, so, Smartbody has an abstract class to add another scripting engine?, since my game i need the all performance possible, and the team banned Python into the game engine due their poor performance of the application in serious projects (well for me), and is replaced with AngelScript (C++, no proxy functions required.) and Lua.

And is possible use SmartBody in archives?, i was using Smartbody SDK for awhile (Linux) and everything worked ok, but the model, face animation, skeletons dispersed around their character directory was a mess, isn't possible package it in a single archive?, like OGRE use for their resources?, PhysFS is very good and treats .zip files as directories transparently...

At Least, when it's ready the Bullet-physics version of Smartbody?

Thanks you!.
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Re: SmartBody - a character animation system for Ogre

Post by arishapiro »

hydexon wrote:Ok, so, Smartbody has an abstract class to add another scripting engine?, since my game i need the all performance possible, and the team banned Python into the game engine due their poor performance of the application in serious projects (well for me), and is replaced with AngelScript (C++, no proxy functions required.) and Lua.

And is possible use SmartBody in archives?, i was using Smartbody SDK for awhile (Linux) and everything worked ok, but the model, face animation, skeletons dispersed around their character directory was a mess, isn't possible package it in a single archive?, like OGRE use for their resources?, PhysFS is very good and treats .zip files as directories transparently...

At Least, when it's ready the Bullet-physics version of Smartbody?

Thanks you!.
(1) I don't have an abstract class that let's you add another scripting engine, but I did recently add a build variable SB_NO_PYTHON which removes Python from the build. This would allow you to build a Python-less version of the SmartBody library. The easiest way (for me) to enable and maintain other scripting languages would be to add a SWIG interface to the main SmartBody API (mostly the files in the sb/ directory) and then allow people to bind their own favorite scripting language (lua, ruby, c#, Java, etc). Angelscript doesn't have a SWIG binding, so a SmartBody/AngelScript integration would likely have to create one AngelScript functions for every SmartBody function. A quick count of SmartBody's Python interace shows 951 functions methods and 95 classes. Not an unreasonable amount of work, but it would likely take a week or so to complete.

(2) I think it would be easy to support a .zip bundle that contains a set of assets and have SmartBody extract them to some temp directory (hidden from the user). That would be a step towards better organization, I think. PhysFS integration would also be possible, but I'd have to look more closely at that library.

(3) An intern during the summer did an integration of Bullet with SmartBody, but it's in another branch of the repository (branches/research/emiguel), and the integration was mainly done for the purpose of real-time cloth, not rigid bodies. So, a bullet integration would likely take a week or two worth of effort.

If you're willing to share some of the details of your project, and there are some collaborative opportunities with my group, we might be able to get to some of these requests faster than we normally would for mutual gain. My group gets brownie points from our leadership from collaborations.

Ari
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Re: SmartBody - a character animation system for Ogre

Post by hydexon »

Sorry about the late response mr. Ari.
arishapiro wrote:
If you're willing to share some of the details of your project, and there are some collaborative opportunities with my group, we might be able to get to some of these requests faster than we normally would for mutual gain. My group gets brownie points from our leadership from collaborations.

Ari
Well, about our project, we create our serious game engine based in OGRE3D and we find SmartBody impressive and integrate in our engine as an animation middleware (instead of spend more than $79,000 in proprietary software), and because our project will use cinematics and with the features showcased in Smartbody will use more extensively, i can wait for the real-time cloth simulation when its ready.

The reason of .zip archives in smartbody because our engine editor has an Asset Browser like UDK does, but due their mess of smartbody causes to load an single character, will result in a total disaster. Its more practical bundle it with a .smartbody extension (but zip format, of course).

And we are researching the use of Smartbody with a cutscene editor, instead of using the OGRE3D built-in (but is used in mechanical parts, weaponry, etc) to create AAA-level cutscene and cinematics.

Smartbody has choosen to be integrated in the engine himself, no in a single project, so we can create many games and applications only using smartbody and saving a lot of work with our artists and programmers in the animation area.
arishapiro wrote: My group gets brownie points from our leadership from collaborations
Really?....
arishapiro
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Re: SmartBody - a character animation system for Ogre

Post by arishapiro »

Yes, I'm interested in your feedback and any other aches and pains that you might have during your integration. Just keep me in the loop with your progress, and I'll try to help as much as I can.

Ari
hydexon
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Re: SmartBody - a character animation system for Ogre

Post by hydexon »

For the Smartbody Developers and Site managers, when i tried to access to your Smartbody website's forum, gives me to the News page.
arishapiro
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Re: SmartBody - a character animation system for Ogre

Post by arishapiro »

Sorry about that - the forum gets attacked frequently. Not sure why that redirect is happening, though.

If you have a question, you can post it here and I will try to answer it.

Ari
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Re: SmartBody - a character animation system for Ogre

Post by arishapiro »

Ok, I fixed the SmartBody forum - should be working again:

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

Ari
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Re: SmartBody - a character animation system for Ogre

Post by 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

[vimeo]86414414[/vimeo]

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
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Re: SmartBody - a character animation system for Ogre

Post by simedj »

arishapiro wrote:All,

Image

Update 11/26/13
We now have downloadable SDK versions for Windows, Mac and Linux platforms here for download using the LGPLv3 license:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/smartbody/files/
Firstly... very impressive work, congratulations!

A licensing question - how does the LGPL licensing affect building on iOS where we have to link statically rather than dynamically?
Looking to find experienced Ogre & shader developers/artists. PM me with a contact email address if interested.
arishapiro
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Re: SmartBody - a character animation system for Ogre

Post by arishapiro »

simedj wrote:
arishapiro wrote:
Firstly... very impressive work, congratulations!

A licensing question - how does the LGPL licensing affect building on iOS where we have to link statically rather than dynamically?
For now, you can simply request a license from us (you can contact me directly at shapiro@ict.usc.edu if you are interested in this). In many cases, there won't be any cost (if you are building a small app or game, for example). We mainly want to prevent people from repackaging the platform as middleware and reselling it, and we would like to keep control of our code (and of course, get credit where possible so that we can keep this project going).

Also, this is also the case for desktop use of the platform - if dynamic linking is not ideal, you can also request a different license from us.

I think it's unfortunate that the mobile platforms don't make it easy to do things like dynamic linking.

Regards,

Ari Shapiro
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Re: SmartBody - a character animation system for Ogre

Post by simedj »

Indeed, LGPL and iOS don't really fit. I don't know what other projects do (other than use less restrictive licenses in general) - you'd think there'd be a way to encompass this under the intentions of LGPL somehow!

Anyway I might contact you by email in the near future, I don't have a specific application in mind but it could be of interest to my use of Ogre in medical simulation.
Looking to find experienced Ogre & shader developers/artists. PM me with a contact email address if interested.
hydexon
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Re: SmartBody - a character animation system for Ogre

Post by hydexon »

arishapiro wrote: For now, you can simply request a license from us (you can contact me directly at shapiro@ict.usc.edu if you are interested in this). In many cases, there won't be any cost (if you are building a small app or game, for example). We mainly want to prevent people from repackaging the platform as middleware and reselling it, and we would like to keep control of our code (and of course, get credit where possible so that we can keep this project going).
This incident occurred before?
simedj
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Re: SmartBody - a character animation system for Ogre

Post by simedj »

Oh and I forgot to ask, have you or anyone else tried this on mobile platforms e.g. iOS yet? I was wondering how computationally heavy it is.
Looking to find experienced Ogre & shader developers/artists. PM me with a contact email address if interested.
arishapiro
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Re: SmartBody - a character animation system for Ogre

Post by arishapiro »

hydexon wrote:
arishapiro wrote: For now, you can simply request a license from us (you can contact me directly at shapiro@ict.usc.edu if you are interested in this). In many cases, there won't be any cost (if you are building a small app or game, for example). We mainly want to prevent people from repackaging the platform as middleware and reselling it, and we would like to keep control of our code (and of course, get credit where possible so that we can keep this project going).
This incident occurred before?
Not to my knowledge, but if the license gets changed to be very unrestrictive (Apache, BSD, zlib...) we won't be able to go back to a more restrictive one. I do believe that there are bits and pieces of SmartBody that could be commercialized as middleware on their own.

Ari
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Re: SmartBody - a character animation system for Ogre

Post by arishapiro »

simedj wrote:Oh and I forgot to ask, have you or anyone else tried this on mobile platforms e.g. iOS yet? I was wondering how computationally heavy it is.
We do have a commercial user and a few hobbyists using it on iOS. If you eliminate the rendering, most of the computation from SmartBody is from animation blending, which is fairly lightweight. Most of the applications that I know of on iOS using SmartBody are talking-head type of applications (single character in close up), rather than games with large environments and, say, tens or hundreds of characters. Using our internal renderer (and not Ogre) on iOS we get real time performance from a 20k polygon count character.

Ari