"Chambers" <bdc### [at] yahoocom> wrote in message 
news:web.43d81a10670091f6eed49ef10@news.povray.org...
> I've been away from POV for a bit (around 1 1/2 years), so I haven't been
> keeping up on what other people are doing.  I'd like to animate a person,
> and I don't know if anyone's yet come up with an elegant solution for that
> (ie, using a common file format such as skinned models from games would be
> an elegant solution; typing in hundreds of bezier patches for each from
> would not).  What have other people been doing to solve this problem?
>
> If I need to, I'll work out my own system; I'd just rather not reinvent 
> the
> wheel.
>
> ....Chambers
>

Hi Chambers,

I recently posted an Alpha copy of POV-Person. It generates a range of 
people, does animations and a bunch of other stuff. It's free and is 
designed to be readily extended. It doesn't yet have any converters for 
common anatomical model file formats, but over the weekend I wrote a BVH 
converter to convert some free motion capture data to POV-Person format to 
increase the number of poses that it can handle, so that's coming soon (as 
soon as I've debugged my converter).

It's still a work in progress and I get the impression that hardly anyone 
has done anything with it yet, but then it's not been out for long.

I posted the source here:
http://news.povray.org/povray.binaries.scene-files/thread/%3C43bb0b2b%40news.povray.org%3E/

There's an example of a walking animation I generated using it here:
http://news.povray.org/povray.binaries.animations/attachment/%3C434287ae%40news.povray.org%3E/pp00animationexample0101.gif

Other Alternatives
------------------
Zeger Knaepen is working on an animated Muscle modelling macro. See the 
thread:
http://news.povray.org/povray.binaries.animations/thread/%3C43c6bed8%40news.povray.org%3E/

Most of the human forms in POV-Ray I've seen on the newsgroups recently have 
been exported from Poser or from modellers.
I think this is how the 'Fighting Temeraire and Friend' mpeg that Stephen 
posted at
http://news.povray.org/povray.binaries.animations/thread/%3Co5cos1tjr1upujtsa0417f0cqtq8ddeg16%404ax.com%3E/
was probably generated. It was his posting and his link to the BVH files 
that got me writing the converter mentioned above.

Otherwise, most POV Scenes still seem largely devoid of human life.

Regards,
Chris B.

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