"melo" <mel### [at] coxnet> wrote in message 
news:web.47e2cb703d86ff96314b3d800@news.povray.org...
>
> Well now that I put him in a room, I could see the short-comings of my 
> approach.
>

You may find that you can use the 'min_extent' and 'max_extent' functions 
may help you avoid collisions between your object and floors/walls/ceilings 
(or at least detect them).

>
> Much to my shock I
> discovered a freeware character animation software:  Blender, which 
> provided
> both build in forward and inverse kinematics.  It was rated next to 3dMax 
> &
> Maya.
>
> Has anyone had much/any experience with it.  Am I daydreaming?
>

Blender is an open source modeller, (see http://www.blender.org/). It seems 
to have come a long way since I last looked at it many years ago and their 
site indicates that it incorporates some character animation features. The 
'features' section on the site certainly talks of skeleton rigging and 
animation with forward/inverse kinematics, although it's difficult to judge 
where it's limitations may lie from the brief description that I just read.

Their 'scripts' section at 
http://www.blender.org/download/python-scripts/wizards/ talks about 
MakeHuman Python scripts, but I couldn't get the links there to work. I 
don't know if those scripts are anything to do with the sourceforge 
MakeHuman project at (http://sourceforge.net/projects/makehuman/).  There's 
also talk of 'Walk.O.matic ' scripts and 'Blender People' scripts that seem 
to be separate initiatives.

Their site does have an animation forum which looks to be pretty active, so 
you would probably be able to get some good feedback there on how easy it 
would be to achieve what you want to do. Also you may well get a wider 
audience on this newsgroup by starting a separate thread for this question 
rather than tagging it to the bottom of this thread. It might be only you 
and me still reading this one :-).

Regards,
Chris B.

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