"Mike the Elder" <nomail@nomail> wrote in message 
news:web.491b145b87020f10ad9dd8b40@news.povray.org...
> The last time that I broached the subject of adding human figures to my 
> POV-Ray
> work, I became so frustrated that I just gave up and went back to working
> figure-free.
>
> Finally, what about whole new alternatives I might be missing?

Hi Mike,

The MakeHuman project is attempting to make humanoid figures available to 
everyone on a GPL license. They already have a good open licensed humanoid 
base mesh and a working humanoid modelling application that was released 
about a year ago (as a release candidate).

The new release candidate currently under development is being built to 
incorporate a large range of ethnic, physiological, age and gender model 
variants and an improved pose GUI.  It exposes a considerable amount of 
functionality through its Python API. A POV-Ray export function is already 
built into the project on SourceForge which will give POV-Ray users a lot of 
options that they don't get with meshes converted or exported from most of 
the available tools (see 
http://makehuman.wiki.sourceforge.net/UG_POVRay_Export).

> I really would like to support the freeware movement and its associated
> communities whenever feasible.

As yet the model has no hair or props (e.g. clothes) and no built in 
animation features and needs people to invest time and modelling skills to 
increase the speed at which such features can be implemented.  I have some 
POV-Ray macros for the generation of hair and some simple clothing from work 
I did on earlier POV humans a few years ago. My plan is to adapt these to 
fit the MakeHuman model. Anyone wishing to contribute time, coding skills, 
modelling skills, POV-Ray skills or just ideas at any level is most welcome 
to join in.

> What about "two-way-traffic" between POV-Ray and figure software so that 
> figures
> can integrate with furniture and props that I create directly in POV-Ray? 
> Am I
> stuck generating figures with empty hands sitting on empty air in the 
> figure
> software and then tediously trying to match things up by trial and error 
> in
> SDL?

The MakeHuman application currently under development incorporates a Python 
interpreter and exposes its Python API so that Python plugin scripts can be 
coded and run through command-line options without needing to install 
anything else. You could therefore conceivably code a Python script to take 
an input file that you generate from your POV-Ray scene, load a figure, pose 
it based on your generated data and export a posed model that can be 
included in your scene.  It would clearly be quite some work, but it opens 
up the possibility of getting a character to walk over terrain or climb 
stairs defined in your scene file.

Best Regards,
Chris B.

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