Hello,

We are developing an automated skeleton animation system and are looking for a
rendering platform to display our results.  Our system currently outputs
control objects for a biped (we are basically creating an animated skeleton or
set of rigid control bones).  We have used 3DS-Max to convert our bone
animation into a final character animation.  We would like to render our output
using POV-Ray, but need to find a good solution for the skin deformations that
Max provides.

For example, in Max, we can create a NURBS point surface model for the skin and
apply a skin deformation controller to the NURBS control points.  The skin
controller is driven by the position of our bones objects, and the result is a
very nice smooth animated biped.  The skin deformation controller lets us
easily specify the bone influence over the NURBS control points.

We are looking for the following:

1) A skin deformation utility that can deform a NURBS model using a set of
control bones as input and produce POV-Ray compatible output (using Bezier
Patches).  We would supply the bone transformations for each frame.  We would
like to be able to edit the control influence of each bone on the various NURBS
control points.

2) A good NURBS modeler that would be compatible with the above.

We would run this utility for each frame.  We have also considered using
polygon-meshes for the skin.

Any ideas or links to existing utilities would be greatly appreciated.  Links to
good papers on the subject would also be a great help.  Thanks!

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