"Chris B" <nom### [at] nomailcom> wrote:
> "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).

Yes, I had tried those a while back, and reported by failures in getting them
work the way I hoped.  See I attempted to draw a box around my Humanoid after
getting min and max extends to see visually what how those macros behaved.
Much to my disappointment, the boxes seemed to extend outside screen.  Well I
played with camera coordinates to see if by accident I had put any part of him
way out of limits.  I could not find anything it down.

Besides, even I was successful getting them working, I was not liking using
them, what if s/he was carrying something in her/his hand that extended beyond
his/her forward foot.   Nonetheless, the macros I found, and keeping rotations
in arrays, allowed me calculate the coordinates of his forward heal/foot
correctly.   Nothing too sophisticated.  Knowing the exact placement of his her
forward foot, and for the poses I coded seeing no other part of his/her was
further ahead than her forward foot should have made
    Align_Trans(Object, Axis, Pt).
macro work, it had not.  Well, I am clueless why the heck not?

It appears I could use a language I am comfortable with to generate POV-RAY
scene code using the Pose files, skeletal hierarchy definition files, to
generate the coordinates of all of the joints, then use POV-RAY to render it.

Well, I was finding myself needing a structured language that could allow me to
create a tree to represent the skeletal hierarcy, where each node would be a
joint-segment pair.   whenever a pose file specify a rotation for a node, that
rotation would need to be applied to all the children of that node.   Well this
is for forward kinematics part of the movement.

It blows my mind that you were able to accomplish not only forward, but some and
absolutely relevant inverse kinematics by traversing an array of joints up and
down and resolving all unresolved movement and geometry constraints.  Assuming
I interpreted your approach correctly.

I have accumulated lots of bioengineering and anthropological references that
give average volume/weight percentages of every segment in an average
male/female human body.   As well as biological joint rotation constraints.
All of those could be properties of tree nodes.

I have hopes, not limited energy to carry thru with all my hopes & dreams.   I
wanted an animated humanoid that would be subject to  the laws of mechanics and
dynamics as s/he moves to stay in balance.

I wonder how I managed to get my doctorate without Google?  Now, with the touch
of my fingertips I can do so much through research than before. Which has its
benefits and its down site, I get lost in the information highway, when I
realiaze how little I know, and how much more I want to know.

Well as I started teaching myself skeletal and character animation, and reading
up on forward and inverse kinematics, I realized the mathematics needed to make
my virtual being move was the the same math used in robotics.   Now, I want a
take robotic classes, I want to  have a robot that will be syncronized with my
virtual humanoid, in hopes they can facilitate robotic rehabilitation device
development and testing.

Yeah, yeah.  very doable for someone who is a recovering perfectionist, and a
recovering TBI survivor.

Thanks for your note, I will create a separe line of inquiry on Blender?
Instead of investing my years into resolving problems already solved -see that
would be the only way for me to really understand them and learn them- I should
focus on the areas I want to apply them to.

Cheers,
Mel


>
> >
> > 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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