Helo animation lovers,

I am about stop my first partially successful walking skeletal animation POV-RAY
attempt.  I have come much further than I have ever thought possible, thanks to
patience and help from this listserve, especially from Chris B.

Well, my Humanoid is walking, he is walking in place.  I have not managed to get
him ranslated across the screen in a controlled enough fashion so it will look
like indeed he is stepping forward.  I am able to calculate where his foot
lands that he strides forward with 1st.  Then I try to translate him so by the
time he brings his back foot into cross over position and starts striding with
it, his center of gravity is completely over the foot he took his initial step
with, and so on...   Hey,  now that I know where his forward foot ends, I could
use

Align_Trans(Object, Axis, Pt)

macro to align his right side with the point at which his forward toes came at
Logically, this should have worked, when in application it had not, I remained
clueless.  I had visually validated that my calculations of his forward heal
and toes were correct.

Given I hit a road block after months of trying and hoping, I realized, I should
not have fully left it to POV-RAY to manage the coordinates of my Humanoid's
joints.  Had I known them, I might have attempted some Inverse Kinematics to
enforce constraints, such as leaving the forward foot locked whereever it
landed.  Ensuring he does not go thru walls and floors.  Yes, I was counting on
Align_Trans
macro to handle all my obstacle management as well, I just defined a bunch of
reference points for alinging my Humanoid against to ensure s/he is safe from
obstacles.  That worked most of the time, if not in all.

Well, all this background is sort of covering up my feelings of guilt for
searching the internet for another tool that would provide more of the forward
and inverse kinematics functionality, while allowing scripting/programming to
its users.

I have found Blender.   See

http://www.tdt3d.be/articles_viewer.php?art_id=99

for a table of comparison of most 3D applications.  I know nothing about the
company and author that published this article.  It sounded through.


> Much to my shock I have 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?

Here is Chris  B.'s response already:

Thank you all for jumping in.
Meltem

=======================
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.

Regards,
Chris B.

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