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Wow.. Is this a mesh rather than blobs?

Very nice ... I'm still trying to make out what he is saying. But, very 
nice. :)

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Mike Raiford <mra### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
> Wow.. Is this a mesh rather than blobs?
>
> Very nice ... I'm still trying to make out
> what he is saying. But, very
> nice. :)

I cannot remember whether the lip-sync file was for (the first few seconds
of)  "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" or "povray rocks baby."

Thanks.  The chin is a blobbed stack of about 37 spheres, whose radius and
position are determined by a natural_spline. Half of them are stationary,
half of them are rotated by an angle that goes from zero to the angle by
which the lower jaw is rotated.  One of the latest improvements was simply
clueing in to the idea that a natural spline would work better than a
linear one.   If you look at it carefully, you'll see that the tip of the
chin actually looks like it flabs down a bit more than it should, almost as
if it were made of rubber.  I thought this was funny so I posted it.

Also the chin length in profile was totally wrong for the old version of
MIME Man, even though I though't I'd based it off an anatomically correct
skeleton.  These are based on the poser guy, as evidenced by the background
image.

Now, I'm thinking about how to use this stack-of-spheres to give more
realistic calf & shoulder muscles, plus lips!

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gregjohn wrote:

> Mike Raiford <mra### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
> 
>>Wow.. Is this a mesh rather than blobs?
>>
>>Very nice ... I'm still trying to make out
>>what he is saying. But, very
>>nice. :)
> 
> 
> I cannot remember whether the lip-sync file was for (the first few seconds
> of)  "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" or "povray rocks baby."
> 
> Thanks.  The chin is a blobbed stack of about 37 spheres, whose radius and
> position are determined by a natural_spline. Half of them are stationary,
> half of them are rotated by an angle that goes from zero to the angle by
> which the lower jaw is rotated.  One of the latest improvements was simply
> clueing in to the idea that a natural spline would work better than a
> linear one.   If you look at it carefully, you'll see that the tip of the
> chin actually looks like it flabs down a bit more than it should, almost as
> if it were made of rubber.  I thought this was funny so I posted it.
> 
> Also the chin length in profile was totally wrong for the old version of
> MIME Man, even though I though't I'd based it off an anatomically correct
> skeleton.  These are based on the poser guy, as evidenced by the background
> image.
> 
> Now, I'm thinking about how to use this stack-of-spheres to give more
> realistic calf & shoulder muscles, plus lips!

This comes across as a buttload of work to get the job done.  POV-Ray's CSG
is not a very good tool for doing organic shapes; organic shapes aren't
impossible, but they take a heap of work.  One thing I was amazed with
when working on the mesh modeler--especially when combined with a good
surface subdivision algorithm--was the speed by which I could get a model
done.  Things take hours instead of days and come out looking much better.

When the object being modeled is made from cylinders, spheres, cones, etc,
CSG produces much better results for a given effort level, but for organic
shapes Beziers, splines, and subdivision surfaces deliver much better
results for the same investment of time.

Regards,
John

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John VanSickle wrote:
> but for organic shapes Beziers, splines, and subdivision
> surfaces deliver much better results for the same
> investment of time.

I agree. However, these kind of objects need to be made with a modeler
external to POV-Ray. (Don't they?) When the object is modeled outside of
POV-Ray, can the animation of the objects still be controlled completely
from inside of POV-Ray?

Let's say for example that Greg want to make an army of men who all have
slighty randomized walk cycles. With his current character I think he
can do that automatically simply with a while loop because everything is
controlled completely from inside POV-Ray. How would he go about that
with a mesh-based character? If this has been made possible by now, I'd
be very interested in hearing more about it.

Rune
--
3D images and anims, include files, tutorials and more:
rune|vision:  http://runevision.com **updated Apr 27**
POV-Ray Ring: http://webring.povray.co.uk

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Without personal experience with character animation I'm hardly qualified to
answer this question. But on the other hand, the following seems logical to
me:

Mesh-based character animation can be done in either one of two ways: 1)
Different poses (especially facial expressions) are carefully modelled by
hand. The result will be a numer of "key frames" that can be morphed
together to optain whatever facial expression is needed. 2) Different poses
(especially the body) are achieved by mathematically moving large sections
of the mesh in various directions. This is controlled with "bones".

Now: Is there anything that prevents POV-Ray from doing this? I've tried the
morphing technique in POV and it works. It's quite simple. Regarding
bones-animation I don't have experience but I can't see any particular
problems. When both the mesh and bones are imported into POV-Ray, it's a
matter of moving the correct vertices for each bone. These vertices can
either be chosen by distance (those who are close to the bone will be mostly
affected, having less effect, the further we move away) or they can be
chosen by a "body part" index, where all vertices are given additional
array-dimensions, stating how much the vertex is affected by various
movements of each bone.

I know, I should take a closer look at bone-animation in 3dsMAX and learn
how it works. But overal, the principles don't look too complex to me. The
complex thing is to create the different poses, but that is outside of POV.

Regards,
Hugo

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Hugo Asm wrote:
<snip>

Very correct summary on character animation and bones. Now, I've been
thinking about the issue of making support for bones in POV-Ray for
quite a while (about three years), but my skills are not up to the task.
I agree however, that nothing is preventing it from being implemented
for POV-Ray either in a patch or maybe simply in SDL. It just doesn't
seem that it has been done yet.

Rune
--
3D images and anims, include files, tutorials and more:
rune|vision:  http://runevision.com **updated Apr 27**
POV-Ray Ring: http://webring.povray.co.uk

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Rune wrote:
> John VanSickle wrote:
> 
>>but for organic shapes Beziers, splines, and subdivision
>>surfaces deliver much better results for the same
>>investment of time.
> 
> I agree. However, these kind of objects need to be made with a modeler
> external to POV-Ray. (Don't they?) When the object is modeled outside of
> POV-Ray, can the animation of the objects still be controlled completely
> from inside of POV-Ray?
 >
> Let's say for example that Greg want to make an army of men who all have
> slighty randomized walk cycles. With his current character I think he
> can do that automatically simply with a while loop because everything is
> controlled completely from inside POV-Ray. How would he go about that
> with a mesh-based character?

My modelers have an internal skeleton (if the user builds it), and the
length and angle of the parts of the skeleton can be adjusted by the
scene code that calls the model's INC file.

> If this has been made possible by now, I'd
> be very interested in hearing more about it.

http://www.geocities.com/evilsnack/lionsnake.htm

Regards,
John

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John VanSickle wrote:
> My modelers have an internal skeleton (if the
> user builds it), and the length and angle of
> the parts of the skeleton can be adjusted by
> the scene code that calls the model's INC file.

> http://www.geocities.com/evilsnack/lionsnake.htm

This sounds interesting. I'll have a look at it.

Rune
--
3D images and anims, include files, tutorials and more:
rune|vision:  http://runevision.com **updated Apr 27**
POV-Ray Ring: http://webring.povray.co.uk

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