As David said, it's not exactly a simple task. Our 3DS loader certainly
can import excellent looking models (there are some quirks and my 3D
modelers are getting better and better at making models that work) but
animating them is possible in a couple different ways.
To animate in real time you are going to have to sacrifice some quality
until the hardware gets a LOT faster. Moving a few joints (what we
intend to do) shouldn't be too bad but won't do the nice deformations of
a "Hollywood" style animation (keep in mind that we can't do in real
time what takes Max hours to generate a couple minute clip). I'm
intrigued that David states they are going with morphing (my intuition
tells me that is going to be too slow / CPU intensive).
- John Wright
Starfire Research
David wrote:
>
> There are a few people here with real-world experience, and they are
> probably all different experiences :) www.roboforge.com is an application
> using Java3d and has quite nice animation. You can bring a non-animated
> humanoid into Java3d very easily using Starfire Lab's 3ds loader. I would
> stay away from VRML in java3d as a primary loader unless you plan on writing
> your own loader. Java3d does not have complex humanoid animation built in.
> Even if you want to do something as simple as single skin keyframe morphing
> you have a job ahead of you. We have just started work on this ourselves.
> The path we are starting to experiment with is to model in 3dmax, use
> character studio to define the animation, use 3d exploration to read in the
> model and animations and then use the 3d exploration sdk to write out our
> own file format. Inside of java3d we would be using a loader which can
> read our own file format and then creating animation classes which morph
> between keyframes using geometry by reference and the geometry updator
> callbacks. If you want to do skin and bones directly inside java3d then it
> is more difficult because you need to handle the transformations yourself.
> I think it would be slow to set up an animation using a hierarchy of
> transform3d's but you could try.
>
> Good luck. I know there are people on this list who have this working, but
> no one can/will post their code on it, so you will have to figure it out
> unfortunately.
>
> Dave Yazel
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Rudolf J.C. Buijs <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Sent: Tuesday, January 16, 2001 6:24 AM
> Subject: [JAVA3D] How to REALLY get humanoid content into a Java 3D
> application?
>
> Hi everyone -
>
> We are considering Java 3D for development of a new application which
> involves animation of humanoids with motion capture data.
>
> This is a must-have: the humanoids MUST look good and realistic!
>
> I would think that it would be best to use a 3rd party tool to define
> texture-mapped geometry, export this to VRML (or .3DS etc) and use any of
> the loaders.
>
> What's a good way of going about this? I am thinking of content creation
> packages like Poser or 3D Studio Max and exporting to VRML, but I don't know
> for a fact that it will work.
>
> Does anyone have REAL-WORLD experience with this? What software are you
> using that will actually allow creation of humanoids and import them into a
> Java 3D application? Preferably in the H-ANIM 1.1 standard if that's
> possible. Which loaders to use for Java 3D? Any gotcha's?
>
> This is what I have so far: I've searched the web for loaders (found and
> tried latest X3D) and VRML models (H-ANIM 1.1 preferably), but so far I have
> been unsuccessful in importing even one humanoid (every single VRML model I
> managed to find runs into problems with PROTO's, I have some models
> available if anyone else cares to try, the demo VRML runs fine on my
> system).
>
> Many thanks in advance and many regards - Rudolf
>
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