-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Zach Deedler wrote: > Hi Jan, > > Do you know where the most current version of osgCal is? The LGPL version.
You can find it here: http://osgcal.sourceforge.net/ > I swear there is a conspiracy to shut all this stuff down by some major > animation company or something? All this stuff is just not being supported. There is no conspiracy, however this stuff requires quite a bit deeper knowledge than your regular "let's write another FPS shooter/game engine" 16-year old hobbyist has. Not that it is *that* hard, but quaternions, linear algebra and profound knowledge of animation issues that you need to successfully develop this will put off even the more hard-core types. It is simpler to show off your shinny glassy spheres or metaballs or water shader or whatever whiz-bang effect than to animate characters well. Unless somebody puts the money on the table to pay for such library/toolchain, it will not happen, I am afraid. Outside of specialized university labs which are usually focusing on other issues than high-end, top performance human character rendering anyway, the required skill set is only within game companies and animation studios. And those are guarding their know how very well for competitive reasons. I have worked for VRlab in Lausanne under prof. Thalmann which specializes on character animation. We have also collaborated with people from Miralab in Geneva that is probably known even more for this, however, to be honest, we didn't really have some high-end toolkit for rendering characters ourselves. If it rendered what we needed for our research, it was good enough and nobody bothered with things such as hardware-accelerated skinning or LODs. You do not really need that for a screenshot in a paper or dissertation. Also the code quality is sometimes crazy - this stuff is written by grad and doctorate students which are rarely software engineers by background. Moreover, nobody will pay you for developing it since it is not really something you can publish or, even better, patent because it was done many times before already. I remember that I needed to justify how fixing up the osgCal library and its integration into our simulator contributed to my thesis. I needed something to be able to animate few guys on the screen for my AI simulator and our in-house libs didn't cut the mustard at the time. However, since it was not research, I had to explain why I am "wasting" time with it. I am not picking on my former employer here, though - this is very much the same elsewhere, at other universities as well (e.g. here at Aalborg). You are pressured to publish, publish, patent, patent - number of publications and number of patents are easy to count so some genius invented the idea that this is a good measure of a scientific quality of a researcher and the institution (just read the EU policies on research and see how they are hell-bent on patenting everything now). However, you cannot patent something like skinning or character animation so nobody will pay you to "waste" time with it. My personal objective and long standing item on my TODO list is to write a simple character animation toolkit with a Blender exporter (I really hate Max) that will be easy to work with, with a clean and small codebase. It doesn't need a whole lot - except of time which I do not have at the moment :( Regards, Jan -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mandriva - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFGJrLnn11XseNj94gRAib7AKC9wnN5Oz0SyqMn74PITB1Pxos8wQCfeWiq +PALQd2SYhRQ+ykRjMEtyUw= =rFKK -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ osg-users mailing list [email protected] http://openscenegraph.net/mailman/listinfo/osg-users http://www.openscenegraph.org/
