Zabaware has been working on a new 3D character animation engine for the past few years to eventually replace the current proprietary Haptek engine we currently use. The benefits of the new engine include:
- More modern system that can take advantage of current generation graphics cards for improved quality
- Save Zabaware on licensing costs and allow Zabaware to grow and invest more in AI development
- Cross-platform capability. The new engine will work on iPhone, Android, Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows
- Easy and encouraged user customizability of characters. Full body characters will be supported as well as full 3d environment rendering.
The Zabaware character engine is being built using the open source OGRE3D (
www.ogre3d.org) graphics libraries. The engine itself will be released under the open source GPL 3 license. This means the engine has the potential to impact more than just Zabaware. Any chatbot developer or company outside of Zabaware will be able to utilize, build-on, and improve the Zabaware character engine in their own projects. Currently the chatbot industry uses many different proprietary solutions for character animation. I believe that with one open common system we can improve the quality of all bots and have ease at targeting multiple computing platforms all at once.
Zabaware has spent over $45,000 in developing the engine so far but has run out of funding to finish the job. We are now reaching out to the greater chatbot community (including chat bot enthusiasts and other chatbot developers) to try to raise $20,000 to finish the job. This will pay for an experienced OGRE3D developer and graphics artists to finish the job already started.
If you are interested in donating to support this project please visit Zabaware's Peerbackers page at
http://peerbackers.com/projects/3d-character-animation-engine-for-chatbots for detailed information and to donate to the project. Various rewards for donating are available.
http://peerbackers.com/projects/3d-character-animation-engine-for-chatbots/home/
I’ll try to fill in some more technical details on the capabilities of the engine in response to some questions I received. The engine is about 90% complete for working with Windows and we have a working prototype. This is actually a description of what the engine already does in its current state:
Our system uses morph targets, and one of the things that makes it so special is that we give a great deal of control about how the face moves between those targets. This allows us to tune specifically for an inhuman character like an Orc, or a regular human, or even something like Terrance and Philip from South Park (quick, virtually non animated transitions).
Another thing about our system is that we also mix in emotions as morph targets, so the character can display complex combinations of emotional states in mixes, all while talking. We also have a special kind of “morph animation sequence”, which allows an artist to include subtle additional layers of animation. For example, picture a woman speaking, then a woman singing the same words she just spoke. We can make that difference by applying one of our special animation types.
In addition to that, we also have skeletal animation support, meaning that our characters would fit right in to a game like Fallout… they can walk, run, shoot guns, etc. all while making full use of our system. Again as an example, a soldier might have certain levels of fear, courage, rage, doubt (whatever) and we can apply them to his face, meaning whatever he says will come out of a face that accurately represents his state of mind, instead of the cardboard cutouts we see in games today.
So in a simpler way:
- We use morph targets as one of the fundamental elements of our system
- Among our best features is the way we blend between those morph targets, and layer them, and how much control we give the programmer over blending - it took a lot of work to build what we have, so people shouldn’t get the idea that if they can set a morph target, they can just emulate what we have
- We also have our own special type of morph animation technique which allows us to create very expressive characters, and it’s not hard for people to use
- We also support skeletal animation for characters (though that’s more for bodies)
- We also support morph animation (which is something we’ve never needed to use use and probably never will)
The engine code is very modular and even though we utilize Ogre3D it is not married to Ogre. It can be set up so that other game/graphics engines can use it as well. To put it another way, if you’d rather use Unity instead of Ogre3D for the backend, that is possible if you want to put in the work to make a Unity plugin.
I wish I could post an executable demo showing the current state of the engine but one of the main problems we have is that the characters we have created are owned by Ford Motor Company. This engine was originally created while Zabaware was working on a contract for Ford. Part of the $20,000 we are requesting is for an artist to create new characters under an open license.
But if anyone wants to see our engine running the Ford characters and see the level of control given to the programmer I’d be happy to send you an executable if you want to sign a non disclosure agreement. I just want to prevent the characters from being publicly released.
