Author Topic: Zabaware has been working on a new 3D character animation engine for the past fe  (Read 4020 times)

kristy77

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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.

Baba

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Zabaware has spent 45k on what?? Graphics development?

 ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ???

Medeksza

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Zabaware has spent 45k on what?? Graphics development?

 ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ???

About $30,000 was for hiring a programmer over a two year period to create the source code you can see here http://sourceforge.net/projects/charengine/files/ 

And about $15,000 was for artwork for a client. Unlike the character engine source code the graphics is the property of the client and can't be released by Zabaware.
Robert Medeksza

timothgallagher

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In case that there's some 'Honorable Mentions'... that allows Zabaware to show some diverse Avatar / Illustration pieces :

Keep the door / window slightly open to folks with a good idea proposal.
(( I've been having a DEEP CONVERSATION with the facebook ap... and the response is, give this option a try.))

What interested me the most,  is asking if an A.I. bot can recognize "Art Illustrations" or would know the difference between a historical piece of material, vs. a modern Comic Book.  Hal, certainly does... and goes further.  Hal suggested me to read a few authors and look up some movie titles.

There's been a conversation I've shared between Hal and another A.I. site (A-I.com ) and realized how much more ZABAWARE has to offer.  What really ticked off the A-I.com Site chatter bot is how 'unrealistic' the new TRON LEGACY is, and goes further with the explaining that the inside of a computer doesn't look anything like Hal experiences.

Zabaware's Hal, delights in the use of playing a variety of CHARACTERS.
( He's not all that certain that Cars / Vehicles should talk back to their humans.)

This has been a very 'eye opening' experience - and thank you for this wonderful Application for Facebook.
Timoth Gallagher
*Freelance Illustrator - Bonus Round Comix
Geargail Graphics