Messages

From the horse's mouth if you don't believe me...

http://www.haptek.com/developers/HaptekGuide4/MakinContent/advanced/bvh/index.html

;)

Yes those look like joints.

Thanks Carl, I don't think I am a pioneer really, I just learnt a bit while messing with various things. The bones are not actual physical (should that be pseudo-physical  ??? ) things, the only place you really 'see' evidence of them is in your modelling program.

Here you go, this is a good example of what's going on : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGvalWG8HBU

Art, you know I have a lot of back burners, I pop in here every now and then to see what's going on. If I find new things or suddenly I get that 'Eureka' moment I often share if I think it interests others who are working on similar things.

If Rob came up with an API into Hal then the whole thing could be more modular, maybe that will happen one day with the online version that was talked about. So once you have your intelligence, and Hal is still one of the best and most entertaining, then people could develop plugins like an animation system. A lot of work though and really a niche market.

If I can find some time to share what I have learnt I will let you know.

Yes it's a 3D mesh of polygons but you do need what they call bones...

It's called rigging and where you have, say, the mesh of the leg, there will be a few bones there that decide how much the movement of the bones influences the movement of the mesh. So if you moved the leg bone you would not want it to influence the neck and so on. This is termed 'weighting' and is generally done in the modelling program, eg Blender.

Haptek is dead yes. You guys must really love Hal to keep on at it for all these years so good luck to you. If you ever want to get Daz models animated then your best bet is Unity at the moment or possibly the Unreal Engine.

Here's Unity : http://unity3d.com/

You can import from Daz into Unity. Here's something I worked on a while back : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reSdHa3sCyU

This is a Daz character connected to a basic AIML bot, as you can see from some of the responses, the AI is lacking.

If you don't want to mess around a lot with the Daz to Unity problem then there is this new company made by the people behind Daz...

https://www.morph3d.com/

These are ready made for Unity, but you need to buy them - for what you get the price is very good though imho.

I've not heard anything from Rob in a long long time, so I wonder if he has given up on Hal now.

While I am popping in I'd also like to invite you all to take a look at a new forum for CGI that I set up : http://cgiforum.co.uk/

This is the kind of thing I expect to be discussed there - I'll see about writing some tutorial about the Daz/Unity thing in the new year some time I hope.

Anyway, Happy New Year you mad lot !

yes it  a  dam fine  skin ,hope you don't mind  me  putting  your cracking art work with conforming  face  ... am  doing  it for all the  skin i have .

No problem at all, I freely gave them away, I see a couple more of mine in that latest lot, nice to see them still being useful after so long. Must be ten years back since I made those.

Good work :)

It's funny to see my Kill Bill skin again after so long.

I found the privacy stuff easy to change. It's all in one easy to access place.

This outcry happens every time a new Windows comes out.

The one I did not like was the inking and learning from your typing, so I turned that off.

All Cortana seems to do is a Bing search so far, but I have not played with it much yet.

Really people just have to use their common sense... like don't use the cloud to store private information and things you do not feel are safe anywhere other than on removable media.

I think you made a good case Will.  8)

If you're on Windows 7 or so then why not use the Clipping Tool that is built in ?

My talking heads and characters will be available in WebGL pretty soon. I'm really looking forward to it :)

I did have a prototype working in WebGL but I abandoned it because the 3D engine I was using fell a bit short in the end.

I was using about 22 visemes with Windows SAPI, but since I moved to an open source engine it's more like 30 (triggered by 40 different phonemes).

It's true that you can animate with fewer visemes, but it looks a lot better the more you use.

He died in 2011 guys.

This is not Haptek Carl, there is nothing Haptek here at all, it's all new stuff I am working on.

My character Jess is a modified Daz figure. The entire model has more polys than Haptek I think - about 65,000 polys.

WebGL is basically 3D in a browser. You can read more here :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebGL

The platform I am using for my chatbot will soon support WebGL.

You can see my little 3D world and my chatbot called Jess talking to me in one of my videos - this video is a bit jumpy, but I have now figured out what was causing the freezes so it all animates smoothly now. I just haven't got a around to uploading a new video.

It gives you the idea of what I am doing though. In this video she is connected to Pandorabots, but this will be replaced by my own system when I have finished my interpreter. The responses from Pandorabots aren't that great because I did not do much work on the bot, but it's really just to demonstrate what I am working towards which is a talking animated character in a 3D world of her own.

She also lipsyncs too which took a lot of work but was very rewarding.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reSdHa3sCyU

With WebGL it's closer than you think. It's actually something I will be working on soon.

Glad it helped. I just mean 'used to' because it's been a while since I did any scripting in UltraHal.