My People Putty Characters

[zenman]

I purchased Haptek's People Putty, and quickly generated a number of talking heads (of the female persuasion).  I happen to be a good texture creator, and since the only creative thing you can do (beyond morphing the face) in People Putty is apply a texture, the characters turned out well. (I'll start a different thread later on the limitations of People Putty and it's comparison to the Mr. Potato Head toy).

I haven't seen any people posting Haptek characters for download in these forums.  As far as I can tell, the license allows distribution of the .htr files.  Does anyone know of a reason why the characters couldn't be posted?

On a related note, I am in the process of trying to re-establish the ftp connection to my Web providers file storage area so that I can make these available.  Assuming I cannot do so quickly, is there someone who would have an interest in hosting them so that forum readers could get access?

[KnyteTrypper]

Actually there are a few Haptek characters available here. VonSmith has a couple in one of his downloads, there are a couple in the Zabaware plugins area, a few at the UHEF site. I think that characters you create are your own distributable property. I already have a small chatbot download page at my site, and would be happy to host them for you, at least until Robert gets the proposed UltraHal Vault running. I can host files up to about 2mb each in size. If you have any really good ones, I'd probably like to use a couple of them  as avatars at my Alicebot sites. I'm convinced Haptek is the interface of the future, destined to displace both V-Host and MSAgents, unless something entirely different comes along to obsolete all three.

[zenman]

Thanks, Knyte; I have three, and they're about 1M each (textures are 1024X1024).  How should I get them to you?

[KnyteTrypper]

I think you could probably email them to me (one at a time). I have AIM, Yahoo, MSN, and ICQ messengers, but don't turn them on unless I have a reason to do so (every kid who's ever talked to one of my bots IMs me when I turn them on, lol). But we could co-ordinate on a time. I also use Sonork messenger, which is the best way I know of to send files. It's faster than most of the other instant messengers for file transfer, and doesn't require both parties to be online at the same time. The MS Agent groups I belong to use it to trade agents. At any rate, I'm KnyteTrypper on all messengers. But I'd suggest trying to email to me first, if that doesn't work we'll co-ordinate about file transfer.
Mail to: KnyteTrypper

[zenman]

I'll send the first one.  After you receive, email me to send you the second and third.

[zenman]

I was able to get my ftp working to my Internet storage.  For those of you interested, you can pull my three characters from:

http://home.wi.rr.com/wblair9/Lenore.htr
http://home.wi.rr.com/wblair9/Marion.htr
http://home.wi.rr.com/wblair9/Sarah.htr

In addition, I put up some skins for the Haptek FullBody character that I created.  Look else where in the Forums for how to apply them to the FullBody character. These skins contain nudity; do not download them if you are easily offended.  

http://home.wi.rr.com/wblair9/FullBodyTextures.zip

Knyte, feel free to pull them and host them yourself if you wish.

[vonsmith]

zenman,
Nice textures. Good work.

I haven't invested in People Putty yet. I keep hoping Haptek publishes an update that rids us of the creepy floating head thing. An upper body type character would be better. In the past I've emailed them asking about the future of their product, etc. and never got an answer. People Putty works reasonable well. I hope they create a "professional", but affordable, version soon. The current People Putty seems like a cute toy with great underlying potential.

If the mood strikes you maybe you can make a character for me (and the forum). I think a cute female elve (ala Lord of the Rings) would make an interesting character. Make her young, no more than 6 or 7 hundred years old. After all Elrond is over 3,000. Elves have interesting subdued personalities as a rule. Although I've seen them react passionately on subjects they care about. The right AI could breath life into some clever elvish characters.

Thanks,

=vonsmith=

[James P]

Hi All,
I have an elven haptek character, I can not remember were IO got her. I dont know if she will be what you are looking for but I think she is cool, even if she does have that spooky floating head thing going on. Anyway she has the cutest purple eyes.
Unfortunately I dont know how to post it as a download on the Forum, but I will be happy to E-mail it to anyone with this kind of knowledge. []

[vonsmith]

Thanks James P,
I have the character you speak of. She is like a lite punk rock Elf. Not true to the LotR theme. Still the price is right.

zenman/all,
I have attached preview jpg's of zenman's characters on this post. Just unzip the file and copy the files named Sarah.jpg, Lenore.jpg and Marion.jpg into your Hal "Characters" directory where the like named .htr files are. The next time you go to select a character from Hal's Character tab in General Options you will see a preview.


=vonsmith=

Download Attachment: zenmancharprev.zip
62.87 KB

[KnyteTrypper]

I have the Elf character, too. Seems like it came from the old Haptek forum, which I don't seem to be able to find any more. I'll put a link to the Elf below. The Haptek SDK has their stock male/female characters in both torso and full body, as well as the basic creepy floating head, lol. There's another nice torso character here http://www.haptek.com/corporate/. I think it's been discussed here before...If you clear your Temporary Internet Files, then go visit all the sites you can find with Haptek characters on them, when you check your Temporary Internet Files again, they'll be full of haptars. There's not an enormous wealth of characters to be gleaned this way, but enough to make it worth an hour or two linksurfing.

Elfe.htr

[zenman]

I've spent many years in Curious Lab's Poser (a 3D character building and posing package), and have quite a bit of experience in creating characters and textures.  I'd love to get my hands on the Haptek development tools, but the fact that they don't advertise their prices, as well as the fact that their marketing message is aimed at businesses, makes me suspect that I'd have to mortage my house to get them.  

The biggest issue I have with People Putty is the lack of ability to add additional 3D objects as accessories.  Importing a wavefront obj file with it's texture is a simple effort.  Haptek's "add-on" pack with "40 additional accessories!" contains many of the same objects with the same textures but with different colors applied.  *Very* poor man's "add-on's".  I can't even create replacement textures for the hair props (which are badly in need of replacement) because I don't have texture templates or existing textures maps, and I can't find a method for loading them even if they existed.

If anyone has Haptek's .haptar extractor, and could pull the textures out of the .htr files, I'd be happy to create some replace hair textures.  This assumes that someone also knows if there is a way to apply external textures to the objects, otherwise the .htr would have to be rebuilt with the new texture in order for it to be available.

Oh, and an LotR Elf character would not be difficult, but the only hair object that fit the "blonde" motif is the "Supermodel" hair (which can be seen on the pre-installed "Sandy" character).  People Putty could greatly benefit from having another 10 more hair models available.

Zen

[zenman]

BTW: vonsmith, creating a character for one of the most helpful persons in these forums is the least I could do...:-)

[vonsmith]

zenman,
Good observations on the Haptek situation. They do seem to target businesses and professional programmers as customers but how their product or service is being offered isn't all that clear to me. They expect you to purchase expensive software, training and support from the get-go. I assume one must call them and find out on a case by case basis what they can do for a business application. Like I said before, I have emailed them as a consumer a few times and never got contacted back.

I think their product would catch on like wild fire if they opened up the interface for inexpensive third party add-on's. Look at the strength of the Poser community. There are thousands of third party character accessories/props, new characters, enhancement tools and plugins for Poser. Just think what a few of us forum fans could do if we could inexpensively add or edit accessories for People Putty! By "locking down" and limiting People Putty to the few proprietary tools they offer I think Haptek is crippling themselves. Supporting a small but vocal individual consumer base would help lead to the big business opportunities they apparently seek. I wonder if they really have a good marketing plan in place? Apple Computer started in a garage selling to motivated individuals, they didn't start by selling high dollar upscale computers to the professional business base. In the meantime dedicated innovators like yourself have to struggle to get around People Putty's limitations.

It's interesting you should mention hair. From what I have seen the hair in People Putty is pretty crude. There is a third party hair prop for Poser that is Elven hair. Too bad it couldn't be imported into People Putty. The other People Putty add-in's I have seen are childish and toylike.

=vonsmith=

[zenman]

Hair models tend to be simple primarily to minimize polygons.  Poser has some fairly huge (in terms of polys) hair models, but they are intended to be static, and not real-time animated.  Given this, I understand why Haptek keeps their models simple.  Nevertheless, I agree with you in that they could have both more sophisticated models, and absolutely could have more detailed textures (although for textures the argument is the same; smaller textures equals faster real-time animation).

I am familiar with other people who have argued with businesses to change their business model to include non-business buyers, and those attempts have always been up-hill battles.  I agree with you that Poser is a good example of how the user community has keep the program viable with add-ons; if Curious Labs (or the previous Poser owner) had limited the ability for that, Poser would have been dead with ver. 3.0.  

On the other hand, Poser evolves very slowly with new version releases every 3 years or so.  This seems primarily due to the loss of income due to piracy.  That may be why Haptek decided on their current business model (not too much piracy between corporations).

[zenman]

Okay. Latest two.  The poor man's LotR elv / elf, and a very cute Tigress.

http://home.wi.rr.com/wblair9/lotr.zip
http://home.wi.rr.com/wblair9/Tigress.zip

Update: I had to check capitalization on the Elf file; fixed now.