making a talking and imitating avatar

[farshizzo]

Also, it would help if we would know what the clamp and the head variables mean with the avatar.face() function. It seems that the clamp variable needs to be a bone, but which bone then (as we already mentioned, we don't use the avatars that come with vizard)?

The head parameter of the avatar.face() function needs to be the bone you want to attach your head to. The clamp parameter should be the bone you want the neck vertices to be clamped to. Vizard will transform the neck vertices of your PeopleMaker face into the coordinate system of the clamp bone. The default clamp bone is skel_Neck. If your neck bone is named differently, then you will need to pass in the name to this parameter.

[marc van gaal]

We have tried playing around with the head and clamp functions, but without any succes.
We still face two important problems.

1. the original avatar face is replaced by a morph face, but the original face does not dissapear anymore. Our code worked fine before when we only made a talking head. But now that we are trying to make a talking and moving head the original face stays visible.

2. Vizard will not put the replacement head on the right position. No matter what bone we refer to the face is always positioned to far away from the body. We assigned all the neck verticles in people maker hoping that this would help in positioning the face, but it didnt.


We have been working on this for days now but we can't solve these last two problems. If anyone has any ideas, we welcome all suggestions.
If anyone is willing to take a lookat the avatar and the morph face you can dowload it using the following link:

www.socsci.ru.nl/bsi/marc/avatar.zip


Marc

[farshizzo]

I tried to get your models working and I ran into a couple problems.

1) Your head mesh is split up into submeshes, so turning off the visibility doesn't work. This is a bug in Vizard and has been corrected.

2) Your PeopleMaker head is too small and facing the wrong direction. I was able to fix this by loading the face into PeopleMaker and changing the rotation/scale.

3) The neck vertices on your face are defined too high up on the face. You should consider adding the neck to the face and moving the neck vertices down. Since Vizard will stretch the neck vertices to the location of the clamp bone, this will look strange with the face you provided.

[marc van gaal]

Thanks for the good suggestions.
I'm working on the neck verticles at the moment.


What I don't understand is how the peoplemaker head can be to small. I used the button to scale the head to vizard standards, so how could it be to small? I don't see anything wrong with in vizard as well, the head seems to have the same size as the original head.

Marc

[farshizzo]

Hi,

You are right, the PeopleMaker head is the right size. The problem is that your avatar is too big. Try scaling down the size of the avatar using the scale property in the cfg file.

[marc van gaal]

Thanks for all the suggestions. We finally managed to solve all the problems and it looks great now!

Marc