making a talking and imitating avatar

[marc van gaal]

I have used the avatar.face command to replace the head of our avatars with a head we morphed so it can speak. This wasn't much trouble and went smoothly.

We are now trying to let the avatar imitate headmovements made with a HeadMountedDisplay. And this is where we run into some trouble.

The movements made by the HMD are to be repeated by the neckbone so the avatar makes the same headmovements. We first found out that the weights we assigned to the head were not translated to vizard after using peoplemaker. This resulted in the head, neck and shoulders moving as one object. The result was that when turning the head to the left the shoulders also turned breaking through the body texture.

We therefore tried to tie the neck to the body to keep it's original weights. We then exported a face without a neck to peoplemaker to add the morph for talking. We replaced the original face in viard with morph face and this time the avatar could speak and move his head in a natural manner. However, for some reason the face was slightly parted from the neck and we could not get vizard to place it exactly on top of the neck.

After reading the peoplemaker manual again (read the ##*&&# manual!! I know) we discovered peoplemaker should be able to compute neck verticels. We tried to use this on our earlier face that still had a neck and then tried to implement it in vizard. But again, things went wrong.

At the moment we have no idea how to fix this, so if anyone has been in this situation before or knows what to do.... I'd appreciate the help.


Marc