Post Number Onety-one

So I bet you’re wondering what we did this week.

Nicole fixed the discontinuity on the line. Then she extended her code so it draws the joint paths for all joints. Here’s a video of the results:




As you can see, it generates curves that follow each joint’s position over time. (It did generate curves for the head as well, though they’re currently overlapped by the model.) The script itself is a bit slow since it hasn’t been completely optimized, so the part of the video where the script was running was sped up.

This script also outputs a .gcp file with the joint names, number of control points for each joint, and a list of control points for each joint. (.gcp stands for gesture control points, if you were curious.) This file is passed to Omar, who reads it in, chooses a set number of control points, and modifies the curve. But I’ll let Omar give you more details on that.

Nicole is currently working on a script that reads the .gcp file that Omar’s code generates, but she’s having trouble finding good IO documentation for Python. She can read lines or a specific number of characters, but what if she wants to read until she hits whitespace. How would she do that?

testline 1.0 -2.0 3
For example, if she wants to grab the following strings from the line above: ‘testline’ ‘1.0’ ‘-2.0’ ‘3’
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Omar wrote a MEL script that reads the .gcp file that Nicole generates, takes roughly 20 of the control points passed in, and outputs the curve as a beta-spline. It can do this for a .gcp file with data for multiple joints. Here is a screenshot of 3 joint translation curves as beta-splines from one .gcp file that Nicole generated (if they look familiar, it's because they look a lot like the curves that Nicole drew, which is a good thing):

One of the problems that Omar has encountered is that when he tried to run this on the file of all the joints, the script stopped running after about half of them. It may have been due to the fact that too many GUIs were being generated, which leads Omar to his next problem/decision. Currently, for each joint, a GUI appears (as seen above) with sliders for Global Bias and Global Tesion, as well as sliders for Local Bias and Tension for each segment of the spline (with 20 control pts-->17 segments). So, each GUI is huge and holds a lot of information. Although the local parameters provide for a lot more detailed manipulation, Omar is not sure if it is worth it to have to store all that information. And with almost 20 segments, the change from local manipulation is not as easily noticeable as it is on a curve with 6-12 control points. If anyone has an opinion on this matter, please let him know.

For now, Omar will probably comment out that code to have just one UI with a list of the global parameters for each input joint appear after the .gcp file has been parsed. That may be more pleasing to the eye and to Maya.

Another small issue is that not all of the joints move, yet they are passed to Omar in the .gcp file. So, there are a lot of extraneous, "invisible" beta-splines drawn whose control points are being stored even though they are all the same. This just seems like a waste, yet Omar has not found an efficient way to have the script know to skip those joints. It may be able to come from Nicole's end.

For next week…
- Nelskati will discuss whether non-moving joints will not be written to the .gcp or if they will not be read from the .gcp.
- Nicole will continue work on reading input files. Then she’ll start creating a new animation from the points on the modified curve that Omar passes to her.
- Omar will write a script to write a new .gcp file with the new data generated by manipulating the beta parameters. He will also change the GUI design (for now) to just include global parameters.
- If Nicole and Omar can both read in and write files to each other by mid-week, then Omar will be able to tweak the beta-spline curves, pass them to Nicole, and she can hopefully have it playback in the animation so we can see if the adjustment of the curve creates an appearance of a certain emotion! (This may not be possible in the scope of this next week, but we are very close)

So, we're excited. We're getting much closer to emotion aspects of this project. We hope it works!

Until time next brings us together.

The grass is (sometimes) greener on the other blogs (so we might have to counter by making our blog background green),

Nelskati