[sldev] Body motion and facial expression tracking, Microsoft did it

[Argent Stonecutter]

On 2009-06-07, at 08:07, Jan Ciger wrote:
> This is also why the simplistic approach with "only modifying existing
> animation and locking/weighting down joints" as Argent described
> wouldn't work - if you lock down the feet ("I am only reaching for
> things!"), you either wouldn't be able to find the solution (with the
> VRlab's solver and the balance constraint on) or it would look
> completely wrong once the object is out of arm's range and you need to
> bend over to get it.

That's WAY more sophisticated and computationally expensive than I'm  
suggesting.

Imagine a canned animation having the avatar drinking a beer. The  
avatar is siting on a barstool, and he's wearing the beer and a target  
prim in his mouth. His upper body bends back slightly and his arm  
lifts. When his hand (holding the beer) gets within a foot of the  
target prim the preloaded override provided by the script starts  
adjusting the elbow and shoulder by a few degrees... making the motion  
move the beer to where his mouth actually is, instead of 5cm inside  
his head.

That's the problem I'm interested in solving. not the much harder  
problem you're talking about.

In your example, if the object is out of range nothing would happen.  
The existing animation would run... so the worst case is no worse than  
what we have now.