Some questions about BML

[giannis]

Hi all,

I recently found BML and it looks interesting. I have a number of questions that I wonder if someone can answer.

1) Are there any IDE tools that I can use to create BML scripts? I have searched the web but nothing seems to exist out there

2) If I understand correctly, to create animations in real-time, BML combines short motions (exported from popular commercial packages) into meaningful gestures, etc. However, most of the existing research projects appear to focus on the real-time animation of the head, and use canned animations for the rest. Apart from thisi project here, http://www.dfki.de/~kipp/iva07/ nothing else seems to exist that doesn't rely on canned animations for animating other parts of the body. Do you perhaps know something similar? 

3) What is this CADIA Panda BML Realizer and where can I find it?

Many thanks for any answers

[amarshal]

Sorry for the delayed reply.

BML is still in development, and as such, the tools that exist are often test beds, and slightly behind the latest specification.  There is no reference tool set currently available, although there has been discussion of reference schemas and validators.

SmartBody is one of the major platforms attempting to implement BML-style composable animations.  It is available at http://www.smartbody-anim.org and on SourceForge.

"CADIA Panda BML Realizer" is a Panda3D rendering system that wraps around the SmartBody system.  You can find a copy of it in the Reykjavik branch of the SmartBody SVN repository.  We intend to merge this into the trunk by the end of the year, synchronizing the two version of SmartBody.

I'm sure someone else here can point you to the related CADIA website with additional documentation.


Anm