Seamless

alain wrote:

Quote :

"Bohemian Rapsody"

tutanc was singing ?
....

yes , very original chat !!

Yes, is very good and simple to use.
Boss, wont You some hiphop music ? ... Or may be some trance music ?

Hi Isa, Alain and Peter thanks all for testing the sound alarm it worked very well, I am glad this time I did not miss any of you join
No tutanc did not do any singing Alain it was the new sound alarm that sung Bohemian Rapsody lol
The idea with Bohemian Rapsody as a sound alrm is it begins sofy and gets louder and louder.
I did sleep for real and then there was this nice queen song playing in my dreams. I did not realise it was not a dream untill it got well into the song lol. Soon as I realised and woke up I rushed to the computer to turn it off in fear it had awaken my mother and father lol, I asked them in the morning but they slept right through it heheh, My mother said she heard me laughing though which chats makes me do when in good company

I been busy writting some chat tutorials:

Seamless3d Chat
Hosting a World Using the Seamless3d Server
How to Let Others Chat In Your SMLS File

happy you , you have parents who understand you about chats ,
my colleagues didn't LOL

( by the way my wife does since she had used World of Warcraft

Ok I will try the tutos and stuff there

The following image shows my blue bikini girl (which was originally made using elliptical curves and sine tugs) recreated using nurbs patches (except hair and shoes are not yet converted):



It has taken me about 2 weeks which is at least twice a long as I would have predicted but when you consider such an avatar has 37 parts, 14 days does not sound so long. Also I could have done this a lot faster had I not experimented in order to find out how many control points should be used.

1 nurbs patch was used for the torso neck and head.
1 for the belly button
1 for the left breast (right side is a copy of the left)
1 for the left eye creator
1 for the left eye ball
1 for the left arm
1 for each left finger and thumb
1 for the left leg

I am hoping that I will soon have (if not already) a system for being able to churn out endless variations of this avatar by dragging the control points.

thanx ,

holidays comming soon , I will re try

Thanks Alain
when will the holidays begin?
not already I hope?
I am hoping to get my blue bikini nurbs girl ready to make public very soon.
Perhaps it is silly to make an av from scratch when I can provide an av already set up and all the user has to do is vary the nurbs control points, this would give the user 100% artistic freedom over the shape of the humanoid av.
However making an av from scratch would help one understand how everything works.
I think I should write tutorials for both ways.

I have had a few more ideas that has resulted in some changes to how the nurbs patches are done! but the old way should still work at least for a while giving time for people to convert anything to the new way but I doubt many have used my nurbs patches in a big way yet so I would guess its not going to be much of a problem if one at all.
I hate making changes to seamless's design especially now that it has stabilised a good amount but the change I have made will significantly simplify things and make it more intuitive.
These changes will have no affect on the nurbs lathe or bendy lathe or any of the nodes Lilly and Isa mostly use.
The good news is I am spending much more time modelling rather than programming so at least this lets me catch many of the bugs as well as enjoy life more.
I would be very happy if I could keep away from anything political regarding 3d

Quote :

I would be very happy if I could keep away from anything political regarding 3d

yes it is my feeling when I spend many times on LouiZe or other hings ,
and not "creating"...

btw today was a strange day , awe had no electricity when I awaked at 9 am until 1 pm

( because of storms )

The first and second hour without electricity was a bit nice , cleaning the house , after some delau I became crazy )

Waiting for the power to come back can drive me crazy too Alain and here power-cuts are frequent lol

Yes few things are more important than creating content in the end.
I find the content I have made over the years (small as it may be) gives me something better to remember the year by than many of the other issues that dominate my mind.
The great thing about content too is it can live on after a format dies, at least if the content revolves around shapes, because triangle meshes can so easily be ported from one system to another. This has got me thinking what about nurbs then? can they be ported to another format as easily as triangles?
Well one can convert from polygons to nurbs and I have found ways to speed up this process considerably since I last wrote about the method I found but it still requires a fair bit of work however nurbs patches should be able to be converted directly to other modelling software.
I found out recently how easy it is to create a nurbs patch for rhino3d and save the patch to a native rhino3d file using the open nurbs C++ files which are open source
So if I can write a simple importer/exporter for seamless3d and rhino3d files other popular nurbs modelling programs like 3d studio max, maya should be able to import nurbs from seamless.
I read blender can import rhino3d files (.3dm) but can not import nurbs models which sounds strange to me because rhino is mostly used for nurbs. Hopefully I misunderstand or what I read is wrong.
What I like about nurbs is they let you change the triangle structure / density of your model (polygon independent surface) at any stage and they aid in making smooth curvy shapes.

I dont forget nurbs stuuf Thyme ,
I am on holidays but ( nicely ) busy with XColin at home now ,

https://closed.forumactif.com/souvenirs-voyages-vacances-travelling-holidays-f7/neuvic-_carcassonne-t2279-15.htm#68118

( Sergey/MIlano , Bertrand/Asheanor , and Colin , from left to right

we wait for Peter on friday ..

Colin says hello to you

http://seamless3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=224&p=2457#p2457


http://dumenieu.free.fr/louizeforum/seamless/avatar_tryon_shirt2__laugh2_musclebeach2.wrl


funny



reedit :


http://dumenieu.free.fr/louizeforum/seamless/accident-dodge_turn_down-azumi2.wrl

Thanks much Alain I replied on the Seamless3d forum.

Looks like a nice place under that tree (or is it a creeper?)
Hi MIlano, Asheanor and X

... whoaw !!! Pretty impressve ... that bvh.

Thank's Thyme and Alain.

It seems to me that the avtars used by ExitReality and Vivaty also use bvh based animations, and it shifts the - otherwise poor - experience, indeed.

I've got a few questions :

The "good" old AV-Studio avatars mainly do use rotations fed into an extension called something like rotateByVertex, for avatar posing/moving... not sure about it. Probably SL, Exit and Vivaty do use something similar, or might they animate each single vertex of the mesh?

The second approach (mesh animation) would probably reduce cpu-load and allow more sophisticated animations (e.g. taking skin-weight into calculation) and at a first glance, it would have the downside of a larger file-size.

Why am I so concerned about that? ... well, I think that the next step for avatars (if not allready implemented) will be to make them "learn" poses (gestures) on the fly. Something like : a chair teaches the avatar how to sit down, a car teaches it how to put it's hands on the steering wheel, a tune teaches them how to dance ...

This will need a data set as efficient as possible for posing them, to be loaded during runtime... which one? That is the question.

Sorry if it's off-topic or nonsense.

Huggs to all,

Peter

sure not nonsense , if I understood you well , Peter

We had , on blaxxun chat , years ago , a swedish friend ( n'est-ce pas , Thyme ? , and the fist thing she asked me , was to have an avatar sitting when approaching a chair , I think she saw that in CT ( it was free at that time and I saw it too )...
a proxy sending order to the ava gesture , if I remember well ,

but may be you speak of something better ...

Well, if the sit-down pose was sent to the avatar by the chair, it is exactly what I mean.

I guessed that something like that exists since long ago. Also Fab did tell me about it ... he had a "techie" name for that procedure ... don't remember.

Re-thinking about that, I have come to a new (provisional) conclusion ... lol :

feeding gestures from outside the avatar would need all avatars to have the same amount of vertices. positioned in a similar way towards the joints ... not a lot of freedom left for the avatar designer...

Anyways : it's worth a thaught.

Hi Peter & Alain

Peter wrote:

Well, if the sit-down pose was sent to the avatar by the chair, it is exactly what I mean.

Have you seen IMVU avatars? their gestures are connected to objects, they can for example have an avatar sit on a swing and I imagine another avatar could push it but with my connection I imagine this more than seeing it with my eyes. Lilly tells me a lot about it. How I understand it, it can do this easily by not having the avatars walk freely. This of course makes for a big limitation but you can end up with some very interactive gestures that are relatively easy to make by the artist.
I imagine you could have a clickable tree and the tree responds by calling a scripts that makes the avatar climb up the tree. It could have stored variables to make each avatar climb up to a different branch if more than one av were to try climbing it. I can imagine lots of different things like this could be done with "clickable viewpoints"
It seems strange to me why IMVU needs a high speed connection because from how I understand it if you had a chat system set up like this server speed should be less of an issue than what it is for blaxxun. I would think this could be very good for a based system. Would it matter if it took seconds or even minutes to respond? One could treat this approach more like a how we accept a forum to respond rather than like a computer game. You could go away and have breakfast and come back to see some interesting changes (along with animations) to your scene done by others. Perhaps I am getting too carried away here but I like to question what makes one medium different to another and what are the advantages and disadvantages.



I guess what I am talking about is very simple and not quite the same thing you are talking about here peter, but there are advantages in letting the artist do some of the animated work as opposed to calculating everything but then again my hoppies popularity relied on calculations which they needed in order to interact with the terrain & visitors and nothing is written in stone that says one can not calculate to make art

Alain wrote:

We had , on blaxxun chat , years ago , a Swedish friend ( n'est-ce pas , Thyme ?

Sorry I don't recall this chair Alain but I can imagine it being done for blaxxun. I never went to CT much but I remember a VRML builder in the bxx community from Sweden but he was a bloke.

Hi Alain, Isa, Peter and All modellers I hope I am not too late for the French school holidays



Open Source Seamless3d 2.139 (including French and English versions and the server) is available for download from:

http://www.seamless3d.com/download

I was about to upload the new version about 2 weeks ago but because our phone line needing fixing twice this was not to be.
During this time I have kept my self very busy writing and updating tutorials and continuing to refine seamless.

Because of all the changes that have been made to Seamless3d to simplify its use the task of writing tutorials has been made a lot easier.


New & Updated Tutorials

For the first time I feel what seamless3d is all about is quite well documented because of the following 4 tutorials:

Beeline to Animation

Nurbs Lathe Avatar

Worm Animation

Nurbs Patch Avatar

These tutorials take baby steps all the way to show how to make a smooth seamless avatar using polygon independent surfaces and all of the tutorials are accompanied with robot demos to show all the clicks involved

The worm animation tutorial has been around since the earliest versions of seamless3d. It is now greatly simplified (and its accompanying robot demo). If you thought this tutorial was difficult before please take another look at it now because I believe it must be one of the easiest tutorials on the Internet that teaches the basics in skinning at least if one stops at operation 5.
The new nurbs patch demo has also had many changes made for 2.139 and this is the first time I have actually written the tutorial for it.

I have updated the bring to life demo to take advantage of the new coloured ownership mode.

I have also updated the immediate avatar tutorial/demo to take advantage of the new coloured ownership mode but because using NurbsPatches now seems an easier way to make an avatar and offer the advantages of using polygon independent surfaces I now recommend the Nurbs Patch Avatar Tutorial over this tutorial.

Blue Bikini Nurbs Girl Avatar Free to Download

Anyone can now download my blue bikini nurbs girl and change her to their liking:

http://www.seamless3d.com/av/blue_bikini_nurbs_girl_080830.smls

Anyone can keep making subtle changes to her by mostly dragging on the nurbs control points until she looks like a completely different avatar.
One can make significant changes by dragging the control points alone but big changes may require triangles in the poly map to be edited from time to time. What one needs to know should be covered in the nurbs patch avatar tutorial.

Patch Trees

I have made it so that a Stem now can be plugged into a NurbsPatch, a FuseSurface plugged into a Stem and a NurbsPatch plugged into a FuseSurface.
This arrangement not only makes it so that there is no longer any need to reference patches when fusing them, it reduces clutter in the scene tree and makes for a more intuitive node structure.
Now when making a model out of NurbsPatches, Stems and FuseSurfaces, the nodes form a "patch tree" which is simular in concept to a skeleton of Part nodes.

The old way of plugging a NurbsPatch into a Stem and a NurbsPatch referencing a FuseSurface still works for backward compatibility but I have prevented the user from being able to create new node strucures like this to avoid confusion in the future.
If you have patches and stems pluged in the old way I advise re plugging them to the new way because the old way will stop being supported for bug fixes etc in the future.
I doubt these changes will cause much if any disruption to anyone but if you run into problems as a result of using patches the old way please send me the files so that I can fix them for you which I will be only to happy to do.
A ColorSweep can now be plugged into a Stem much like a TextureMapper. Same as a TextureMapper it colours the vertices at the poly map stage.

Other FuseSurface Refinements

Some of the ideas that evolved from the PolyToNurbs node have been applied to the FuseSurface node to make it easier for both beginners and advanced users.
Because of these changes the user can now drag control points where one patch is fused to another and Seamless3d will automatically adjust the control points so that the joining patch always moulds itself to the surface it is fused to.

New TransferOwnership Node

Allthough TransferVertex nodes can still be used they have been made obsolete by the TransferOwnership node. The TransferOwnership greatly simplifies the task of transfering ownership to a list of parts. This node is well documented in the worm animation and nurbs patch avatar tutorials.

Colored Ownership

Transferring ownership and weighting groups of vertices is much more fun now that seamless3d has Colored Ownership mode. This mode shows which part owns what vertices by coloring vertices in accordance to who they are owned by. Different weighted groups within a part will also be coloured differently.



Polar Poly Mapping
Polar poly mapping existed in the original on-line Seamless3d C++ modelling library but there has never been support for it using Seamless with a GUI untill now.
Although anything achieved with polar mapping can be achieved with default mercator mapping, I found when instructing the robot to edit the poly map for the pelvis for the avatar demo it was hard to make the operation look straight forward. Not only does a Mercator map get increasingly distorted at the polar regions it can cause triangles to overlap each other as they reach to the single vertex at the center of the pole. This does not cause a problem for the end result but it can make hand editing very awkward.
The following image shows the difference between a hand edited polar map and a hand edited Mercator map:



Polar poly mapping is documented in the nurbs patch avatar tutorial.

Export/Import Single NurbsPatch to/from a wrl
Because of vnomad's request and because I could see this would allow one to import a NurbsPatch from a smls file without modifying the node structure, I have added a feature that lets one export/import a NurbsPatch node to/from a VRML file. When exporting, the NurbsPatch node is converted to a VRML NurbsSurface node and when importing, the VRML NurbsSurface is converted to a NurbsPatch.
Right click on the NurbsPatch and select import or export

Multiple World Server
The Seamless3d server can now serve more than one world at one time.
Peter worked on some php scripts for the previous version so that there would be no need to upload any thing but the smls file in order to chat in it.
Because I have not had much experience in I did not understand Peter's scripts well but this lead to me to simplifying 2.139 to allow anyone to open a smls file without uploading anything (other than the smls file) and without needing any extra scripts for the server.
Because of these changes I have updated the seamless3d chat tutorials:

http://www.seamless3d.com/tut/chat/index.html

Many thanks to Peter, vnomad's colored ownership suggestion and all who have helped influence 2.139 to be what it is

I have just uploaded 2.140
It just has 2 bugs fixed that were soon found after 2.139 was uploaded
One which Lilly found prevented textures working correctly for the BoxBuild node so many thanks to her for her swift response
The other I found would cause problems if local urls for textures were used when using seamless3d chat

LOOOOOL are you crazy to post all that at 8 pm , I have re school tomorrow LOOL

very happy to see you back online , Thyme , I will read all

LOL I know I should be sleeping but getting the new version uploaded stole all my chat time so I have to steal time from some where LOL.
Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrg school tomorrow!!! my thymming is always perfect! Thinking about your holidays was a big motivator for me to get this version and the tutorials uploaded, when are your next holidays Alain? lol

thyme wrote:

when are your next holidays Alain? lol

LOOOOOOL THyme !! dont provok me LOOOL ,
I made that 2 days ago !! ))

https://closed.forumactif.com/souvenirs-voyages-vacances-travelling-holidays-f7/meeting-thyme-t2344.htm

btw I mail you now about the MixED dates/ modem question

hello thyme:) pretty colors and nice ver for made funny avatars looll ) i tested but I am wedged here I do not include/understand why…

http://isaworld.free.fr/seamless/seamlesscolor.JPG

i read the tutorial made 3 nodes and

ctrl+v this is the same thing.... i crashed ...

Code:

To add the calcRot function plug a Function node into the Anim  node.
Plug 2 CodeLine nodes into the Function node
Code the 3 new nodes with:

 Rotation calcRot(float v, float d)
    float a = sin((v + d) * PI * 2) * .2
    return Rotation(0, 0, 1, a)

thank alain for your help ....

but i have a problem because i write bad word and not use : ( )

but now !!!!!!!!!!!!! i have not my colors ....

http://isaworld.free.fr/seamless/seamlesscolor1.JPG
http://isaworld.free.fr/seamless/color.wrl

i think i have not understand all

I see your worm animate, well done Isa and thanks Alain for your help

You know you do not have to do any hand scripting to animate this worm Isa? You can animate the worm the normal way you animate models in seamless but scripts can do very sophisticated animations and can be fun too

I can see why you are having trouble colouring your worm but this is easy to fix
You have plugged your ColourSweep into the NurbsLathe, lol I did not realise I allowed this to be done yet but you show me I have
All you have to do is drag the ColorSweep to be between the TransferOwnership and the NurbsLathe (should be between the 2 nodes as siblings not as a child of the NurbsLathe)
Please look at the red line to see where I drag the ColorSweep to:



and you must add a part node to the ColorSweep as a reference (hold down the alt key when you drag the part named seg0 to the right of the ColorSweep)



thanks for the screen shots they let me see what is wrong right away and thanks for doing my tutorial Isa

ok now i have the color .. we must use alt while slipping the square color

http://isaworld.free.fr/seamless/essaicolor.wrl

Hi Isa sorry for my delay in replying to your post.
I see you have got the colours worked out for the output file I wonder if there has been some confusion over coloured ownership mode and what it is for. It is only for showing how the vertices are grouped up for the different parts (which part owns what portion of vertices)
Isa in you animated wrl I see some of the vertices are not animating the same as the other vertices in their ring. This makes me suspect you have not ticked the beginSP field or perhaps you have not set the number of vertices for each vertex ring (qty) exactly. This is what coloured ownership mode is good for. When in coloured ownership mode you should see each ring with its own colour.



If you notice one vertex in a ring coloured differently to the rest in the ring you know the wrong number of vertices is specified somewhere in the TransferOwnership node.
If you can not see what is wrong please send me your smls file and I will be happy to point it out.
many for showing your file I much value feed back from this tutorial.

Hi Alain, Isa Peter and All
I have uploaded 2.141 in time for the Mixed3d exhibition:

http://www.seamless3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=320

None of the changes should affect Seamless3d chat however because I have not changed any of the multi user code for this version since 2.139 & 2.140.
I delayed its update because I had suspected a bug had been added and was behind the problem of Alain not being able to log in but this proved not to be the case.
There are still things we can try later, I have wondered if seamless3d used an auto installer so that it gets registered in the windows system it may get authorized to use the net for Alain's computer? If I wrote an auto installer people would not have to manually register smls file too (for double clicking on the files to open them) so it may be worth doing even if its not the solution to this logging in problem.

I have just noticed from one of isa's screenshots she is using a French version.

I stated in my anouncement:

I have only uploaded the English version because:

• Many of the French version's translations need to be updated.
  
• Many of the key words for the Seamless3d modelling language are derived from the English language (same as for VRML) but have a specific meaning for Seamless3d, so many of the key words used in the menus should perhaps not be translated.
  
• Matthieu's French translations for the tutorials refer to the English modeller with all the images for the English modeller
  
• All French Seamless3d users I know use the English modeller.
  
• It takes many hours for me to compile, test and upload 2 versions for each update.

So please let me know if you find the French version significantly easier Isa (or anyone else) and please be honest