Ai Dreams Forum
Chatbots => Avatar Talk => Topic started by: medeksza on June 30, 2011, 12:43:14 pm
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Zabaware, the developer of Ultra Hal (http://www.zabaware.com (http://www.zabaware.com)), has been working on a new 3D character animation engine for the past few years to eventually replace the current proprietary Haptek engine we currently use. The benefits of the new engine include:
- More modern system that can take advantage of current generation graphics cards for improved quality
- Cross platform support. We are focusing on Windows, IOS, and Android now but will expand to include Mac OS X and Linux support.
- Easy and encouraged user customizability of characters. Full body characters will be supported as well as full 3d environment rendering.
- Potential to be a common graphics platform for chatbot developers due to its open source nature.
The Zabaware character engine is being built using the open source OGRE3D (http://www.ogre3d.org (http://www.ogre3d.org)) graphics libraries. The engine itself will be released under the open source GPL 3 license. This means the engine has the potential to impact more than just Zabaware. Any chatbot developer or company outside of Zabaware will be able to utilize, build-on, and improve the Zabaware character engine in their own projects. Currently the chatbot industry uses many different proprietary solutions for character animation. I believe that with one open common system we can improve the quality of all bots and have ease at targeting multiple computing platforms all at once. The current source code is available at http://charengine.sourceforge.net (http://charengine.sourceforge.net)
Zabaware has spent over $45,000 in developing the engine so far but has run out of funding to finish the job. We are now reaching out to the greater chatbot community (including chat bot enthusiasts and other chatbot developers) to try to raise $20,000 to finish the job. This will pay for an experienced OGRE3D developer and graphics artists to finish the job already started.
If you are interested in donating to support this project please visit Zabaware’s Peerbackers page at http://peerbackers.com/projects/3d-character-animation-engine-for-chatbots (http://peerbackers.com/projects/3d-character-animation-engine-for-chatbots) for detailed information and to donate to the project. Various rewards for donating are available.
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Hello, Robert, and welcome to AI Dreams! :)
This is not a complaint, mind you, but I wanted to point out to you that your post is dangerously close to being categorized as spam. Given that Zabaware is familiar to most folks here, I (personally) am willing to give a bit of leeway here, but the term "crowdfunded" doesn't fly with me, since nearly all commercially sold products (not just software, but literally everything sold) can be construed as "crowd-funded". I'm interested in what the rest of the community thinks about the nature of your post, as well, so I'm doing a "micro-hijack" here, to ask opinions: Spam? Not spam? Please advise, folks. :)
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For me 'not spam' because it will fund an open source project that will be available to the whole community rather than a proprietary product that is usually closed shop and often expensive.
Spam to me is the pursuit of advertising a commercial product (usually) anywhere and every where no matter what. Whilst this project is useful to the community, of interest and related to our site's scope.
In the past we have been happy to post links to things like TTS voices, graphics programs and all manner of commercial products, so I don't think this does any harm or is really a great departure from what goes on here.
I admit as Zabaware is in the commercial domain too that it does cloud things a little, but personally I am behind it.
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I would be happy for Zabaware to release up-dates for the Ai part of Hal but we haven’t seen any since 2009.
I vote:
Semi Spam :D
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Thanks for your understanding. I'm certainly fine with whatever you decide is appropriate on your forum. I didn't post here until after freddy kindly offered to help promote this project on the zabaware forum.
This project actually started back in 2008 when i invested about $45000 in its development. This was at a time when Zabaware was more profitable. Then 2009 came and we lost our main commercial backer to the project with the american auto crisis. So the project stalled. Currently Zabaware more or less breaks even and i work a full time job outside of Zabaware. The $20000 requested for this project will go to the programmer and artist i had to lay off in 2009 to finish the project as an open source system.
So yes i definetely have commercial interest to revive Zabaware with this project as this will let me stop paying royalties to haptek and expand hal to mobile devices. But as an open source project i think it can help other chatbot developers too as there are no good free open source platforms that meet all the needs for a developer
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I for one am interested in seeing where this will go to.
I have 1 question though, you are using the GPL3 license, does that mean you will also be open sourcing the rest of the platform?
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Personally, I have known Robert and UltraHal and Zabaware for MANY years and I applaud his efforts in trying
to further development of AI in general and in specific terms, chatbots like UltraHal.
To me, it would be different if he posted something about the latest window washing product or a typical infomercial
type of product, but his posting is very much in line with the main theme / topic here at AI Dreams.
Likewise, Robert is a well known and well liked friend of many of us here so for him to ask politely for support for
a product that so many of us have gotten enjoyment from over many years is like a good friend asking for a buck
for a cup of coffee because he's a little short of cash today.
His project will open MANY doors for the entire chatbot and AI enthusiast community and Zabaware's success will
in essence be our success as well.
While unsolicited requests are often frowned upon I think each needs to weighed on their own merit and circumstances.
<Not SPAM> I am a moderator here as well and I approve this message!
Best of luck Robert!
We all will benefit!!
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I for one am interested in seeing where this will go to.
I have 1 question though, you are using the GPL3 license, does that mean you will also be open sourcing the rest of the platform?
I'm not currently planning on open sourcing the rest of Ultra Hal, just the character animation engine.
The character engine is built on ogre, which is licensed under the MIT license which is a permissive license that allows you to link to pretty much any other license. The character engine does not modify the Ogre code, we link to it and build off of it, so the character engine is GPL 3. We own the character engine code so we are free to release it under other licenses as well so we can release it with a proprietary product without being forced to make the proprietary product open source as well. If you are interested in using the character engine in a proprietary product I'm open to providing a proprietary license to do so, in fact on the peerbackers page I listed a "reward" option that if you donate $4000 to the project I'll give you a proprietary license. Otherwise it is freely available as GPL 3.
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I originally posted this message in response to a question about morph targets I received on the chatbots.org forum and thought I'd include it here to provide more technical details. The engine is about 90% complete for working with Windows and we have a working prototype. This is actually a description of what the engine already does in its current state:
Our system uses morph targets, and one of the things that makes it so special is that we give a great deal of control about how the face moves between those targets. This allows us to tune specifically for an inhuman character like an Orc, or a regular human, or even something like Terrance and Philip from South Park (quick, virtually non animated transitions).
Another thing about our system is that we also mix in emotions as morph targets, so the character can display complex combinations of emotional states in mixes, all while talking. We also have a special kind of “morph animation sequenceâ€, which allows an artist to include subtle additional layers of animation. For example, picture a woman speaking, then a woman singing the same words she just spoke. We can make that difference by applying one of our special animation types.
In addition to that, we also have skeletal animation support, meaning that our characters would fit right in to a game like Fallout… they can walk, run, shoot guns, etc. all while making full use of our system. Again as an example, a soldier might have certain levels of fear, courage, rage, doubt (whatever) and we can apply them to his face, meaning whatever he says will come out of a face that accurately represents his state of mind, instead of the cardboard cutouts we see in games today.
So in a simpler way:- We use morph targets as one of the fundamental elements of our system
- Among our best features is the way we blend between those morph targets, and layer them, and how much control we give the programmer over blending - it took a lot of work to build what we have, so people shouldn’t get the idea that if they can set a morph target, they can just emulate what we have
- We also have our own special type of morph animation technique which allows us to create very expressive characters, and it’s not hard for people to use
- We also support skeletal animation for characters (though that’s more for bodies)
- We also support morph animation (which is something we’ve never needed to use use and probably never will)
The engine code is very modular and even though we utilize Ogre3D it is not married to Ogre. It can be set up so that other game/graphics engines can use it as well. To put it another way, if you’d rather use Unity instead of Ogre3D for the backend, that is possible if you want to put in the work to make a Unity plugin.
I wish I could post an executable demo showing the current state of the engine but one of the main problems we have is that the characters we have created are owned by Ford Motor Company. This engine was originally created while Zabaware was working on a contract for Ford. Part of the $20,000 we are requesting is for an artist to create new characters under an open license.
But if anyone wants to see our engine running the Ford characters and see the level of control given to the programmer I’d be happy to send you an executable if you want to sign a non disclosure agreement. I just want to prevent the characters from being publicly released.
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Thanks for the extra information Rob. It seems full of features. One thing I was wondering about just now, is will there be a web implementation/player or whatever you like to call it ?
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It could potentially be made into a browser plug-in like the Haptek player is, but I don't see anyway to make it HTML5/javascript or Flash based.
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That's a shame, as I found that users were very reluctant to download the Haptek player, thinking it was potentially damaging to their computers. That was one of the reasons I stopped using it for my bots.
I'm not sure how many ordinary users will download such a plugin.
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It's my thinking that most likely, less than 30% of regular users won't install yet another plugin for their browser, especially if they use "non-mainstream" browsers, such as Safari, Opera or Chrome, since (the last time I looked) the Hap player won't work with them. Or has that changed since I last looked?
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Although we could target non-mainstream browsers with a plug-in, I agree that most user's won't want to install plug-ins. The main focus at this point is to support mobile app development on iPhone and Android as well as Desktop OS's.
Maybe in the future it will be possible to port it to work with WebGL once the standard becomes finalized and adopted by browsers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebGL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebGL)
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Is it just me but the page below looks really messed up. Text over text, pictures over pictures.
http://peerbackers.com/members/zabaware/ (http://peerbackers.com/members/zabaware/)
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Yes it's all messed up here too.
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I wrote and told Robert about it.
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Thank you Dusky O0
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Hmm, the project target has gone way down to $2,500 now. Why's that Robert ? Are you able to fund the project now with around 10% of the original target ?
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Perhaps he received a considerable donation from an unknown source. ???
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You are right Art : http://www.ultrahal.com/community/index.php?topic=8606.msg57268#msg57268 (http://www.ultrahal.com/community/index.php?topic=8606.msg57268#msg57268)
Looks like it might happen now.
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Thanks for the support of everyone who contributed so far. If we manage to raise the $2500 ($1305 to go as of this message) for this project I will use it to purchase the Amy character from turbo squid http://www.turbosquid.com/FullPreview/Index.cfm/ID/448779 (http://www.turbosquid.com/FullPreview/Index.cfm/ID/448779) , pay an artist to configure the model for use with our engine and make a really simple outdoor environment for her. The money will also go to pay my 3d engine developer to get an interactive demo of the engine up and running (independent of Ultra Hal) and as a plug-in for Ultra Hal. We should be able to get this done in about a month or so and I hope getting a demo out will help build some more interest in this project.
I should be able to finance the remaining cost ($17,500) of the original project through several loan sources that have recently been made available to me. This will go mostly to creating the mobile versions of the engine, an open source character, and tutorial for character creation. But I want to get a public demo out of this engine out as soon as possible and this Amy character from turbosquid should be fairly easy to get to work with the engine code we already have.
The peerbackers crowdfunding drive has about 10 days left and $1305 to go. I'd appreciate any contribution, no matter how small. I believe this project can be a great open source alternative for character animation for all the chatbot authors out there.
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Today is the last day to back this project, if you were thinking of contributing but haven't yet now would be a good time to do so. O0
http://peerbackers.com/projects/3d-character-animation-engine-for-chatbots (http://peerbackers.com/projects/3d-character-animation-engine-for-chatbots)
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It looks like the funds have all been found and this project is going ahead.
Congratulations Robert :)
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That's odd, yesterday it was also at 0 days but more then half the money was still needed. Also strange that it went down so dramatically.
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Yeah strange that the funds suddenly appeared.
Maybe Robert will come in and explain at some point, I would have thought he would want to at least pop in to thank everyone for their contributions and help.
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Yes I found it a little odd that it happened at the last minute like that too.
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Just popping in a little late to say thanks to everyone who donated. The last minute generous donation was for over $1200 from Richard Amico (Amanda Interactive. We are slowly but surely working toward a December release of a demo using the new Amy character. Currently working on a translator tool to translate the 3DS max format into Ogre as existing tools crashed on the character.
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Great to hear that Rob and good to see you popping in.
Best of luck with the demo, I am looking forward to seeing it O0
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Dear Medeska, long time I used Hal, it is incomparable. Have you thought about your work with iClone?, It may be possible to built an AI, in the operation iClone. As Hal, is fitted with a 'Character'. FRIENDESHIPS ;)