I'll be speaking/giving a presentation/doing a Q&A about BlenderPeople and group AI in Boston at the Asgard on Monday, March 5th. The organization that's hosting is called Grey Thumb. From their website:
"Grey Thumb Boston is a group of scientists, engineers, hackers, artists, and hobbyists in the Boston metro area with a strong interest in artificial life, artificial intelligence, biology, complex systems, and other related topics."
The release they're sending around:
"When: 7:00pm March 5, 2007
Where: The Asgard (350 Mass. Ave, Central Square, Cambridge)
Who: All are welcome
BlenderPeople is a free, open source crowd and combat simulation
project. The system uses a combination of Blender 3D, Python programming
and a MySQL database to generate and track the motion and interaction of
Actors within a simulated environment. Although there have been other
partial implementations of free crowd simulation software, BlenderPeople
is the only one currently in development that offers a complete
solution, from initial visualization through final rendering with high
resolution character models. The project is not intended to be a
realistic crowd simulation in the sense that one could use it to model
emergency escape routes for architectural design, but focuses on
producing animation that will be believable from an entertainment
perspective. Technical issues that are addressed in BlenderPeople are
different path finding algorithms for different time constraints,
avoidance and self-structuring behavior of Actors from short rule sets,
programming of Actors through simple distance thresholds, and a novel
approach to footstep based character animation. Currently, the project's
focus is on slashing search times for nearest neighbors from the field
of Actors."
So, if you're in the Boston area and want to say Hi and see me demo BlenderPeople, you're welcome to stop by. If you want to come, leave a comment so I know who to look for!
