BlenderPeople Development

Train leaves the station...

noreply@blogger.com (Roland) — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 11:46:00 +0000

I'd say that I'm not veering back into BlenderPeople development, but I know how I am. It's already in my head, so that means that within a few weeks I'll be fooling around with it again.

Also, I've started coding solid animation baking and conversion into Blender, which it needs anyway. Basically, it boils down to A) Bake motion from constraints and parenting relationships to Ipos; and B) Convert bone level to object level animation and vice versa. I have the object-level baking engine working, but it needs lots of interface work, both internal and external.

So, w00t?

Some thoughts on the road ahead...

noreply@blogger.com (Roland) — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 16:06:00 +0000

A commenter on the BlenderPeople page brought up some issues that have been addressed before, and some that haven't, and I thought I'd respond on the main page, so that anyone interested will most likely see it.

I would like to remind everyone that while I have tried to make BlenderPeople as easy to use as is possible at this, and also to provide comprehensive documentation, it is still a 0.8 release, and, for that matter, a personal project. Yes, it's one that a lot of people are interested in, as evinced by the fact that the BP page and XML feed gets more traffic monthly than the rest of my websites combined by an order of magnitude. But I decided a long time ago that "public interest" was not going to rule the development process, and, in turn, my personal life.

I think that anyone who has read and worked through the Quick Start in the (IMHO) really great documentation would have a hard time saying that I've simply said "Here it is and good luck."

As for making money from it... well, the software isn't ready. And neither is Blender. My footstep generation solution is interesting but hacky, and Blender itself doesn't have one yet that creates real footsteps. It's still just cycled motion. As I have source commit "powers" and have done some work as one of the minor developers with Blender, I see it as up to me to put such things (baking tools and a good footstep system) into Blender as would be generally useful for all character animators, as well as for BlenderPeople. There are no "Blender Gods" that I need to bring an offering to for this: it'll hinge on me bringing a great proposal and solid working code implementation to Ton and Josh.

And now, a reminder about where I see BlenderPeople going by the time it hits 1.0:

- The controls and UI integrated into main Blender panels, via the current tools API and event refactor, or, if that doesn't become possible, using one the other Python scripter's interface layers for a much better control system.

- Significant increases in speed. Right now, speed is prohibitive for anything over 1,000 actors due mostly to search times during the first phase and a lack of dupligroup pose caching in the second phase. I have a couple of ideas for drastically cutting search times (near linear scaling, instead of n^2!) that I've worked on paper, but have yet to put into code. Ton and Josh tell me that pose caching for duplis is not that big of a deal to implement, so I'm sure I can expect some help on that when it becomes the big bottleneck.

- Automating the use of Level of Detail -- it's in there right now, but hidden. You can do it "by hand", but I want it to be automagic.

- Better animation blending and a real footstep system. If I go "100% pose space", it will avoid the crazy "swoops" you see in the demo animation., which is what's going to happen.

- A couple of different demo setups, including a hand-to-hand combat one, a "city streets" one and a stadium/crowd rally.

- Making the behavior tree nodal. Right now, it's hard coded, and works pretty well for a default, but if Python coders can get access to Blender's node interface, this could easily and usefully converted to a nodal system. Such a change would give BP an enormous boost.

- Support for multiple materials and variable character types for assisted/automated generation of diverse crowd meshes.

On the prospect of eventually making money, it could certainly happen. The software will remain Open Source (it's GPLv2 right now), but people who have a commercial need to implement it will always be free to obtain real support directly from me for a fee. Likewise, libraries of commercial quality characters and actions, including motion capture, could be sold.

Personally, I think that's the biggest barrier to using the software in a production environment, both now and in the future: creating the actors and animation. The motion engine itself actually works well enough and could produce usable results right now if the modeling and animation library were good enough.

So, that's where BlenderPeople stands, and where it's probably headed, in case you were wondering.

(Cross-posted at harkyman.com)

Just Letting You Know the Score

noreply@blogger.com (Roland) — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 17:26:00 +0000

BlenderPeople development is on hiatus while I am writing my book. Development will resume in the Summer of 2008. I’ve had a number of requests for step-by-steps about getting BP running, and requests for personal service. Due to my writing schedule, I can’t give personal service right now. Also, the documentation is complete as of the latest version and contains a step-by-step simple startup. If you can’t get it working from that, I just don’t have time to help you get it going. Sorry for the inconvenience, but 1) 0.8 release and 2) free.

Status Report

noreply@blogger.com (Roland) — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 13:03:00 +0000

Just to clear and on the record, BlenderPeople is still on hiatus. While I can carve time to work on BP itself, maintaining a separate build of Blender that has the features that allow it to function in line with BP's needs is really "out of scope" for me. When Blender catches up, I'll be there.

Two little tidbits, though:

1. I actually got to show it at SIGGRAPH this year, at least in the Blender booth. I was fiddling with it and someone came up to say "How are you getting MASSIVE to run inside Blender?" which is funny because of how totally much BP is not MASSIVE.

2. I think I have a new way to find nearest neighbors that will be significantly faster than the previous one. It's a diagramming method. I'm not really into the theory of that sort of thing, but I know how it works from a functional standpoint. Of course, after my last try at something like this was a bust, my confidence is a little lower.

Demo in Boston Next Week

noreply@blogger.com (Roland) — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 15:04:00 +0000

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!

Bottlenecks

noreply@blogger.com (Roland) — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 19:34:00 +0000

With the ground height and color tree searching moved into Python, that leaves the nearest-actor calculation as the single biggest time sucker in BlenderPeople. I know I'm not supposed to be working on this right now, but I think I've come up with a way to do this significantly more efficiently than I have in the past.

The way it works now is that every time an Actor needs to know who is closest to him in the simulation, a distance calculation is done against every other current Actor. An Actor may ask for nearest person up to four different times in a single round. This means that the average number of distance calculations (followed by a non-indexed proximity sort) is (Actors^2)*2 (two times the square of the number of Actors). The "squared" part means that as the number of Actors goes up, efficiency declines not linearly, but as a square. That's bad.

Here's my brainstorm, and what I'm working on (it may turn out to be crap, and not work, but my ideas like this usually pan out): When it moves, an Actor gives itself a three-numeral score, based on the distances from three constant, strategically chosen points within the ground area. These three values locate the actor discretely within the field of play. Then, a sort is done against the whole Actor set three times, using each of the current Actor's values in turn as the zero point for the sort, the difference from the main sort value is cached. The Actor with the lowest cumulative cache after the third round should be the closest, if my mental model is correct. With this model, Actors are required to make three distance checks (Actors*3), then four indexed sorts. On queries, no new distance calculations need to happen -- just the triple-sort.

My guess is that the difference will not be noticable on requests with smaller actor pools (100 actors with old method = 10,000 distance calcs + 200 sorts; new method = 300 distance calcs + 400 sorts), but on larger pools (2,000 actors old = 2,000,000 distance calcs + 4,000 sorts; new = 6,000 distance calcs + 800 sorts).

If this works it will dramatically increase the speed of BlenderPeople, and in turn making it a viable tool for larger and larger numbers of Actors.

New Computer

noreply@blogger.com (Roland) — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 17:52:00 +0000

Well, now that the old house is sold(!), I'm not living in mortgage-induced poverty any longer. That being the case, I finally found a nice price on a new computer. Our old kitchen computer had been on the fritz for a long time, and I finally replaced it last night with my main workstation.

Being delivered tomorrow to my house is an AMD 64 X2 (dual core) machine with 2GB of dual channel RAM, into which will be placed the very tasty nVidia Quadro FX video card gifted to me by the Blender Foundation (thanks guys!). Although I'm neck-deep in other projects right now, I feel quite certain that I'm going to have to take an evening off to see how the dual cores and generous RAM allocation treat the parallel processing task that BlenderPeople presents.

I'll let you know how it turns out.

Mac OS X build available again...

noreply@blogger.com (Roland) — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 13:18:00 +0000

The OS X (Python 2.3) character animation build of Blender is now available:

http://www.harkyman.com/blenderpeople/blender-2.42a-bp.tbz

That's a tar/bzip file, which should decompress straight to the application.

Also, someone asked in the comments whether the animation enhancements of this build are in the main tree yet. Answer: nope. Almost all of the stuff I've done with this messes around with Blender's guts pretty heavily. Ton's comments about the whole thing are along the lines of: "The math looks weird. I'll have to spend some time really looking at this to see what you did." Of course, Ton doesn't have a whole to of time. :)

Quick Note

noreply@blogger.com (Roland) — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 02:00:00 +0000

Just a quick note to let everyone know that I tested the rebuilt binary on a clean machine with fresh installs of Python 2.4, MySQL 5, and MySQLdb 1, along with the official BlenderPeople0.8, and it worked like a charm on my first try. So, the binary is confirmed good!

Enhanced Character Animation Binary Back OnLine

noreply@blogger.com (Roland) — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 02:35:00 +0000

With the untimely hiatus of graphicall.org, we were left without a good repository for the BlenderPeople Blender binary. Shortly after that happened, my own workstation suffered a power supply "incident", which also took out the electronics on my main hard drive. I found the exact same model # of HD on eBay, and was considering purchasing it to swap to the electronics. However, I actually do keep backups and multiple copies of things on different machines, so I decided it wasn't worth wasting almost $100 on something that may or may not work.

In the end, I purchased a new HD, pulled everything off backups and rebuilt. Of course, due to the fact that I owned two houses, I didn't even have the scratch to buy that new HD until just last week. And the old house is sold now, so, like, Hallelujah. But the workstation is back online, and I've posted the .zip of the BlenderPeople Blender 2.42a build.

Get it here:

Blender 2.42a Enhanced Character Animation Build

I'll try to get the Mac OS X build back up tomorrow.

Small Good News

noreply@blogger.com (Roland) — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 03:34:00 +0000

Graphicall.org went down many weeks ago, and with it went the special binaries for running BlenderPeople. I've had a large volume of requests to repost the binaries, but due to the fact that 1) my main workstation fried, and 2) I could recompile, etc., from backups but didn't have time to fix the workstation so I could do that, it hasn't happened yet.

The good news is that I have my workstation reconstructed, etc., and just tonight I got a successful compile of both regular bf-blender and the special BlenderPeople build. I don't have time to package it tonight, but I'll get it done tomorrow and post it on my own web space.

Break Time

noreply@blogger.com (Roland) — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 02:42:00 +0000

One of the reasons I'm such a great guy is that I never work on more than one external project at a time. Personal rule that keeps me sane, and keeps the quality of my output high. That sign in the doctor's office that reads "Please be patient if we are running behind. We plan to show you the exact same level of attention when it is your turn." That's me.

And, for the past too many months, the focus has been BlenderPeople.

Break time.

In the coming months, I'm going to be setting up my church's new web site (trust me... fun != volunteer + web design), trying to get one of my many small business concepts off the ground, and hopefully doing a little artwork, writing a little music, and maybe even stepping back into writing fiction. As I've also been given cvs commit priveleges as a Blender developer, I'm going to start breaking up my character animation enhancements, reworking them to meet the high standards required, and getting them into the main Blender tree.

Those of you who have followed BlenderPeople's development over the past couple of years know that this doesn't mean the project is abandoned. Far from it. My brain quite frequently does its best work when I'm thinking about other things. If I get any smashing ideas, I'll put 'em up.

In the meantime, check out my personal/family blog The Hess Report, which you don't have to be friend or family to enjoy. If you lean to the libertarian side of things, you'll also want to put Steel City Cowboy on your RSS reader, too. I don't update that often, but now that BlenderPeople is at a resting point, it'll probably get a little more attention.

Thanks for all the great comments and the emails I've received! Seriously, things like that keep me working on this project almost as much as my own personal drive.

Later folks!

Successful Release

noreply@blogger.com (Roland) — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 16:49:00 +0000

Wow. BlenderPeople0.8 release has been a success, as much as an unfinished GPL script suite can be a success.

Someone noticed it and put it to the front page on CGTalk, which was very cool, and I've gotten a lot of very nice and ethusiatic responses. The BlenderPeople websites (RSS feed, blog, and main page), which usually serve about 12,000 pages in a month, served almost 10,000 just on the release day.

BlenderPeople0.8 Released

noreply@blogger.com (Roland) — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 12:55:00 +0000

The post title says it.

Duped from the static page...

Not sure if BlenderPeople is for you? Download and read the comprehensive documentation: Blender People 0.8 Documentation

Blender People 0.8, zip file.

Blender People is a suite of Python scripts for Blender that, in conjunction with a mySQL database, allow the generation of large scale crowd dynamics, including (but not limited to) combat scenarios. Included in the distribution are a sample .blendfile, with all the scripts embedded, and the Windows installer for MySQLdb. BlenderPeople0.8 is release under the GPL. This version of BlenderPeople makes use of features not found in the official Blender 2.42a release. Windows users can find the special Blender compile here; OSX (Python 2.3) users go here. Anyone who wants to build their own for their platform can get a .zipped ./blender/source/blender directory here.

If you want a comprehensive list of what it can do, then download the standalone documentation. But if you're too lazy to even do that, then here is a short feature list:

- Arbitrary number of Actors
- User-defined Actor types
- Heirarchical, automatic or user-defined command and control
- Ranged attacks
- Actors can be set to attack, defend, march, retreat, mill, regroup, attack area, etc.
- Cross-platform
- User-defined effectors to simlute the effect on Actors of fire, mud, boulders, force fields, etc.
- Support for Blender's character animation DupliGroups
- Fast (my Athlon XP1800 w/512 MB RAM was clocking 40 seconds of calc time for each 1 second of animation in an 800 Actor simulation).

System Requirements
Software:	Available at:
Blender 2.42a - Character Animation Build	Windows users: graphicall.org
	OS X users: graphicall.org
mySQL 5.0	http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/5.0.html
MySQLdb 1.0(self-installing .exe for MySQLdb included for Windows users)	http://sourceforge.net/projects/mysql-python
Python 2.4	http://www.python.org/

Don't be intimidated by the requirements list. People have found the documentation to be both complete and helpful, and have been able to get things running on their first try. Trust me, when you set up two 500-Actor armies, let them have at each other for fifteen minutes or so of calculations, then watch the results, it's really fun.

Preview Frame

noreply@blogger.com (Roland) — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 19:20:00 +0000

Here's what 40 seconds of rendering buys you:

Release Scheduled for Next Week

noreply@blogger.com (Roland) — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 17:43:00 +0000

Today and tomorrow, I'm rendering the final demo video. 400 Actors with full character animation, 34 seconds.

Everything seems to be working well, so I'll spend this weekend finalizing promo artwork, making a "press release" (Big Time!), editing the docs and making the demo/tutorial DVD. Monday, I'll post the Blender binaries to graphicall.org. After that, it's release time, and then I'm taking a nap.

BlenderPeople 0.8 Docs Available Now

noreply@blogger.com (Roland) — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 16:31:00 +0000

I just finished writing up the documentation for BlenderPeople 0.8. If you're interested to see what the upcoming release will do, download them and read them. The only things missing (I think) are the links to the final binaries and DVD .iso. If you see any glaring typos, feel free to send me a marked-up .PDF of the bad stuff.

600k PDF file:

BlenderPeople0.8.pdf

Writing the Docs

noreply@blogger.com (Roland) — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 14:14:00 +0000

I try to make the BlenderPeople docs the absolute best documentation of any Python script available. In fact, I try to make it even better than the Blender documentation itself. Do I succeed? Well, that's not my call to make.

I've gone through a bunch of test runs on the final release .blend and the final binaries, and everything works as I'd hoped. I've fixed a number of interface bugs, and will probably crunch the last couple today.

I'm also finishing up the docs... new sections have been added for the character animation controls (which from a user standpoint are pathetically easy), as well as entire sections explaining the database structure and walking you through creating your own character animation library for use with BlenderPeople.

Hopefully, I'll be finishing the docs today. When I do, I'll post a link, so you all can see what the release will do in-depth.

Banner Graphics -- Preferences Anyone?

noreply@blogger.com (Roland) — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 04:06:00 +0000

Here are the two banner graphics I've come up with. Both are just type and rendered characters from BP.

and

Does one trounce the other completely?

MatchBone blendout problem fixed

noreply@blogger.com (Roland) — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 18:40:00 +0000

I fixed the MatchBone blendout problem (well, mostly). It's not an ideal solution, but it doesn't exhibit the radically bad behavior that it was showing before.

Also rearranged the place in the sources where is build the MatchBone caches, so that fooling with NLA in Python also causes MatchBone to update. Previously, it only updated on GUI interaction, which was limiting.

Another Matchbone Bug

noreply@blogger.com (Roland) — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 13:15:00 +0000

I was reviewing the OpenGL animation of the almost-minute-long final demo video I'm preparing for release and noticed that there were still some problems along the way (evidenced by "flying" actors -- people zooming back and forth through the scene). Upon analysis, I realized that MatchBone, which has recently been modified to work properly on BlendIn/blendout values doesn't work when blending in from one strip, but blending out to a different one. A slight modification of the original fix should do for this case, too.

And, as that's the only thing I see wrong with the OpenGL version of things, once I get it fixed, I can start rendering the final demo!

Memory Issues Solved At Last

noreply@blogger.com (Roland) — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 14:29:00 +0000

One of the showstopper bugs that I wasn't willing to release until I fixed has been found and squashed. There was a memory leak somewhere in the Action Baking code, and it seemed to be causing Blender to consume increasingly enormous amounts of RAM while generating walk animation. With Ton's help, I was able to find the problem and fix it. No more memory leak!

However, BP was still eating RAM for breakfast when I was making character locomotion. After a couple of tests, I realized that all along it had little to do with the memory leak and more to do with Blender's Undo system. The system will store (by default) 30 copies of the .blend file in RAM while you work (it's actually more efficient than that, but that's as far into it as I'll get here), so it was just crushing itself after 20-30 turns of animation! Turning off Global Undo before generating locomotion fixed the problem entirely.

So what am I doing right now? Getting ready to have BP make the final animation pass on a 400 actor battle.

Level of Detail

noreply@blogger.com (Roland) — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 02:28:00 +0000

After I implemented the Dupligroup support into Action Baking and Matchbone, I realized that one of the true strengths of the dupligroup system is for Level of Detail. Once you have everything built, it's a piece of cake to swap out entire grouped objects with different levels of detail. You simply retarget the placeholder at a different group and update any Action Strip target armatures. Everything else works seamlessly. It turned out to be so simple that I just went ahead and put it into BlenderPeople.

So, before, where I was having trouble rendering more than 24 characters TOTAL, I just had my whimpy machine crank out a frame of 300 actors, all onscreen at once, with the appropriate level of detail per their distance to camera, in about 45 seconds. No memory chokes.

The way I did it was to create five different versions of my main mesh: hi res (26k verts), medium (13k), low (2k), proxy (382) and skeleton (150). I'm thinking to implement it like this: you start off with skeleton, for blocking things out. Once you have everything hopping as you like it, you can go in and make a selection in the 3D window of the relevant camera and the actors in question, advance to a particular frame, then press the LoD button in BlenderPeople, at which point it relinks the groups to the appropriate group objects. It should be a good first step.

As part of the new release is making some impressive demo animation, getting the Actor count up in final rendering is very important. So, if you're thinking this doesn't relate directly to release, well, you're wrong. To me, it's essential. Nice picture hopefully forthcoming tomorrow.

Support for Dupli Groups now built in!

noreply@blogger.com (Roland) — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 19:03:00 +0000

I managed to put in support for objects that represent dupligroups today. As mentioned in the previous post, this technology is a big advance over previous methods of doing the same thing and will probably become the preferred way of animating groups of actors.

I just had to modify things slightly in the Action Baking code so that all baking takes place on a reference object and an actual object. In the case of a regular armature, those two objects are the same. In the case of a duped object, they're different. But, it works, and looking at the dupli-group code showed me how powerful it is. I don't think we've seen the last of the benefits of this feature.

So, now that that little detour's taken care of, back to preparing the release...

Linked Duplicate Groups

noreply@blogger.com (Roland) — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 12:21:00 +0000

Right now I'm working on updating the Action Baking code to work with the great new Linked Duplicate Groups feature found here:

http://www.blender.org/cms/Object_Groups.755.0.html

This will make the creation of armies much easier from a user standpoint, lighter from a file size standpoint, and easier to manage programmatically.

The task of updating Action Baking to use this isn't the easiest thing I've ever done, but it's pretty straight forward and I'm hoping to have it finished today.