[Help!!!] Human Objects with Actions/Facial Expressions

I am looking for a human object with actions such as walk/talk/run/jog and/or facial expressions/actions such as laugh/smile/cry/jiggle...

The objects coming with Alice are all very simple. Implementing such actions/expressions would be daunting for a novice user like me.

I need it for a demo.

Any help would be highly appreciated!

Thanks!

[gabe]

Creating more "human" objects (i.e. including methods that emulate human movement and expression) is something that is very much on our radar. As our human objects are implemented now, it would be very difficult to implement standardized methods that would work across all humans. We would have to do each one by one. So the solution isn't a simple one (as I'm sure you've come across in your work with Alice), but it is something we will be visiting in the future.

Perhaps some others can share their movement/facial expression methods with the community?

Thanks for reinforcing the need for more object-level methods on humans.

I'm working on something right now that involves my different characters to talk. Even if some of the characters don't have an already established method for talking, I can't even go in manually and have then move their mouth!

Please help!

One (maybe the only one) of the characters that does have a mouth animation is the "mad scientist." Not sure if there are any others.

What I have done occasionally is create alternate textures for a character with the mouth (or other) feature changed as needed. I then alternate between textures for talking, eye movement, etc. Not great - but better than just a dull face.

The texture for a character can be found in it's unzipped .a2c file. (I prefer to use 7Zip to decompress the file, but usually WinZip works ok.) Just copy it, make your changes, and load the new texture in the standard manner.

Also there are about 20 "walking" objects that come with ver 2.2 beta. While I don't recommend that version for general use yet - you can copy the character files s into the Alice 2.0 library and they work fine.

Since Alice so far isn't very adapted to minute facial details, it might actually be easier to use the billboard import trick. Basically, go into MSPaint or a similar drawing program, doodle out a variety of mouth and eye shapes. Then save them and import those images as billboards into Alice. They'll basically be 2d rectangles with the image you drew on one side. Then move them, resize them, etc, to fit over the face of the model. Making 5 or 6 different mouths and a few eyes for each of the model's eyes, you can toggle "is showing" in the billboards' options, giving a sort of stop-motion look, but recognizable facial movements. It'll look kind of like Robot Chicken faces, only instead of action figures it's Alice models. Maybe you can use this idea, or it'll give you ideas for other things to try. I think Alice seems a bit limiting sometimes, but I've found that playing around with stuff in it will open up some options that go around the limits of model movements.