alice-teacher Alice v3.1.37.0.0 (Mac OS X)

[Don Slater]

See below…

On Aug 16, 2012, at 8:07 PM, "Gamez, Enrique A (172B)" <enrique.a.gamez at jpl.nasa.gov> wrote:

> In preparation for possible student questions, I have a few of my own for the community.  First, I have to say that I love all the possibilities presented by having fully articulated models!
> 
> 
> 1) Can body parts be separately scaled?

Not at this time… We expect that this feature will be implemented, but earlier attempts created some very unsatisfactory side effects, especially when combined with the vehicle property… As a side note, you will also notice that you cannot move a body part, only turn or roll it. In other words, you cannot detach a body part from the rest of the body This is a side-effect of the soft skinning I referred to in an earlier post.

> 
> 2) Can we load our own background image to put behind our characters (replacing the typical grass, sea_floor, moon, etc.)?

Yes… Something to watch out for is that the ground images are actually "tiled" to cover the entire landscape of the world, so use some care in choosing the background image that you wish to use for the ground, that the tiling effect accomplishes what you are after.

You will also se that it is possible in Alice 3.1 to replace the ground texture in code, using a procedural method of the ground class, so that one can build a project in which the scene starts on the sea surface, and then moves to the sea floor, for example.

> 
> 3) Can we load an animation or sequence of stills into the background of our characters?  This would simplify posing characters to match movements in the background.

No, at least on the Alice side. Remember that we are executing a Java program, so the Alice virtual machine would have to know how to execute the imported animation which has its own embedded code. Of course, if you export your Alice project to a Netbeans Java project, if you can find the right hooks in Java to execute the animation, you would be able to implement it on that side.

> 
> 4) Can we programmatically change the axis center around which a particular joint moves?  eg.  to animate a box falling down stairs.

You cannot programmatically change the skeleton / axis center of an object. But the non-Prop classes all have consistent skeletons, including a spine base and a spine middle, so you could turn an object forward "as seen by" the spine base or the spine middle. However for Prop classes, they do not have a skeleton as such, and so there is no obvious center point to rotate around. However, you could embed a small object in the center of the box, set its vehicle as the box, and use it as the reference point. Not as satisfying.

It may be that the center point for the box and sphere should be the center of mass, instead of where they are now, at the base, as in all other Alice 3.1 models.

> 
> 5) Is it possible to generate a movie out of an animation such that the Alice programming environment isn't required to play it?  (I.e. in a .MOV, .WMV, or .MP4 or other format?)

There will be an export to movie command implemented in the near future. In the meantime, using screen capture software, such as Camtasia, or Jing, as was suggested earlier, works pretty well.

> 
> 6) Has anyone developed a "walk cycle" procedure that you would be willing to share?

Anyone?

> 
> 7) Does Alice support any text to speech engine?

We have a proof of concept in the lab and it will be introduced, hopefully sooner rather than later.

> 
> 8) Is it possible to allow Alice characters and props to be placed over an alpha (i.e. transparent background) to facilitate compositing later in post production?  This would facilitate getting our Alice animations to appear as it they are in the real world and quite possibly interacting with live actors.

Alpha is a problem for us because we are using OpenGL, which has caused us some problems in trying to correctly implement the alpha channel.

> 
> 9) Typo:  menu still says "Beta".

Thanks, it has been noted… It will be corrected in the next release…

Thank you.

All the best,
Don Slater


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