opencog / blender_api

Eva Blender Animation API

Sophia Blender Animation API

This repository contains an animated model of the Sophia head, as a Blender file. A Robot Operating System (ROS) node to control the model can be found in the blender_api_msgs repository. The ROS node is automatically started when the blender file is loaded.

The rigControl python module contains scripts to drive the model, as well as defining a public programming API. The rigAPI module defines an abstract base class for controlling the rig: the ROS node uses this API, and rigControl implements it.

Running

Pre-requisites: Blender must be installed.

This works well with the following versions:

• Version 2.71 on Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty) from the irie ppa: sudo apt-add-repository ppa:irie/blender
• Version 2.78 available by default on Debian 9 stable (Stretch).

This does NOT work with:

• Version 2.69 (the default version) on Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty)
• Version 2.75 or 2.79 on Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty) from the Thomas Schiex ppa: sudo apt-add-repository ppa:thomas-schiex/blender See issue #76.

Start blender as follows:

blender -y Sophia.blend -P autostart.py

Sophia can be controlled via buttons in the blender GUI (note the panel on the right). A HOWTO guide for manipulating via ROS can be found in the Sophia cookbook

Newer versions of Blender

The rig does not work with newer versionf of Blender. There have been some efforts to port it, but these are incomplete. See the progress report for status and hints. Wanted! A Blender expert who can port over the old rig!

Design

The programming API is currently in draft stage, here: API_v1. What has actually been implemented does not match the proposed API; neither is "authoritative", both probably need revision.

• The ROS node listens to and acts on ROS messages. It uses the abstract base class rigAPI to communicate with blender.
• Animation messages are queued with the CommandSource.py module.
• The CommandListener listens to CommandSource messages; these are 'rigAPI messages.
• The command.py module implements the rigAPI
• The AnimationManager keeps track of of Eva's internal state.
• The Actuators are responsible individual actions of Eva such as breathing, blinking and eye movement.

All animation sequences and 3D data are stored in the Blender file.

Requirements

The existing API needs to be changed, to allow control of the ramp-in and ramp-out for animations. The API needs to expose:

• time of ramp start
• time interval until ramp-full
• strength of animation at ramp-full
• duration of animation
• time interval of ramp-out
• spline for above.

To implement the above, the following changes are needed:

• Change the API to include the above parameters, as a part of the animations.
• Change the ROS messages, to pass the above parameters.
• Update the blender rig to respect the API requests.
• Update the behavior trees to issue the new ROS message formats.

To avoid ROS compatibility issues, the new ROS messages should probably be published on a different set of topics than the existing ones, so that both the old and the new ROS message formats could be handled for a while.

Copyright

Copyright (c) 2014,2015,2016,2017 Hanson Robotics

Copyright (c) 2014,2015 Mike Pan