March 5th: Roland Hess on BlenderPeople at Grey Thumb, Boston

Remember our post about the Grey Thumb group last month? They were looking for a Blender user to give them a Blender demonstration. Well, they've found one and I can only say I'm sorry I can't be there!

Here's the announcement:

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.

Note: Parking is available for $3 (with validation) in the garage behind The Asgard on Green St.

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