December 05th, 2012 at 5:00pm PST, Agenda and Minutes

Agenda

Attendees

William Glascoe Don Brutzman Joe Williams Dick Puk

Minutes

Joe Williams discussed the history of H-Anim development

Principles used today where developed 20 years ago!

Joints <- weighting function -> skin vertices

The geometry comes first; segment connections second, which deforms the skin with complicated mathematics

Joe discussed the MoCap techniques for facial animation

He focused on the challenge of animating human lip movement during talking (vice singing and other vocal behaviors)

H-Anim specification's Displacer element the way to correlate individual (skin) vertices to every joint's location and rotation

Sequence of human poses captured must be transformed to be transportable to another human character

Joe acknowledged there is a minor deficiency with our specification of the feet bone for bone but the most important joints are accounted for.

Joe discussed attachment points (sites) as the basis for inverse and forward kinematics (rigid body physics). Joe thinks there may be rationale to add a couple levels of detail in the skin to match the skeleton levels of detail.

Don Brutzman noted many humanoid animation capabilities are using homegrown "skins". After William talked about justifications for knowing the location and rotation histories of the humanoid joints in addition to the skin vertices, Don suggested we collaborate with the Medical working group to prioritize the hundreds of terms describing individual gross and fine motor sequences (e.g., coughing, sneezing, etc.)

Joe thinks the industry's players should proffer their best practices for us to complete the specification via the NWIP. He mentioned the class of animations that communicate the transfer of energy from outside the human body to inside via a site (feature).

Don asked a couple of questions after acknowledging Joe's tremendous depth of knowledge with H-Anim.

1. Have we properly documented what H-Anim is capable of? 2. What are the near-term milestones?

William discussed his contact with the Biodigital Human creators (Biodigital Systems in New York City) and their API availability. He invited the lead Web developer (John Qualter) to our working group but John has not responded. Biodigital's market is medical education.

Joe told us the H-Anim architecture, starting with the most complete skeleton, we advocate is valid because when you look at the dozen or so key players they are mimic hierarchical skeleton architecture of H-Anim. Unfortunately, those players were not properly engaged by the H-Anim working founders for various reasons and several variations were developed to meet product development schedule milestones unique product needs.

Joe summarized his discussion with two fundamental points: 1. to transport animations between similar characters [with little effort] is the basic application of the H-Anim specification 2. get implementers interested [in H-Anim specification revisions] from the perspective of proffering technologies and computational techniques you think completes our [internationally standardized] human character.

Myeong brought us back to the published agenda and asked the group to discuss file formats of body scan data. Joe said some very complicated mathematics have been implemented to move vertices from frame to frame but those vertices are of the skin only and that's an issue because they ignore the human skeleton's segments and its rotations.

William brought of 3D printing (additive manufacturing) as a exogenous factor in the strategy development for our group. Don quickly reacted with the 3D CAD working group interest in this area and how 3D printing is too far removed to our purpose. We will not consider 3D printing applications (Use Cases) in the near-term.

William suggested a hub-spoke diagram to illustrate the H-Anim relationship strategy--H-Anim working group (hub) with the markets at the end of the varying length spokes. The distance from the hub representative of the effort we see to expend to "get in bed" with the market leaders who should adopt H-Anim technology.

Myeong asked if her action to remove information for the NWIP was ok. Dick Puk concurred so the information will be deleted from the NWIP.

William explained why Dr. David Bruner was not presented because we expected his attendance.

The group decided the next meeting will be 5:00 pm (Pacific) Thursday, 03 Jan 2013.