Exposer Home Page

| # EXPOSER: A TOOL FOR ANIMATING PLIB CRITTERS. | The foot bone's connected to the leg bone, The leg bone's connected to the knee bone, The knee bone's connected to the thigh bone, The thigh bone's connected to the back bone, The back bone's connected to the neck bone, The neck bone's connected to the head bone, Oh, hear the word of the Lord! -- Unknown (but incompetent) anatomist.

# Introduction.

Exposer is a tool to allow you to perform fairly complex animations of complex creatures with relative ease using the PLIB Scene Graph API. Naturally, Exposer is written using PLIB and generates output in several forms that PLIB programs will find useful.

Exposer is totally unrelated to the Windows program 'poser'. The name 'exposer' relates to the fact that this program used to be called 'poser' until I heard of the existance of a Windows program of the same name. This is therefore the ex-Poser program.

Exposer has a complex (but very powerful) GUI - you WILL need to read this manual in order to take advantage of it.

## Licensing.

Exposer is OpenSource software, issued under the terms of the GNU Public License (GPL).

## Installing and Running Exposer

Download ExPoser from the PLIB site: http://plib.sf.net/dist/exposer-0.0.1.tar.gz

Next, unpack the tarball containing the Exposer sources:

       tar xzvf exposer-0.0.1.tar.gz

Then run the usual:

       ./configure ; make

(And you can optionally run 'make install' if you wish to fully install the program rather than running it out of the installation directory).

Then to run the program (without installing it) you could type something like:

      src/exposer

The program will prompt you to enter a 3D model file - the ones in data with the extension '.ac' will do for starters.

Exposer can read any format that the PLIB library supports that can contain both line and polygon objects.

## So What Does It Do.

Well, right now, not a lot. The idea is that you can take an arbitary polygonal model (typically of a person or animal of some kind) and with minimal additional modelling effort be able to animate it in your game or other interactive application.

The technique that exposer uses is 'skin and bones' animation where the polygons of the model form the creatures 'skin' and you model a set of line primitives inside the creature to make a crude skeleton (the 'bones') much like the armature that a sculptor would use.

Exposer therefore separates out the polygons and the lines in the model you load (because your game will only be using the polygons) and uses the lines to form a hierarchical structure of matrix transformations. Exposer then assigns each vertex in the skin to one of the bones (possibly more than one in the future) according to distance - and then moves each vertex in accordance with the matrix of the bone to which it's attached.

Exposer can optionally display each bone as a coloured cuboid and provides a Heading/Pitch/Roll dial for each of them - but typically, you'll only want to view the 'skin' - and that's the default. By playing with the coloured dials, you can move the bones in any way you like and the skin will try to follow that movement as smoothly as possible.

One important issue is how the lines are assembled into a bone heirarchy. Firstly, exactly ONE of the lines in the original model must be painted RED. This bone is special because it's the root of the bone hierarchy. Typically, this will be a bone in the spine of a human or other mammal - but you might choose it to be something else. You can "Make the Tail Wag the Dog" by making the tailbone be the red one!

Once the program has found that red 'root' bone, it looks for other lines that have one or other of their vertices touching the root bone. Other lines can connect to the root somewhere other than at the ends of that red line, but your non-root bones MUST connect to it at their ends.

The program allows a 1% tolerance on this positioning so bones don't have to be EXACTLY touching - but they do have to be VERY close.

So, now we have the root bone and some other bones connected to it - and now the program proceeds to expand out the skeleton by treating all of the newly connected bones as 'root' and proceeding recursively from there.

In a sense, it's like reading the lines of the song at the top of this page backwards:

       The back bone's...the RED bone,
       The thigh bone's connected to the back bone,
       The knee bone's connected to the thigh bone,
       The leg bone's connected to the knee bone,
       The foot bone's connected to the leg bone

...although if it were me, I'd want a pelvis-bone and for the sake of graphics, there wouldn't need to be a knee bone.

So, that's more or less it.

## Controls.

Having loaded your first model, you'll see something like this:
The rather nice shade of green is my favorite colour. If you prefer shock-pink...bad luck - that's what source code is for! The 3D model sits in the middle of the screen with the GUI widgets floating in front of it.

There is an optional black and white chequerboard 'floor'.

Let's go through the GUI controls piece by piece:

### The Menu Bar.

In the top-left, there is a pretty standard menu bar,
The 'File' menu allows you to replace the model you are working on with another, it also allows you to load and save 'bone' files - which contain everything you create in Exposer. Generally, these Bone files have the same filename as the 3D model but with the extension ".bones". Exposer will fill that filename into the file selector box - so you probably only have to hit "OK" to load and save.

The 'View' menu lets you zoom into and out of the 'timeline' which we'll come to later. The 'Time' menu has other 'timeline' operations.

### The Bone Dials

To the left of the window are the bone dials - each coloured row of GUI widgets represents one of the bones in your model.
The button marked 'X' resets all of the angles of the bone to zero - which will always be how your model was posed when you created it. The 'H', 'P' and 'R' buttons let you freeze and hide any of the three dials that you don't want to use for that particular bone. This is useful for joints like your elbow that can only flex in one degree of freedom.

The three dials represent the heading, pitch and roll angles of the joint at the end of that bone nearest the top of the bone connection hierarchy.

The rectangular area above the 'X/H/P/R' buttons can be used to enter a short text string to identify the bone. These strings are saved when you write out the bone data and your application program might want to read them to help identify what's what.

If you have more bones than will conveniently fit on the screen, the scroll-bar to the left of the bone widgets will allow you to scroll them up and down.

### The Body Translators

Just below the meny bar, there are three sliders with text display/entry areas that allow you to bodily translate your model.
You should generally use this for things like adding 'bounce' to a character's walk sequence - it's not advisable to try to position your character within it's world using this feature.

### View Control

In the bottom-left corner of the screen are some view controls. These can be used anytime to change the view you have of the model - but they don't change any actual data in the model or it's bones.
You can also use the 'Zoom' slider to move the model closer or further away, and there are buttons marked 'Skin', 'Bones' and 'Floor' that let you toggle the display of each of those things - so you can see just the skin, just the bones or both (Or neither if you are particularly perverse!) - with or without the floor plane. The initial default is to show just the skin.

The 'Pan' and 'Tilt' dials allow you to move your eyepoint around the model to view it from all sides as it animates.

### VCR Controls

In the bottom-right corner of the screen, there are some VCR-like controls to play the animation, pause it, play in reverse and to play at triple-speed in forward or reverse.
You cannot adjust any joint angles in the model when the animation is playing - so be sure to press the downward arrow (STOP!) when you want to do editing.

There is a control to make the ground translate along at a specified speed (in OpenGL-units-per-second). This is useful if (for example) you want to animate a running character that's you'll be moving at two meters per second in your game. You need to move the legs so that the feet move along at the same speed as the ground or else it'll look like 'moonwalking'. Set the VCR's ground speed to match the speed in the game and you'll be able to see if the animation is going to work.

### The TimeLine

This is a large rectangle taking up most of the bottom edge of the screen:
It has a number of functions, it starts up as a view of a 10 second animation. Seconds are indicated by the long tickmarks, tenth seconds by the short ones. You can zoom into or out of the view or reset to seeing the entire timeline using the 'View' menu in the menubar.

If you are zoomed into the timeline, a slider will appear to allow you to scroll it left and right.

Magenta lines that extend across the full height of the timeline indicate "events" - each event is a point in time at which you have set the bone joint angles. You can add an event by selecting 'Add an Event' in the 'Time' menu and then clicking somewhere onto the timeline to position it. One they are positioned, you can click and drag events up and down the timeline to change when they happen.

To change an event, click on it and it'll flash to indicate that you have it selected. Then you can adjust it using the bone dials. A common problem is to try to edit a position without selecting it first - make sure that the event is flashing on the timeline.

Various operations on the 'selected' event are available from the 'Time' menu.

You can also select a 'region' by left-clicking on one end and right-clicking on the other. The current region is highlighted in yellow. There are operations that operate on the current region in the 'Time' menu.

Wherever you click the left button on the timeline, the model will move to that position - and the bone dials will follow. You can drag the mouse up and down the timeline to replay the animation at whatever speed you move the mouse. However, to get a 'realistic' playback speed, use the single arrows on the VCR menu.

Remember though that you can only EDIT the position of the model on a selected event.

### Menu Operations on the Timeline.

The 'Time' menu allows you to add an event, delete the selected event, delete ALL the events in the 'region' that you have highlighted, or delete the section of time in the 'region' - compressing up the rest of the timeline to fit. Finally, you can add more time to the timeline so that you can create animations that are longer than the ten seconds initially provided.

## The Exposer ".bones" file format.

This is a very simple ASCII text file - however the parser for it is VERY crude at this stage.

The first line of the file is:

      NUMBONES=17 NUMEVENTS=7 MAXTIME=10.0000 Z_OFFSET=1.3 SPEED=0.3

So there are 17 bones, 7 events - and the duration of the animation is ten seconds.

The Z_OFFSET is advice to the application about the height of the origin of the model above the lowest point on the model in it's default pose.

SPEED is the speed set on the VCR 'Ground Speed' control - which the application can use to tell at what speed the character should move forwards in order to make the animation look right.

Then follows the bones - one per line:

      BONE "bone-name" HPR

The 'bone-name' is the string you entered beside the bone dials. The 'HPR' part sets which axes are frozen. (in this case, none of them...the frozen axis letters are replaced by dots).

After all the bones come the events. For each event there is a header line:

      EVENT 3.0000 17 (0.000,0.000,0.000)

The first number is the time (in seconds) at which the event occurred, the second number is the number of bones that are affected by this event. Currently this must be the same as 'NUMBONES'. The coordinate in parentheses is the body-translation of the model from the origin at this moment in time.

After the event header, there is one line per bone containing the three joint angles in degrees for that bone at that time:

      (90,45,37)

That's it! However, as I said - the parser is 'brittle' and very intolerant of errors - edit the file at your own peril!

## Support Programs.

In the ExPoser directory, you'll also find a short program called 'merge_bones' - this takes a number of '.bones' files (listed in order on the command line) and concatenates them end-to-end - placing the results in the file 'out.bones'.

On stdout, it lists the header from each of the component files. It is (of course) necessary that the '.bones' files originated from the same 3D model - merge_bones checks that things are consistant and warns of errors.

## Some Advice

Bones don't necessarily have to be placed where the bones would be in an anatomically correct version of the critter. In the example 'dog.ac' file, there is a tongue-bone and two ear-bones - and there are no ribs, spinal vertibrae, etc.

You'll also probably need to hop back and forth between your modeller and exposer to position the bones how you want them. You'll find on occasions that the algorithm that causes exposer to attach a skin vertex to the nearest bone will sometimes result in part of a character's stomach being attached to their hand or something. If that happens then you might try adding some lateral bones in the stomach to ensure that there is always one attached to the spine that's closer to the skin than the hand is.

Artists should be encouraged to model the character in a position with their legs wide apart and their arms fully outstretched to minimise this kind of problem.

It is normal to model the character facing down the positive Y axis - facing away from the camera.

Using the axis freeze buttons to isolate only those axes through which a real joint can rotate is very useful. A human elbow joint can really only rotate through one axis and turning off the other two is helpful.

You can also use Exposer for things other than animals. You could model plants bending in a heavy wind - or even flexible things like flags or clothing.