Hi. I think it would be very cool to have SmartBody integrated into Unreal Engine 4. It does a lot of amazing things. You could even become a hero of your own videogame, to translate yourself there as a rigged character automaticly.
SmartBody is a character animation platform originally developed at the USC
Institute for Creative Technologies. SmartBody provides locomotion, steering, object manipulation, lip syncing, gazing, nonverbal behavior and retargeting in real time.
SmartBody is written in C++ and can be incorporated into most game and simulation engines. SmartBody is a Behavioral Markup Language (BML) realization engine that transforms BML behavior descriptions into realtime animations. SmartBody runs on Windows, Linux, OSx as well as the iPhone and Android devices.
Not going to happen unless you can convince them to use a different license than LGPL. http://smartbody.ict.usc.edu/sb-license - LGPL is considered “copyleft” and usage is against the terms of the EULA.
It doesn’t seem that the license should be too much of a problem, because it seems all they really want is to know what it is being used for. In their forum they say that they have thought about giving it a apache or zlib type license, but have kept to the LGPL one so they can know what it is used for. But they also say that if you write to them and tell them what you are going to use it for, then they will “grant them a license to use it however they like in their commercial application.”
It’s been a while since I looked into any of these systems in any detail, but I think Cartwheel is different from Smartbody in that Cartwheel is a physics based animation system, where as Smartbody focuses on “keyframe” type animation, but provides lots of useful features to enhance them (like full body IK, and full animation retargeting, and some physics based features).
Cartwheel I believe is based on the SIMBICON controller. Which is designed to provide bipedal locomotion for a character being simulated in a physics engine.
Another system that you might want to look at is Dance/ , which is also a physics based animation system, and was wrote by the same person who has done most of the work on Smartbody. I don’t think he is actively working on dance any longer though.
Game-only (monolithic) builds statically link even on Windows, making LGPL identical to GPL in practice with UE4. You could probably hack windows standalone games to use modules instead of being monolithic, but some platforms don’t even have a concept of dynamic linking.
Unfortunately, having looked at the code of SmartBody I’m far less excited, it’s quite a mess. The Cartwheel 3D code base looks much nicer in comparison, and even has some useful comments… problem is it only seems to work reliably when the character is moving at a leisurely walking speed, if you crank up the movement speed the character ends up having a seizure.
