3D Human, articulating characters

I am looking to create a 3D human, articulating character (arms, wrist, fingers, shoulders, head) against a stationary background. This character would be a host or presenter of a show. The character will stand in the same place at all times but it does need to be move in a human way. The character needs to present a multitude of gestures, such as shoulder shruggging, pointing, detailed hand movements, face touching to look inquisitive among other human-like movements and transitions.


Which technology is suited for this type of goal?

Is this something that is programmable using Swift and can this be done on the fly?

Accepted Reply

Take a look at this article https://developer.apple.com/documentation/scenekit/scnskinner


"Typically, an artist creates a skinned model using external 3D authoring tools and saves it, along with animations that use the skeleton, in a scene file. You load the model from the scene file and pose or animate it in your app, either by using animation objects also loaded from the scene file or by directly manipulating the nodes in the skeleton."


So, for this type of thing ("I am looking to create a 3D human"), you should be using an external 3D authoring tool to create your geometry and animations, and then you could import them into SceneKit.

Replies

Take a look at this article https://developer.apple.com/documentation/scenekit/scnskinner


"Typically, an artist creates a skinned model using external 3D authoring tools and saves it, along with animations that use the skeleton, in a scene file. You load the model from the scene file and pose or animate it in your app, either by using animation objects also loaded from the scene file or by directly manipulating the nodes in the skeleton."


So, for this type of thing ("I am looking to create a 3D human"), you should be using an external 3D authoring tool to create your geometry and animations, and then you could import them into SceneKit.

I began looking into Blender and Unity last night after I received direction from you. Everything looks good but I went back to look at SCNSkinner to put it into context. After spending time attempting to see how to utilize this API, I found I I was not comprehending how to utilize it. I looked for a couple of hours and could not find any examples. What I did find online were pre-programmed motions that were triggered. None of them utilized SCNSkinner.


Are there any examples of using this part of the API. Even some simple use-case would go a long way.

Sorry for the late response. I have been offline for a bit.



Although the presentation talked about skinning and the sample has no no actual code for skinning

I'll try again to understand how to utilize this part of the API.

Note: It used to be easy to just go to sample code and search for a framework and you would see all of the examples. Now examples and tech notes are no longer easy to find. They are buried and that is a shame because there is a wealth of knowledge that has to be excavated.


Now for the good part. YES!!! Those were awesome examples. I did not know the slide deck was made from utilizing scenkit.


Thank you very much for directing me to those examples.