
Show HN: Procedural Character Animation with Machine Learning in Three.js - snayss
https://github.com/sneha-belkhale/AI4Animation-js
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andybak
The original project had a disappointingly restrictive licence considering my
taxes helped fund it:
[https://github.com/sebastianstarke/AI4Animation](https://github.com/sebastianstarke/AI4Animation)

What licence is this under?

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snayss
To be honest I don't have much knowledge about licensing. If you want to
experiment with this project for any use please go ahead -- although if you
want to use the original dataset, you would have to follow the original
licensing

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openbasic
Then you should inform yourself:
[https://tldrlegal.com/](https://tldrlegal.com/)

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snayss
thanks, just updated the license in the readme: [https://github.com/sneha-
belkhale/AI4Animation-js#license](https://github.com/sneha-
belkhale/AI4Animation-js#license)

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dvh
Why is demo displaying black horse on a black background? Even sample
screenshot shows that. Am I crazy? Is this some kind of meta joke? I don't get
it.

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penagwin
It took me a while to realize it was a horse, the fact that you can't
recognize it against the background means they REALLY should adjust some
colors.

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snayss
it's actually a dog :,,) . We agree, adjusting the lighting now.

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abainbridge
For comparison, here's Dog's Life, a 2003 PS2 game that I worked on. You get
to control a selection of dogs. I think the quadruped animation system was
pretty good for the time it was made.
[https://youtu.be/yi0-9ut1cEk?t=216](https://youtu.be/yi0-9ut1cEk?t=216)

~~~
canada_dry
> pretty good for the time it was made

No kidding. Especially when you consider how the tools for doing this kinda
thing have gotten exponentially better just in the last couple years!

I'm curious what your current work looks like?

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dgreensp
Call me a critic, but I don't see any "realistic transitions"? I mean, the
positions of the limbs are continuous, barely. Stopping is very jerky.
Sometimes the dog does a sort of "downward dog" pose for a long time when you
stop, sometimes entering and exiting this pose slowly. The hind legs look
weirdly limp at times. Is this better than some sort of naive interpolation
between animations?

It took me a while to realize about the A-W-D movement controls (I tried arrow
keys and mouse first), and, as others have said, everything is really dark.

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snayss
Thanks for your thoughts, I actually have noticed and agree with most of them.
This project is still a work in progress -- just wanted to share some initial
results and get feedback from the community.

> Is this better than some sort of naive interpolation between animations?

The current implementation might not be, but the idea of procedural animation
can very powerful. It eliminates a lot of manual labor of creating animations
clips / state machines and also can account for realtime unpredictable states.

To see what's possible, you should check out the original demo that this
project ported to the web --
[https://github.com/sebastianstarke/AI4Animation](https://github.com/sebastianstarke/AI4Animation)

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kowdermeister
I would mention somewhere the WASD controls :) Figured it out by accident.

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mlok
Thank you. It should also be noted that WASD controls are very bad on an
azerty keyboard. There are better choices than these keys. (Arrows being
obviously even better than letter keys)

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KidComputer
If I get the horse galloping in a circle its legs end up crossing and clipping
through each other.

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snayss
Yeah, we had to do retargeting of the original wolf skeleton to the skeleton
of the dog model. That was kind of tricky, and introduced this front leg
crossing artifact...

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crazygorilla
At least there is a live demo, I see so many GitHub projects where a
screenshot or a live demo would say more then a thousand words. Checking out a
repo and trying to run it is a big hurdle.

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snayss
hey -- I made a discord chat if you all want to follow up on this -- and give
suggestions -- [https://discord.gg/UXypcZV](https://discord.gg/UXypcZV)

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css
What is the expected performance like on this? I am getting < 50fps with an i7
6700K and Quadro P4000.

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kif11
Some people said they got 60 fps on iPhone X. :) Personally, I'm getting 25
fps on MacBook 13, 3.1 GHz Intel Core i7 with Intel Iris Graphics 6100.

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kekub
I can confirm 60fps on iPhone Xʀ.

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kif11
I don't really understand how iPhone is better then i7 6700K and Quadro P4000!

