SmartBody, first steps

SmartBody is a character animation platform originally developed at the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies. SmartBody provides locomotion, steering, object manipulation, lip syncing, gazing and nonverbal behavior 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.

I want to use this to control the character animations for a video game made in Unity3D.

 The package does say this it can work with

• Unity
• Ogre
• Unreal
• Panda3D
• GameBryo

However it supports Unity and Ogre actively. 

Goal: To send BML messages to a control characters in SmartBody via TCP or UDP messages.

Tasks:

1. Get and Compile SmartBody ( For Windows and Linux )
2. Familiarize self with SmartBody examples
3. Learn how to use TCP in Python.
4. Produce code to control SmartBody character from python code combining what was learned from 2 and 3.
   
   
   

   
   import random
   
   import select
   import socket
   import sys
   
   service = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
   
   # Connect the socket to the port where the server is listening
   server_address = ('localhost', 3850)
   print >> sys.stderr, 'connecting to %s port %s' % server_address
   service.connect(server_address)
   
   
   print "|--------------------------------------------|"
   print "|       Starting Locomotion Type Demo        |"
   print "|--------------------------------------------|"
   
   smartBodyRelitivePath = "../../smartbody/data/"
   
   # Add asset paths
   scene.addAssetPath('script',smartBodyRelitivePath + 'sbm-common/scripts')
   scene.addAssetPath('mesh', smartBodyRelitivePath + 'mesh')
   scene.addAssetPath('mesh', smartBodyRelitivePath + 'retarget/mesh')
   scene.addAssetPath('motion', smartBodyRelitivePath + 'ChrBrad')
   scene.addAssetPath('motion', smartBodyRelitivePath + 'ChrRachel')
   scene.addAssetPath('motion', smartBodyRelitivePath + 'retarget\motion')
   scene.addAssetPath('motion', smartBodyRelitivePath + 'sbm-common/common-sk')
   scene.loadAssets()
   
   
   # Set scene parameters and camera
   print 'Configuring scene parameters and camera'
   scene.setScale(1.0)
   scene.setBoolAttribute('internalAudio', True)
   scene.run('default-viewer.py')
   camera = getCamera()
   camera.setEye(0, 2.87, 11.67)
   camera.setCenter(0, 2.14, 9.81)
   camera.setUpVector(SrVec(0, 1, 0))
   camera.setScale(1)
   camera.setFov(1.0472)
   camera.setFarPlane(100)
   camera.setNearPlane(0.1)
   camera.setAspectRatio(0.966897)
   scene.getPawn('camera').setPosition(SrVec(0, -5, 0))
   
   # Set joint map for Brad
   print 'Setting up joint map for Brad'
   scene.run('zebra2-map.py')
   zebra2Map = scene.getJointMapManager().getJointMap('zebra2')
   bradSkeleton = scene.getSkeleton('ChrBrad.sk')
   zebra2Map.applySkeleton(bradSkeleton)
   zebra2Map.applyMotionRecurse('ChrBrad')
   
   # Retarget setup
   scene.run('motion-retarget.py')
   # Animation setup
   scene.run('init-param-animation.py')
   
   # Set up 3 Brads
   print 'Adding characters into scene'
   posX = -200
   for i in range(1): # Only add one brad
       baseName = 'ChrBrad%s' % i
       brad = scene.createCharacter(baseName, '')
       bradSkeleton = scene.createSkeleton('ChrBrad.sk')
       brad.setSkeleton(bradSkeleton)
       # Set position
       bradPos = SrVec((posX + (i * 200))/100, 0, 0)
       brad.setPosition(bradPos)
       # Set up standard controllers
       brad.createStandardControllers()
       # Set deformable mesh
       brad.setDoubleAttribute('deformableMeshScale', .01)
       brad.setStringAttribute('deformableMesh', 'ChrBrad')
       # Play idle animation
       bml.execBML(baseName, '')
       # Retarget character
       retargetCharacter(baseName, 'ChrBrad.sk', False)
   
   # Turn on GPU deformable geometry for all
   for name in scene.getCharacterNames():
       scene.command("char %s viewer deformableGPU" % name)
   
   # Whether character has reached its target
   brad1Reached = True
   
   # Paths for characters
   brad1Path = [SrVec(-2, 8, 0), SrVec(-2, -8, 0)]
   
   bradCur = 0
   pathAmt = 2
   
   
   class LocomotionDemo(SBScript):
       def update(self, time):
           # Select is a creative way of checking to see if a service has data ready to read,
           # ready to write to or an exceptional condition.
           r, w, e = select.select([service], [], [], 0.0)
           if r: # There is something to read
               data = service.recv(256)
               character = 'ChrBrad0'
               # The last 0 in the target is zero just so the character stays on the plane
               bmlMessage = ''
               
               print "BML Message for " + character + ": " + bmlMessage
               bml.execBML(character, bmlMessage)
           
   
   # Run the update script
   scene.removeScript('locomotiondemo')
   locomotiondemo = LocomotionDemo()
   scene.addScript('locomotiondemo', locomotiondemo)