BML Realizer

BML Realizer (BMLR) was a B.Sc. final project at Reykjavik University in the spring of 2008. The creators are Bjarni Þór Árnason (bjarnia@gmail.com) and Ægir Þorsteinsson (aegirth@gmail.com). Dr Hannes Högni Vilhjálmsson was the project supervisor.

BML Realizer is an open source animation toolkit for visualizing virtual humans in rich 3D environments. As an input to the animation engine we use Behavior Markup Language (BML), a new standard language for describing the coordination of body movement in animated characters. This standard is developed by a group of research labs across the world, including CADIA and University of Southern California´s Information Science Institute (USC/ISI). BML Realizer uses ISI´s SmartBody as the core of the toolkit, but with necessary modifications to make it completely independent, open and very easy to use. Specifically, we adopted a new rendering engine, called Panda3D, and redesigned SmartBody´s communication layer to make it usable in a simple single-application environment.

The latest version of BMLR can be found at http://cadia.ru.is/projects/bmlr

There are two versions of BMLR available, one that includes a redistributable version of Panda3D (Win32), and one that does not. The version that does not include Panda3D is labeled NOPANDA.

If you get the NOPANDA version, you need to obtain the latest Panda3D version (NO VERSION BEFORE 1.5.1 WILL WORK) from Panda3D's download site: http://www.panda3d.org/download.php. The NOPANDA version could come in handy if newer versions of Panda3D are released but BMLR is not updated to include them, or if you need Panda3D for other operating systems than Win32.

In any case, all you need to do is extract BMLR to a desired folder on your hard drive. Read the README and QUICKSTART files included, and you will be good to go.

• Changelog
• Frequently Asked Questions
• PandaBMLR
  • Modeling for PandaBMLR
    • Blender
    • Maya
• SmartBody
  • SmartBody command reference
  • SmartBody motion controllers