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A rather large project (rich web application) has fallen into my lap and I am unfamiliar with how to accomplish a major functionality. I'm hoping you all can help point me in the right direction.

I need users to be able to customize a 3D avatar and store it on the server somehow. The user can choose a body type, hair style, hair color, clothing, accessories, etc. The user can then choose from a number of different environments to place their avatar into, a specific animation (dance moves, playing an instrument, etc.), and an audio file. The audio file would then play while the avatar performed the animations within the selected environment.

How should we go about doing this? What technology should we use? Ideally, my colleagues and I would use MoCap software (w/ Microsoft Kinect) to complete 3D base models and animations for the avatars. Is it possible to then dynamically skin / texturize the models with the user's stored avatar? If so, how would I accomplish this? Does anyone have any other suggestions on how we would go about solving this problem?

I sincerely appreciate any direction in the matter. As well, if you feel as if you have the skills required to complete this task we may be looking to outsource. I just do not even know what skills I should be looking for in potential contract workers.

Thanks for your time.

David Denton
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If you need to reconstruct a 3D human avatar in real-time interactively you can use the algorithm for generating Avatars from Kinect for monitoring obesity as it is demonstrated in this video, which shows a real-time example of reconstructing a rigged avatar using Kinect. Watch demo video.

The algorithm is described in details in the technical paper: A. Barmpoutis. 'Tensor Body: Real-time Reconstruction of the Human Body and Avatar Synthesis from RGB-D', IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics, Special issue on Computer Vision for RGB-D Sensors: Kinect and Its Applications, October 2013, Vol. 43(5), Pages: 1347-1356. Read PDF.

Angelos B
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Since you need to handle 3D models, it could prove useful to look into some Flash 3D APIs (e.g. Stage3D - link: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/stage3d.html). Assuming you use some other tool for storing animation info (like model keyframes), you would also need a parser which can send the data to the 3D API, or store it in your application's specific format. The last step towards rendering and animating the models is to parse all the animation info and modify the model accordingly.

Romi Halasz
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