model of the human arm

I would like to build a model of the human
arm for motion analysis studies.
Could someone tell me if there are available
libraries or give me some general advices how to do that .

Thanks very much !

Is the robot arm at the end of chapter 3 of the red book too simple? You weren’t looking for definitions of muscle shapes and hair were you?
Barry

Originally posted by armin:
[b]I would like to build a model of the human
arm for motion analysis studies.
Could someone tell me if there are available
libraries or give me some general advices how to do that .

Thanks very much ![/b]

to what extent of realism?

You could build an arm out of a couple of blocks that are parented to each other to form a hierarchy. On the other side of the scale you could make use of a pckage such as Maya or Max to model your arm with all muscle tissues, skin etc. The challenge would then be getting the data from the packag, loading it, and then having some very complex code to manipulate it in the same way as a human arm. This wouldn’t be very quick.

Some more details are needed…

Originally posted by bsperlin:
Is the robot arm at the end of chapter 3 of the red book too simple? You weren’t looking for definitions of muscle shapes and hair were you?
Barry

Thanks very much for your answer !

Actually I thought an arm with a realistic shape would be nice . Muscle shape and hair are not so important.
The robot arm in chapter 3 of the red book is maybe a good start, but I would like to achieve a more realistic human shape.
I could transform the blocks in the example into cones which would be already an improvement.

I do not know the Maya package but I will look for it .
Actually I thought maybe there are some libraries of an arm ( upper, forearm and hand)

you’re unlikely to get an actual library as such. One way to improve realism is to get hold of a freeware model file. This would probably only hold geometry, the bones and skinning mechanisms would need to be added. I remember seeing a demo on www.gamasutra.com that had a skinned arm with source code. That might be a very good place to start.

code is somewhere on here http://www.gdmag.com/code.htm

A friend of mine did her PhD thesis on an opengl model of the hand (Realistic movement with a neural net) - you may find some useful links on her web site: http://www.cs.dal.ca/~okuchar/main-noframes.html
Joe

Thanks very much for all the links !

I will check them out.

well I would create a model with milkshape3d and load it. Theres lots of tutorials on how to do it. I have code to load in a model thats only about 500 lines of code. Theres a tutorial on this at http://home.clara.net/paulyg/objects.htm