DePaul University's American Sign Language research project focuses on combining computer technology and linguistics research to bridge the communication gap between the deaf and hearing worlds by working towards the realization of a digital English-to-ASL translator.
More information about the ASL project can be found at: http://asl.cs.depaul.edu/
Hand Metacarpal Research
In the current model the movement of the fingers had already been implemented and was controlled by a maxcript GUI interface. However, metacarpal bones (the bones in the palm of your hand) remained completely stationary in the current implementation. This caused the model to produce unnatural hand shapes for some positions. An example of this would be any time the palm of the hand should bend such as the thumb touching the pinky. My task was to take the calculations of the fingers and use this placement to develop new calculations to place the metacarpal bones into their correct rotation. The script to fix this was written in MaxScript.
Re-Skin Research
New pants were designed for the ASL model but, these pants had to be added to the original model while maintaining the skind weights from the upper body while incoperating the new skin weights that had been designed with the pants. My task was to write a script to combine the new pants with the upper body while still retaining all the weights of both meshes. This script was written in MaxScript. Example peices of code from this script can be found in the links below:
The screenshots above show the transition of weights on one bone from the two old meshes into the new combined Mesh.
Below is a screenshot of the re-skin utility.
