GENEA-visualizer-minimal-v2022.1

Description

This release contains a minimal version of the GENEA visualization tool in the form of a Blender script that you can use directly with Blender through the command line or Blender's user interface. This release is useful if you have Blender installed on your system and you want to play around with the visualizer. Note that while the release should resemble the final visualizer as close as possible (i.e. the one that will be used during evaluation), it is possible that some of the code, or default settings, change. If you wish to avoid this, then it is better to use the server-based solution, either hosted by the GENEA organizers, or hosted by yourself after downloading the files from this repository.

Using the script

1. Make sure you have Blender 2.93.9 (other versions may work, but this is not guaranteed).
2. Extract the .zip contents to a directory of your choice.
3. Start Blender and navigate to the Scripting panel above the 3D viewport.
4. In the panel on the right of the 3D viewport, press Open to navigate to the script directory and open GENEA_script_wip.py.
5. Tweak the settings in main() on line 200 , under the if statement - make sure to specify full paths for the BVH and WAV files, including the extension and drive label.
6. When ready, run the script by pressing the "play" button at the top to render the scene (this can take a while, so try with fewer frames first).
7. The rendered video will be output to the output directory, next to the script file.

A friendly tip

It is likely that your machine learning pipeline outputs a bunch of BVH and WAV files, such as during hyperparameter optimization. Instead of processing each BVH/WAV file pair separately through Blender's UI yourself, call Blender with command line arguments like this:

"<path to Blender executable>" -b --python "<path to Blender .py script>" -- --input "<path to BVH file>" --input_audio "<path to WAV file>" --video

On Windows, you may write something like this:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Blender\blender.exe" -b --python ./blender_render.py -- --input "C:\Users\Wolf\Documents\NN_Output\BVH_files\mocap.bvh" --input_audio "C:\Users\Wolf\Documents\NN_Output\audio.wav" --video

You can also specify a --duration <frame count> flag to render clips shorter than 3600 frames, for faster testing!