   Need a Roadmap
  well..  I am starting my final Year project, time is short and am new with OpenGL, let me give a short description of Project - For Sign Languages I want to Design a Human Model {only Face+Head for showing Expressions and HANDS to show Signs}. This is Machine Translation for Converting English To Sign Language With Expressions for making it pure NLP. Ofcourse its a Final Project and needs to be Proffessional Looking { A Character liek Shrek  }. I Need someone to design a Roadmap for me, what things do i need to know and what should I use to MODEL Face and Hands and move them to convey Meanings in Axis of Rotations just as our Hands move.Given that i know only Basic OpenGL at this time. Please Do reply Soon.   
Quote:Original post by rhammadkhan.... I Need someone to design a Roadmap for me, what things do i need to know and what should I use to ....Wanna this person make the project for you too ???   ;  you probably dont even want to touch OpenGL for this kind of projectthats getting way too low levelhandle the organizational problems first eh?a machine that translates english to sign language? think about what kinda input you haveis this something where someone is going to talk into a microphone and its going to display sign language in realtime?that sounds a little unrealistic, how would you do the voice recognition and language parsing?maybe start with something simple like translating a text file eh?now, i dont know too much about sign language, so lets hope you do (else youre screwed) but is it structurally different from english? or is it like a letter for letter conversion? if its structurally different youre going to apply all the stuff you learned from compliler design to parse the input text and figure out grammar trees then convert to the sign languge structure, but thats goign to be hell since english isnt nice and clean with strict rules like a computer language, youre going to have a lot of exceptions to code inif its letter for letter conversion you just need an animation for each of them, and should probalby make a 'vocabulary' of common words too, since im pretty sure people who do sign language dont literally spell everything in the air, they use shortcutsanyway for actually getting the animations,look into stuff like Maya and 3d Studio Max modeling programs, maybe Poser since it does character animation stuffmaking every animation individually would be nuts, so youre going to have to find a way to represent different signs as parameters like.... 1st finger up, second finger down, etc then apply all that stuff to some basic model with switchable parts...or maybe you should consider some kind of motion capturebut heck, if youre going to do motion capture anyway, why not just record a person doing all the needed signs, then load up different video segments in whatever order you need? its just as functional for translation, emotions would probably carry better, and a lot less work   ;  I don't know sign language myself either, but I think it's modeled after English and is word for word...So parsing shouldn't be too much trouble, a dictionary database of some sort should be appropriate.You should take a look at this virtual face demo by Ken Perlin (of Perlin Noise fame):  http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/experiments/facedemo/If time really is short as you say, then going for Shrek quality is (in my opinion) unrealistic; I think you should aim more for something that looks like Perlin's demo, just with a hand as well for signaling.Like haphazardlynamed says, if you're not very familiar with OpenGL this is a bit much to take on in a short period of time, and going with pre-rendered animations would be a lot easier.If you did want to implement this with OpenGL though, figure your way to rendering an articulated hand first, with the different pieces of fingers forming a matrix push/pop heirarchy so you can render the whole thing together easily without too much trouble. Then you can express a single "hand state" as some series of finger rotation values. Then you can encode a single signed word as a sequence of these hand states (frames of an animation, basically). Then you just need to get to work building a database of English word -> hand state animation entries, and then a way to look them up and play them. Put an interface on top, and then I guess you're done...Minus the face, which would be similar (but again, more) work.If it's not too late for your project, my recommendation would be to try for either just a signing hand that's on the order of the quality in Perlin's demo, and have that do as many words as you can implement, or to try to think of something else altogether. Remember that if you don't set your sights too high and you achieve them, you could always add icing to the cake later.   ;  ha, a little ambitious i believemake space invaders instead :), a very nice looking one at that!!   ;  Dude don't give up and don't let yourself been discouraged by some people in this forum£¡Even if you're not able to finish your project just try and start it out, some other people might be interested and complete your idea, and it might be of great help to dumb and deaf children/people(That's the most important part).From the link(http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/experiments/facedemo/) given above,i got this, it might certaintly encourage you.Good luck!   