CAVEActors: A Human Actor Library For The CAVE^TM Darren R. Thompson

IV. The Actor-Data File

As mentioned before, all information describing the actor is obtained from the actor-data file. This enables the programmer to easily modify the actor's attributes and view the results without having to re-compile. The format of the file is shown in Appendix B. All line spaces are required. The values for the vertices, normals, material properties, rotation angles, and other data were used for the actor created for this project. Any comments inserted just for this report will be placed in {}. These comments are not supposed to be in the actor-data file. The line spaces taken up by these comments are not supposed to exist in the file. Every time the actor is initialize, a file called values.out is created and all of the values of the class? variables initialized by the actor-data file are printed to this file. This enables the user to ensure that every variable is initialized properly.

Notice that there are definitions for various parts of the body such as the arm movement data, pointing angles, fist angles, and the leg movement data. This is done to give the programmer maximum flexibility. With a layout such as this, the programmer can tailor the actor's movements to his/her liking.