real time animation input?

rooster

So I was wondering the other day if theres any way you can record motion you input into the computer, via mouse, joypad, whatever, and say 'this is the x/y motion of this object'

digital animatronics, if you will. Maybe this would be awful in practice, but I would love to move my mouse in the sort of arcs I want for a leg or arm ik and have that motion transfer directly to the animation. I realise this is limited to 2 axes, but I think with a bit of practice you could do 2 'recordings' to get the full 3d motion of something.

you know how you grab an ik control in a 3d program and play about with the arm or leg; i think it would be great if you could capture that movement, like a music sequencer recording what you play on the keyboard.

well, it sounds neat to me: can anyone think of how you'd do it though?

Clockwork

Been a long time since I did any animation (need to get back to that), but reading this I can't help but think of XSI/Softimage... Seem to remember doing something like this.

Maybe someone can confirm.

LoTekK

I'm reminded instantly of some stuff Daniel Martinez Lara did several years back, though I can't find the video he did explaining the setup. From what I recall, he had some objects and animations rigged up to take joystick and mouse input in realtime. Pretty neat stuff, and IIRC he was working in Max.

DrunkShaman

rooster wrote: »

So I was wondering the other day if theres any way you can record motion you input into the computer, via mouse, joypad, whatever, and say 'this is the x/y motion of this object'

digital animatronics, if you will. Maybe this would be awful in practice, but I would love to move my mouse in the sort of arcs I want for a leg or arm ik and have that motion transfer directly to the animation. I realise this is limited to 2 axes, but I think with a bit of practice you could do 2 'recordings' to get the full 3d motion of something.

you know how you grab an ik control in a 3d program and play about with the arm or leg; i think it would be great if you could capture that movement, like a music sequencer recording what you play on the keyboard.

well, it sounds neat to me: can anyone think of how you'd do it though?

*Removed*

CrazyButcher

friend of mine asked me about plugin development for max on this,
about hooking up analog devices such as
http://www.synthtopia.com/synth_review/Behringer/images/BCR2000_top.jpg

and linking them to max, to aid animation. However it was unsure to both of us how commercially viable this enterprise would be. Because max's standard mocap(midi) capture requires a dedicated "record mode" whilst our idea was to have the stuff active any time...

these analog devices are pretty cheap these days.

Piflik

I think you can do this in Max using Motion Capture Controllers...never tried it, though.

rooster

ok, it looks like it is possible by default in maya..
however, after following these instructions I just can't get it working.
can anyone else test it out please?
http://toybunny.com/category/maya/

update:
works with scale but not translation for me.. quite frustrating..

chronic

this works in maya, i remember a while back seeing a demo scene someone had put together of a car you could drive around inside maya.

arrangemonk

works in max, but it confused me, and i hadnd had a proper device for that so with the joystick its pretty useless
but there is a joypad controller (its just a pcb) that eats 8 analog inputs, with an arduino you can make hid device with 2^whatever ober 8 analog controller (you would need some extra harware for adress encoding to trigger the potensiometers to give back the right volume) and hook it up to one of these poser puppets or a dinosaur or watever and assign it with your rig
that would be awesome

Slum

I have used the Max motion capture to grab mouse movement. I used it to add a natural kind of entropy to a camera move, making it more handheld looking. (rather than using noise controllers)

Eric Chadwick

Yeah, the Motion Capture utility in Max works great, you can easily map your mouse sideways motion vs. front/back motion to rotate on specific axes, or one handles move the other handles scale, etc. You get live feedback in the viewport too.