[3dsMax] Arduino control experiment with physical slider and gesture sensor

Dash-POWER

Hello folks,

Just wanted to share with you my experimental thing which I have built last week. It's Arduino Uno connected to USB (Serial Port as communication) and ordinary slider pot which I bought from China for $0,9. I made connection between the Arduino and 3ds max to control some max properties. Only disadvantage which I have found was maxscript itself. I can't read data from COM port and do something within 3ds max because the script logic is constantly reading float values comming from Arduino. I tried to use some dot net magic to make it running on the background but I had many 3ds max crashes.



The APDS9960 (Gesture sensor) is also interesting. It supports object depth, ambient color values and directions of movement (left, right, top, down, far, near, none).

Video with demonstration can be seen here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TosyHArStgE

Any ideas how it could be actually beneficial for you are welcome. For me, I'm using the gesture sensor as virtual desktop switcher in Windows 10 instead (CTRL+ALT+Arrows). It's handy, actually faster and it looks cool. :-D

monster

Per did some similar stuff, the youtube description has links to the threads.:

https://youtu.be/bniCvySbPS0

another caveman

You should look up at realtime VJ sets

Michael Knubben

If you do end up going with something similar to Per's controller or VJ sets, make sure to look into OSC rather than MIDI. While midi can do high-resolution (14 bits rather than the regular 7) control, it's more finicky, and OSC seems like a more modern solution for controllers like these.

Another thing you can take inspiration from is the way controllers like Ableton's Push, Novation SL and NI Maschine map 8 or so macro knobs to parameters. In the best case: hand-selected, in the worst case just random or the first ones. There's usually a switchable context (moving between instruments and effects) and similarly here you could have a few modes: modifier control, material control, tool control...