Hello SI community!
Aided by Kai-Wolter, I put together this tutorial to create a device capture
facility for softimage.
In this tutorial you will be able to "move" a little flying robot trough a flying city.
Currently I´m trying to generate a greeble city to best suit the robot´s fly trough.
Following this first tutorial, we have the second part which is to correct forward/backward movement
and left/right commands.

http://www.activemotionpictures.com/blog/2010/09/softimage-device-capture-tutorial/

Last tutorial will focus on some interactivity invoking animated clips from timeline.
Also, we would explore "jumping" or "thrusting" for our character.

Part 3 is yet to come, so If you´re interested, please C/C here.
Thanks!

David.

Thanks for the tutorial - I think using 1st person game physics for animation capturing will become somewhat bigger soon. Would be cool to see some Lunar Lander like physics with this. Particles may be added later xD

Reminded me also of this MIDI device capture, don't know how valid this still is today:
http://www.infobloom.se/xjobb/pc1600/

One midi video tutorial comming up! next week!

Also : a new video about usb-playstation-axis-like-pads and softimage!

Does anyone have a Peavey 1600 MIDI Controller? I bought mine when I first purchased XSI (4), and tried to have Michael Isner demo it for me. It looked pretty hard to setup.. So it's been laying in the back of my closet all these years. Well, after watching your vid, I decided to pull it out and see if I could get it working... Almost gave up, but then I couldn't believe I got it working - it works great!! I'm working on putting an addon together. So far I have a device preset, script to generate nulls for it, and an ice compound that puts it all to use.

-Dave

Looking forward to your tuts!

Dave that would be cool. I think I remember having heard the PC1600 device driver allows all sorts of MIDI devices to be connected, that could be interesting.

I'm probably getting a thrustmaster hotas. Quite cheap and has 5 axes of control (XY and stick rotation for the right hand, thrust and an analog slider for the left hand).

edit... just tried one, the dead zone in the middle of all controls seems to be a real problem, probably with all joysticks, smooth movement captures seem not to be possible. There don't seem to be any tools to configure this also.

I've also been working on getting Xbox 360 controllers working. One thing that I noticed that might help you with joysticks is damping down the effect.. Just having a scale of 1 causes the analog sticks to generate values (as displayed by plugging it into setdata self.fader1) between -1000 and 1000.

-Dave

PS. The secret to getting the PV1600 working was configuring it so each fader outputted on Channel 1, and then the # of the fader.. So, [1,1], [1,2].....[1,16]. You can modify that via the Edit, Arrows, and Enter button on PV1600. You can save a preset afterwards into its internal memory, so next time you power it on, it's all setup. I'll post some pictures later on....

The default scale is huge indeed, the dead zone problem however is still there also with a lower scale. What I'm concerned it makes joysticks less useful as a cheap motion capture solution.
I think I'll look if there's a dead zone free joystick, or I'll use the gas&brake pedals from my steering wheel

Dave, do you know if the PC1600 support 16 bit MIDI values also?

SYSEX messages? I believe so.

EDIT: SYSEX->Softimage? No options for that. Built in, that is...

I've hit a bit of a stumbling block and wonder if continuation would warrant a new thread... I was able to follow the original tutorial here and get my null "NULL_Car" to move around with my x360 joystick. (LstickY translates it in Z, LstickX translates it in X. Well, now I want to rotate it with RStickX. I really wish I understood matrices better!! A few years ago, I tried messing around with XNA Game Studio. I think this site http://www.riemers.net/eng/ExtraReading/matrices_geometrical.php is good, but it's still not sinking in (and working in ICE).

One weird thing that I can't figure out is when I calculate my angle ((previous frame's direction -> dir to euler-> 3d vect to scalar->y) added to (RstickX * mult by scalar (10)) and plug that back into the global orientation, it computes the correct angle via show values.

When I plug that into an additional equation it shows angle incorrectly as 0
(my angle -> deg to rad -> cos -> x (scalar to 3d vector)
-> sin -> z (scalar to 3dvect) -> mult by scalar (LStickY) -> add prev frame's global pos -> globalpos

I think since ICE is showing that angle as 0, it's not translating along the rotated vector... ie even though I rotated it 45 degrees, pressing up on stick still moves it only in global z.

Now it seems to be working...( ..... my angle -> added to 90 scalar) -> cos -> mult by scalar -1 -> x-> ( scalar to 3d vect -> mult by scalar (lsticky) -> added to previous )
(..... my angle -> add 90 )-> sin -> z -> ( scal to 3d vect -> .........)

gonna try adding in to the end add node a copy of that but rotated and using lstickx.