Mouse Input Motion Capture?

[briareos]

I know 3dsmax has a feature that mocaps the mouse movement, does anyone know if there are any mel/plugins that achieve this for Maya?

[nonquad]

I've wanted something like that for a long time...

To the best of my knowledge it can't be done in mel. Mel can't launch threads, or otherwise delay its evaluation by specific amounts. A mel script always from start to finish without giving up control; ergo there is never an opportunity for mouse input.

There are two exceptions:
Mel can pause the system, but that doesn't help.
Secondly, one can also launch a scriptjob to be evaluated during idle periods... which is somewhat promising... but since that script gets evaluated at Maya's discretion rather than at regular intervals, it isn't a very controlled situation, and probably not suitable for mocap.

Still... I'd love to be proven wrong!
But at present, I think it would require a plugin.

[audun]

Its not hard at all, set up the timeline and execute these scripts.

For transformation:
recordAttr -at "translateX" -at "translateY" -at "translateZ";
play -record;

For rotation, angle units has to be set to radians:
currentUnit -a rad; // units set to radians
recordAttr -at "rotateX" -at "rotateY" -at "rotateZ";
play -record;
currentUnit -a deg; //resets back to degrees
currentUnit -fullName -query -angle; //prints current angular units

and, for scaling:
recordAttr -at "scaleX" -at "scaleY" -at "scaleZ";
play -record;

YES I know, Alias should have included these obvious scripts on the Animation shelf shipping with Maya

Also If you want to go back and redo your motion capture you will need to go into hypergraph and locate and delete the record nodes connected to your transform node. They're called record1 record2 .. and so on.

Happy mouse shaking
Audun

[nonquad]

Oh hey wow! I never noticed those commands!
Thanks a bundle Audun!

[audun]

One warning, if you set working units to meters, recording translation will not work.
Seems to be a bug, both in Maya 4.5 and 5.0
Do your translation mocap i centimeters and you're ok. Strange bug though.

Guess what units my scene is...
Audun

[mattcioffi]

just found this thread. this is awesome. you're so the man Audun.

[ewerybody]

Hey Nonquad!!!! Pleeeeze Report us obout your efforts!

I'm curious if it works!! And maybe show some examples if it succeeds ;]