I’ve noticed a problem with a lot of animated shorts and student work: The camera work is atrocious. It seems like all the time is spent on perfecting the modeling, animation, and shading, then in the last 10 minutes of production someone puts in a camera and animates it going to the left. Seeing this as a major issue I thought that there must be a better way to have the camera animated easily and a whole lot better. I then recalled I had a 3DConnexion SpaceNavigator that I never use because no applications I use support it. The whole line of 3DConnexion devices might be just what animators need to have better control of their camera.

The SpaceNavigator seems ideally suited to be able to control not just a camera but any object in 3 dimensions, provided that the application can see and understand the device. Unfortunately, Houdini is not one of them. So I researched it a bit and found some hope in an obscure post on the 3DConnexion forum. Someone had been able to use Python to poll data from a device using a Python module called comtypes, a COM client framework (the Windows SDK for the device is a COM dll).  I tried it in Python 2.5.4 and it worked!  At the time it seemed like a simple thing to add the script in Houdini and replace the trans and rotate prints to “hou.node(‘/obj/cam1′).parm(‘my param’).set(my devices param)” and get the camera to receive data from the device.  Long story short – it didn’t work.  Firstly, Houdini doesn’t have _ctypes.pyd which is required by the ctypes module (so I added it to Houdini x.x.x\python\lib\ which worked).  Secondly, though it seemed that the device driver was being seen, an error kept posting.

So more research was needed. I thought maybe using the old comtypes (v 0.2.1) with the script from the 3DConnection post was the issue, so I upgraded to comtypes 0.6.0. But if you read the post, only 0.2.1 works with the script. More research… then after getting the script to work with 0.6.0, I still got the same error.

So off to odforce I went (to cry for help) which got me thinking more but all of those avenues were dead ends.  Then – you guessed it – more research.  Which lead me to figure out what was wrong. My comtypes module in Houdini wasn’t compiled! I had no .pyc or .pyo files anywhere! And that was it, after I compiled everything using the Python compileall module in Houdini itself it all worked out. Now I can get Houdini’s command window to print the data from the device just fine. The next step is to see if it’s feasible to get this data into Houdini beyond printing to a window, but that is for another day (and another post) mainly because some quick tests cause Houdini to freeze up when I try to use the data to send to a parameter.

Here’s a quick look:

Houdini Using A 3DConnexion Device Via Python from Geneome on Vimeo.

There are some 32/64-bit issues. The _ctypes.pyd that comes with Python only seems to be compiled for 32-bit machines.  So unless I compile my own 64-bit _cytpes.pyd, this only works with a 32-bit Houdini. You can use a 64 bit _ctypes, which works with Houdini 10 64 bit but you need to use a different ctypes module version (1.0.2). As we are using a COM dll to poll data, this is a Windows only method. I need to look at the 3DConnexion SDK for Linux to see if Linux is in the cards through this or some other method.

(See the follow-up here.)

Dynamic Color Changing from Geneome on Vimeo.

Here is what the final result looks like (note that I changed the resulting file a bit to get a good flipbook result):

Emitting Particles Using A Bounding Volume’s Normals from Geneome on Vimeo.

Here’s an example of the second method using the flipbook:

Cloth Contrained On Edge from Geneome on Vimeo.