Import and morph geometry

Hi! I’m a total vvvv noob, been checking out a bunch of tutorials so I got the very basics down. The plan is to make a patch for an interactive video installation - nothing fancy, at least I figure the patch should turn out quite straight forward. But I’m a bit confused on what approach I should take and stuff (and pressed for time)…
…so any pointers would be helpful.

So what I want to make is an installation that use different input signals to control mainly the morph of objects/images between a normal state and a deformed/stretched/mangled state (I’m thinking MIDI CC 0-127, or possibly an arduino solution, but MIDI would be more useful for later projects). The image should be 2d vector based, but I could use 3d flat meshes as well if that would be easier. And it would be nice if I could fit in some randomness in the deformed state.

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  • I looked at the Geometry Morphing tutorial, seems doable. But I couldn’t get the cvXporter script working in Maya 2013.
  • The Polygon SVG example patch look interesting, but I haven’t figured out how to do it. I need some way to import the geometry into a list of vertices if I remember correctly?
  • Also I saw there was FBX support in the DX11 Nodes pack. But I have trouble getting that one to work as well. I get a “Unhandled exeption has occured… Unable to find an entry point named ‘RegisterTouchWindow’ in DLL ‘user32’” message (ok, I don’t have touch screen, shouldn’t be a problem right?). And the renderer has stayed black so far, tried opening example patches. DirectX11 is installed and seems to work properly according to DirectX Diagnostics.

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So I have three so far unsuccessful options to look further at, but since being pressed for time I would really like to avoid going into dead ends. Any advice is welcome. Are there perhaps some better option?

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Specs: Dell Latitude E5400, Vista SP2 32bit, 2GHz intel® Core™2 Duo, 4GB RAM.

use obj with dx11 assimp as starter
there is also collada maya plug

Try this, is a geometry mixer, is DX11, I usually use DAE models exported with Blender, they work like a charm, you just have to remember to add the UV map otherwise VVVV won’t read them.

Important, the two meshes must have the same vertex count otherwise you get strange behavior.

mixgeom.zip (20.5 kB)

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Thanks esnho! It’s probably just what I’m looking to do. But…

Looks like I have a Intel 4500 GMA that does not support DirectX 11.

I’ll look into collada and DX9, should be fine right?

Yes but I don’t know if you can mix meshes on GPU with DX9, you should rely on the Geometry Morphing Tutorial you just linked above.
So the mix happen on the CPU and it will consume computing power, but with lowpoly meshes you should handle it.

To open DAE with DX9 and get the values use this pathc.

loadingDae_.v4p (5.6 kB)

Yay! I have successfully imported a cube from Maya. Feels good to move ahead and now start working for real instead of being stuck with technical issues. Thanks again esnho, I really appreciate the help. :)

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