Attaching the camera on an animated mesh

Hi guys,

Any idea which method to use to attach a camera onto an animated mesh?
The mesh is animated in maya and exported as a collada. i.e the animations/movement in space was not created in vvvv.

Thanks,

Doros

No one knows or can provide help?

I have experimented with a number of techniques but I cant seem to get it right. I tried using the coordinates coming out of the collada mesh node, but that wont work as I am using transforms from inside vvvv as well.

So I guess the most suitable way would be to physically attach a virtual camera on the 3d model, as it is done in game engines.

Any way to do this?

Hi Dorosp

You should not attach the camera to the 3D model, but to the renderer that displays the model.

make a Camera (transfor Softimage) node, highlight it and press F1 to get the help patch for the camera node to see how to connect it.

remember to adjust depth buffer using the inspektor (ctrl+i) in the renderer so that you don’t get a funky rendered model.

hope it works out for you

-sunep

Hi sunep,

Thanks for your reply.
Just to clarify, I am trying to attach the camera to the model so that the camera will follow the movement of the model.

Imagine it as having a character dancing around a room and I want to attach a camera on his head, so I can create a first person camera showing what he sees (i am not concerned with rotation at this moment).

Can this be achieved with attaching a camera on the renderer? (i dont have my machine to check it now, will try it later on)

that is a bit more complicated, but have a look at LookAt (Transform) that in combination with the transform you give the model should help you out a bit.

I know there are some others that have done this before, you can check out some of the patches in the girlpower folder installed with vvvv. should give you some ideas of how you can move the camera around.

-sunep

we use maya camera thru custom script and parser…

So I take it there is no way to attach a camera or another mesh to an animated model?

I am sorry to keep bringing this back…

but my question remains. Is there any way to attach a mesh onto another mesh in the 3d space?

As most of my work is in 3d and I used to work with a game engine, there are a number of techniques I would like to use which assume that I can track the 3d vector position of an object at all times.

As I am bringing in meshes, scaling them, rotating them and using skinned animations I can not extract the information from the actual meshes. A simple way I used in the past was to attach another mesh on the animated object, and tract that.

I primarily want to do 2 things. 1) Attach a virtual camera on the mesh 2) Use the mesh as the source of particle emission.

Anyone can point me in the right direction of how to achieve this with vvvv?

If I knew where to start, I would start experimenting… but I cant seem to find a starting point.

Thanks

D

To attach camera just multiply View transform from the camera to transform of the mesh object. Avoid scale transform from mesh object. Transforms can be multiplied by Multiply (Transform).

If you still have the problems - skype: algariol

Thanks alg, will give it a try and add u if I am still having difficulties.

D