I'm very new to Maya, but I've been reassured that what we have been asked to do is possible. Hopefully someone here can help point us in the right direction.
We have an external camera which is going to be sending location, pan, tilt and zoom data over the network. We would like to use this data to manipulate a camera in Maya in real-time and render the results on the screen. This will be used to preview a video signal combined with the rendered image. There is no need to save the rendered results to a file, in fact, if that will slow us down, we would prefer to avoid it altogether. We are thinking it might be better in fact to send the video signal directly to tape, although we need to save the animation keyframe data so we can do a final render for post-production. We have some simple test harnesses in python and C++ that can read the location and timecode data from the network, and I've managed to move the camera around on the screen using another script. One problem I'm having is that the script process seems to be running in the same thread as the GUI, so it hangs until it has finished processing all commands. Is it possible to have a script running in the background that continually updates the camera attributes, progresses an animation according to the timecode data in my script, and renders the resulting image in real-time? It doesn't need to be a high-quality render. I've searched through heaps of tutorials, but there seems to be little about driving animation in real-time. Also, I am hoping it would be possible to texture a video frame from the camera within each animation frame, I suppose in an orthographic projection in front of the rendered model. I can get the frame data from the video signal, but is it possible with the C++ API to interact with the frame buffer in Maya during the render? Hopefully my description isn't too confusing. If you have any suggestions as to a high-level approach (or warnings about specific technical pitfalls), I'd love to hear them. Thanks, Steve --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Yours, Maya-Python Club Team. -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
