interactive animation
 

hello everybody.

i am fairly new to maya

i know some of the basics, like modeling and animation.
i have to do a project where i am to take an existing model and animate it based on parameters given by the user. I want this animation to operate real-time and allow users to change parameters on the fly.

what is the best way to go about doing this???

should i use the shockwave exporter??? i have read a little about it, but do not know if this plugin will be able to do this.

thanks in advance for your help,

jaykrz

ANYBODY?!

shockwave implies the use of flash.
and it also implies to me that a shockwave exporter would just export keyframes and you wont have any intervention of adding user input.

i've never used a shockwave exporter but it sounds like if you use it all the animations have to be predefined.

which means you can't generate animations on-the-fly, but if the shockwave exporter allows you to add buttons and stuff then you can get the parameters you're after on-the-fly (you cant get predetermined user input i dont think....)

unless of course the shockwave expoter gives you flash file, in which case you can import to a new sceme in flash and make buttons that goto and play from certain frames

but without ever knowing what a shockwave exporter does i can't say for sure

does it have to be shockwave?

no it doesnt have to be shockwave...
i tried to do some research on the net and shockwave seemed to be the only thing that resembled what i am trying to.

After further research i found that the shockwave exporter only allows for basic transformations such as scale, translating and rotating which will not work for me.

I'm willing to export my model and try anything that could make this work.

thanks for the reply, Chirone.

hows your c#? xna anyone? ;)

what sort of input are you looking for and what sort of output do you want to happen?

Well i have a model of the human heart, and I would like the heart to be animated based a parameter given from the user such as rest rate, blood pressure, etc.

so the heart should beat in a different way based on those inputs

I have not worked with xna or C# :(

but i am willing to put forth the effort to learn if need be

What you want is a game engine of some sort... can't think of any that require license negotiations with the developer, but there should be a few out there that are of reasonable quality and cost.

Chrones on it, C# with XNA should do it.

Its a free "games engine" thers lots of tutorials for it and resources that you can download and modify.

tyvm for your help