Hou Navigator 0.1 Spacemouse for Houdini

[FrankFirsching]

Hi all!

Finally I've found some time again to play with Houdini. And the result is something, I'd lilke to share with the community. I've called it "Hou Navigator" and it's a plugin to control the viewport using a 3dconnexion spacemouse. Currently, this is just an alpha release and some paths must be adjusted in the source for it to work, but basic sensor movement is already functional. So, if there's someone who likes to play with it, I'm always happy about feedback.
@Jason: What do you think about adding this to the odforce plugins project on sourceforge?

Cheers and happy Easter!
Frank

Attached File(s)

•  spacemouse_0.1.zip (13.4kb)
  Number of downloads: 180

[DaJuice]

Hay, welcome back Frank.
I don't have a spacemouse but I'm sure this is good news for a bunch of people.

[Jason]

DaJuice, on Apr 10 2009, 04:10 PM, said:

Hay, welcome back Frank.
I don't have a spacemouse but I'm sure this is good news for a bunch of people.

This is great, yeah! Well done:) I'll try to get it uploaded to sourceforge.. if I remember how

[LFX]

Nice! Waiting for this by SESI. I hope that getting obsolete now, while I help on this with testing.

OK, first prob on installation. Import sysnavigatorPath = "path" leads to an invalid syntax.
I had installed Python 2.5.4 and the SDK 6.0 update for Windows Vista, all 64bit.

Have a nice day

This post has been edited by LFX: 22 April 2009 - 05:45 AM

[FrankFirsching]

First, thanks for testing :-)

Seems you're copy-and-pasting the small python snippet to the python shell, aren't you? It looks like the newline got lost and python is interpreting the two statements as one. In the meantime someone told me, that executing the startup code directly from the python shell results in a crash of houdini. I've added a shelf tool with the startup code and there it's running without problems. I'll have a deeper look into that problem soon. Hope that helps

[LFX]

Nope, I just entered this:

>>> import sysnavigatorPath = "C:\Program Files\Side Effects Software\Houdini 9.5.379\spacemouse"
File "<console>", line 1
import sysnavigatorPath = "C:\Program Files\Side Effects Software\Houdini 9.5.379\space
mouse"
^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

But I think, me is missing some basic knowledge of programming. So I'm pretty sure that I miss sth. out in the whole installation process.

This post has been edited by LFX: 24 April 2009 - 11:06 AM

[FrankFirsching]

Ok, the line

import sysnavigatorPath = "C:\Program Files\Side Effects Software\Houdini 9.5.379\spacemouse"

is really a syntax error. It should be 2 lines:

import sys
navigatorPath = "C:\Program Files\Side Effects Software\Houdini 9.5.379\spacemouse"

Python is a language, that is very sensitive to line breaks and whitespace characters. As I mentioned in my previous post, unfortunately starting from the interactive python shell doesn't work. Could you please create a new shelf tool and copy the code snippet into the edit field of the "script"-tab in the window that will open? It should look exactly like the example in the readme file concerning the line breaks and indentation.

[LFX]

Done, and no error yet. But nothing happened.

[FrankFirsching]

Is the 3dconnexion driver started? Do you have your mouse pointer placed over a 3D view? The script is moving the camera of the viewer that is placed directly under the mouse. If the mouse is positioned over a different area (e.g. shelf, network pane, etc.) nothing happens.

[LFX]

Yes driver is started. I added a camera and tried to look around.
Only now I added the full code, what I think is right. Like I said before, no clue what's necessary.

import sys
navigatorPath = "[i]Path[/i]"
if not navigatorPath in sys.path:
   sys.path.append(navigatorPath)
import hou_navigator
hou_navigator.start()

And there is coming: No module named spacemouse

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "tool_2", line 5, in <module>
  File "C:\Program Files\Side Effects Software\Houdini 9.5.379\spacemouse\hou_navigator.py", line 173, in <module>
	import spacemouse
ImportError: No module named spacemouse

This post has been edited by LFX: 25 April 2009 - 06:58 AM

[FrankFirsching]

Did you adapt line 170 (assignment of nativePath) in hou_navigator.py to your installation directory? As far as I can guess it should be

nativePath = "C:/Program Files/Side Effects Software/Houdini 9.5.379/spacemouse/native/build/lib.win32-2.5"

Be sure to use forward slashes (or double backslashes), because certain backslash sequences have a special meaning to python (e.g. \n represents a newline character).

[LFX]

Yeah, that's it! Forward slashes, what a tedious job. You should show the whole path with lib.win32-2.5 in the readme.
Anyway, I'm super happy using the 3D-controller in my favorite app. I stay tuned for any update. Maybe getting full potential of the space pilot someday.
Testing it in Houdini 10, too.

Dankeschön

This post has been edited by LFX: 28 April 2009 - 06:04 AM