Data driven animation

[mjL]

Hey guys,

 

I'm trying to look for references of animations driven with external data like .xls documents (or any other data files) for example and I'm not having much luck finding anything.

 

If anyone could point me in the direction of any papers, videos, example files or references it would be really helpful, thank you.

[lukeiamyourfather]

Python has some handy tools for reading data from CSV which you can export from Excel. I've used it for several projects.

 

https://docs.python.org/2/library/csv.html

 

Hopefully you know some Python otherwise this will be a challenging project. 

[edward]

You can also read .csv files using the Table Import SOP.

[mjL]

Thanks for the help guys, my python knowledge is very poor so I'll be careful of getting into any methods that I can't problem solve at this time. Although this is a good reason to push myself I suppose...

[lukeiamyourfather]

You can also read .csv files using the Table Import SOP.

 

Nice! I wasn't aware of such a thing. Has that been around a long time cause I totally missed it?

[lukeiamyourfather]

I just checked it out, that's a sweet node. Ironically they used Python and the csv module that I linked to above. 

import csv

# Fetch our node's parameters.
fname = node.parm('file').eval()
usemaxrows = node.parm('usemaxrows').eval()
maxrows = node.parm('maxrows').eval()
nattrib = node.parm('numattrib').eval()

csvfile = open(fname)

sample = csvfile.read(4096)
dialect = csv.Sniffer().sniff(sample)
has_header = csv.Sniffer().has_header(sample)

csvfile.seek(0)
reader = csv.reader(csvfile, dialect)

[edward]

Yes, but now mjL doesn't need to touch Python.

 

EDIT: I think the Table Import SOP was added late H11 or so. Probably not noticeably new until H12.

[mjL]

Yup, the TableImport SOP was all I needed

 

Thanks again

[breadbox]

Does anyone have any working sample CSV files they can share?

 

I'm looking to import some flight tracking data, but I am not sure how to format the CSV files correctly for use with the Table Import?

 

Id like to also use the lat / long to sphere function but should they be one column in the CSV? I set the column to 6 because in my file that is the start of the lat/long but the results are still looking odd.

 

attached is my .csv, but had to change to .txt to upload.

 

 

 

 

Data00_019.txt