Point-based animation applied while rendering?

[castagnen]

Dear all,

I am somewhat new to Maya, and I am looking for directions to start a new Maya Python script.

On the one side, I have large files encoding the sampled movement of a large number of 3D points.
These movements can be parsed using Python - no problem here.

My goal is to let these "moving 3D points" control the animation of various Maya objects (points, locaters, clusters, nurbs's control points, polygons, etc).

I know that, for each of the moving points, I could attach a keyframe to a node, and pre-load all the movement as keyframes.

However, since I am not interested in keyframes, I would like to set up a system that, while runing the Maya rendering, on each frame :
- reads the current points' positions in the file
- applies the new position to the Maya scene (eg move chosen "points", locators, or other objects, in the Maya scene)
- then, and only then, starts the frame's rendering pipeline

Hence, to some extend, I would need to "hook" into Maya's in-time loop.

Since I am very new to Maya-Python, I hardly figure out where to start.


Would you have any advice, examples, or entries in the API ?


Thank you very much in advance,
Nicolas & team