Recommended C++ Mocap Streaming Skeleton Plugin Approach?

[morgan.jones]

Looking to write a Maya C++ plugin for streaming live skeleton data into Maya using the Maya API. 
 

Reviewing the available information shows 3 possible options, all of which appear to have issues.
 
1. Mocap server (devkit/mocap).  This is pretty old stuff (2006?), at one point was deprecated?  Must launch separate process and use networking for IPC, which seems a bit involved and possibly error prone for our users.  Also, not clear if this still works?  We are really hoping for a cleaner more integrated solution?
 
2. MPxClientDeviceNode / MPxThreadedDeviceNode "is an extension of MPxThreadedDevice node, and is intended for creating Maya devices that act as clients. An example of this will be a Maya device that listens for animation data that is sent from another application." (from Maya api docs).  This sound great, but there are no examples showing how to use this class.  Does Autodesk recommend this approach?  Are there any examples of using it?
 

3.  'Live Link'  This does not appear to allow incoming data, only outgoing.  No API for this.  The Mobu live link into Maya seems discontinued.  Is this a viable approach?

Any insights greatly appreciated!

[Anonymous]

Hi @morgan.jones!

I recently started work on a similar problem of streaming live data into Maya(using the .NET API). The data is being streamed into Maya and I'm able to rotate the transforms of the Human IK skeleton. When a meshed character is  used, the rotations are applied to the Source skeleton that controls the character but the mesh does not deform. 

Now say QuickCharacter is my mesh which is rigged and a reference skeleton is added as the Source for this character. I am able to apply rotations to the transform attribute of the reference skeleton but this is not reflected in the QuickCharacter. Do you have any suggestions for resolving the same.

Thanks in advance!

Abhijay  

[cheng_xi_li]

Hi,

MPxClientDeviceNode / MPxThreadedDeviceNode is recommended. My colleague once has written a sample with MPxThreadedDeviceNode to read data from Perception Neuron. It is old, but it could should you an idea how it works in a scene.

If you want to do more test, there are more samples in the devkit (udpDevice, gameInputDevice, randomizerDevice).

Hope it helps.

Yours,

Li