Houdini HOM + Arduino + ADXL335 - RBDs, live!!!

Having fun with getting accelerometer data into houdini :)

Basically, Houdini establishes a connection to the Arduino via the pySerial module. A control character is then sent, after which houdini reads in the rotation values.

On the arduino, it constantly samples the incoming data from the accelerometer. A moving average filter is used to process this incoming data to filter out the noisy spikes and smooth out the results. This does cause a delay on the screen though.

Houdini is made by Side Effects Software http://www.sidefx.com
Arduino from the cool dudes at http://www.arduino.cc

Project files can be found at odforce :)
http://forums.odforce.net/index.php?/topic/14037-houdini-arduino-adxl335/

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• Arduino
• Houdini (software)
• ADXL335
• accelerometer

[hoptoad]

awesome! i am a vfx artist who is getting into houdini as well. where did you start to learn to interface hardware w/ houdini? i've always wondered about it.

[gallenwolf]

@hoptoad Hi there, for the arduino side, I bought a kit that starts from the basics, and part of it also teaches about serial communications. Once I understood how that worked, I then used the same connections settings with python to get some tests working. Once that worked, I then implemented python code inside houdini for interfacing. This is by no means the only solution, and it is not exactly fast. hths!

[ArkAngelDesign]

Very cool. :D

[gallenwolf]

@ArkAngelDesign cheers man!

[schnitzil]

Really cool, I'd love to see this applied to some kind of motion capture setup. You could be on to a very economical mocap system here. Keep up the good work.