Quick CHOPS test – driving a bird’s wings with MIDI information. Banged a quick tune into Logic, then tapped a simple rhythm into a separate (inaudible) MIDI channel, and used that to drive the downward thrust of a pair of curves in Houdini. As with the piano setup, the motion cuased by any single impulse has to be based on the times between it and both the previous and next impulses, to keep the motion smooth. MIDI tells you when an event happens, but the animation has to look ahead … anticipate … so it can show you the cause, the run-up.
Rather than dig out a bird model I just hung some ribbons on the curves for now; the bird’s flight path was recorded in realtime with a Playstation controller:
See also: piano keyboard animation driven by MIDI information