Forum - Craft Animations - 3d animation tools

I recently purchased a space pilot 3d mouse from 3dconnexion (subsidiary of logitech) It works great in my view ports in 3ds max and is very easy to use, but when I try to use it in conjunction with the observer cam plug in It doesn't allow me to control the camera. It shows up in the devices and I can manually set all 6 axis' to controllers, but it doesn't seem to see any movement when I try to automatically set it up. Even after I set it manually, it will only work on one or two axis' and generally will only move in one direction on that axis. Has anyone had success using one of these to move an observer cam or control any of the craft plug ins?

Thanks,
Jason

Exactly what device have you purchased? We have been able to test our software on the Spacepilot and space navigator series and they should work without problem. The other devices should have no problem either, but there might be something we have missed.

Following are some suggestions which might explain the problem:

* How recently did you install/update Craft Director Tools? We re-introduced support for 3dconnexion devices some months ago. Are you sure you have installed the 3dconnexion driver? A manual approach is to check if a file called "3dxdevice.dll" exists in the location "c:\program files\Craft Animations\Director Tools\data\unidevice" (or similar path, depending where you installed the software).

* What devices does CDT detect while running? Create an ObserverCam and enter input settings->MoveForward->advanced. Then check the list in the "devices" combo. Do you have multiple devices named 3dconnexion, spacepilot or similar? In that case try the second device and configure the settings manually.

* There is an example profile for Observercam called "Example: 3dxmouse". Try load this profile. Does this solve your problem?


Can you please save your current input profile and send it to support? Save the profile. Then fetch the file from "My Documents\Craft Animations\Director Tools\Data\ObserverCam\InputProfiles" and then send it to our support. This may help us find out what went wrong.

I loaded the profile and did a little tweaking and it seems to work better, but its not as easy to navigate as it is outside of the observercam recording mode. I'll keep playing around with the settings, but at least its working on all axis' now. I might try putting the camera on a spline speed controler spline and just use the space pilot to look around.

Thanks

Try set the rotation and movement response factors to 1 in the configuration dialog. (There should be 6 of them, for each direction)
Also try increase the maximum speed for the movement (rotation should already be fine). The default settings migh be a bit sluggish when using such a precision instrument as a Spacepilot.