XBox Controller Module

Welcome to Atoms Crowd blog! In this blog we are going to post some interesting articles to show you how you can work with Atoms.

For our first post, we are going to show you a fun hack: how to drive your agents with an XBox controller.

If you are not a technical user you can ignore the last section, download the material provided below and play with them in Maya 2017:

t he Xbox controller module.
the Xbox module recorder.
the xbox.pyd file necessary for capturing the XBox controller input. Please download it and copy it somewhere in your python path. The pyd file is compiled for Maya 2017.
If you want to have a look here is the visual studio project for generating the xbox.pyd

How to run this example.

Copy the xbox.pyd inside your python path. (i.e. <drive>:\Documents and Settings\<username>\My Documents\maya\<Version>\scripts )
Open the Atoms UI, create a new behaviour module and copy the content of the Xbox controller module in the editor. Click register.
Create a new agent group, add a gridLayout module, a stateMachine module and the XBoxControllerModule .
Set the time line frame range to 1 - 2000 .
Copy the content of the Xbox module recorder in the script editor and run it.
Click "Start".
Use the Xbox controller to drive the agent.
Click "Stop".

How does it work?

First of all, if you were doing all this by yourself you would need some C++ knowledge to capture the Xbox controller input and make it available in python. Luckily this has already been taken care of and you can access that information with the xbox.pyd module. If you are brave enough you can also have a look at the given Visual Studio project.

There are two other major components we are going to have a look now.

The XBoxControllerModule

This is the Atoms module which does all the work and caches the actions run the by the user with the XBox controller.

import Atoms
import AtomsCore
import AtomsMath
import os
import xbox
import maya


class XBoxControllerModule(Atoms.BehaviourModule):
    def __init__(self):
        Atoms.BehaviourModule.__init__(self)

		# Adding the module metadatas
        self.addAttribute("cachedAngle", AtomsCore.Vector3Metadata(AtomsMath.V3d(0.0,0.0,0.0)))
        self.addAttribute("cachedState", AtomsCore.IntMetadata(0))
        self.addAttribute("record", AtomsCore.BoolMetadata(False))
        self.addAttribute("turnAngle", AtomsCore.DoubleMetadata(3.0))

		# initializing the class members
        self.state = 0
        self.old_state = 0
        self.old_dir = [0.0,0.0,0.0]
		# lists for caching the values
        self.stateKeys=[]
        self.angleKeys=[]

    def initSimulation(self, agentGroup):
        # Emptying the two lists and setting initial values
        self.stateKeys=[]
        self.angleKeys=[]
        
        self.angleKeys.append([maya.cmds.currentTime(q=1), [0.0,0.0,0.0]])
        self.stateKeys.append([maya.cmds.currentTime(q=1), 0])

    def initFrame(self, agents, agentGroup):
		# getting the module parameters
        turnAngle = self.attributes()["turnAngle"].value()
        record = self.attributes()["record"].value()

		# getting the xbox control state
        state = xbox.getControlState()
        angle = state["LX"]
        buttonA = state["A"]
        buttonB = state["B"]
        buttonX = state["X"]
        
		# finding the right state depending on the pressed button
        if buttonA:
            self.state = 0
        if buttonB:
            self.state = 1
        if buttonX:
            self.state = 2
        
        if record:
			# if we are recording we cache the values
            if self.old_dir[0] != state["LX"] or self.old_dir[1] != state["LY"]:
                self.angleKeys.append([maya.cmds.currentTime(q=1), [state["LX"],state["LY"],0.0]])
            if self.state != self.old_state:
                self.stateKeys.append([maya.cmds.currentTime(q=1), self.state])
            self.old_dir = [state["LX"],state["LY"],0.0]
            self.old_state = self.state
        else:
			# otherwise we get the default values from the module parameters
            angle = self.attributes()["cachedAngle"].value().x
            self.state = self.attributes()["cachedState"].value()
            
		# for each agent changing the state and direction
        for agent in agents:
            if self.state:
                agent.metadata()["state"].set(self.state)
            dir = agent.metadata()["direction"].value()
            q = AtomsMath.Quatd()
            q.setAxisAngle(AtomsMath.V3d(0.0,1.0,0.0), -angle * turnAngle * 3.1456 / 180.0)
            dir = dir * q.toMatrix44()
            agent.metadata()["direction"].set(dir)

    def endSimulation(self, agents, agentGroup):
        # setting all the keyframes		
        for v in self.angleKeys:
            maya.cmds.setKeyframe(agentGroup.name() + ".atoms_XBoxControllerModule_cachedAngle.atoms_XBoxControllerModule_cachedAngleX",v=v[1][0],t=[v[0]])
            maya.cmds.setKeyframe(agentGroup.name() + ".atoms_XBoxControllerModule_cachedAngle.atoms_XBoxControllerModule_cachedAngleY",v=v[1][1],t=[v[0]])
            maya.cmds.setKeyframe(agentGroup.name() + ".atoms_XBoxControllerModule_cachedAngle.atoms_XBoxControllerModule_cachedAngleZ",v=v[1][02],t=[v[0]])
        for v in self.stateKeys:
            maya.cmds.setKeyframe(agentGroup.name() + ".atoms_XBoxControllerModule_cachedState",v=v[1],t=[v[0]])

The Xbox module recorder

This is a simple PySide UI for starting/stopping the recording. Please make sure to have the agent group transform selected before running this script.

import AtomsMaya
import maya


from PySide2 import QtWidgets, QtCore, QtGui

class XboxControllerModuleWidget(QtWidgets.QWidget):
    def __init__(self, parent=None):
        super(XboxControllerModuleWidget, self).__init__(parent)
        self.ag_name = maya.cmds.ls(sl=1,dag=1,lf=1,shapes=1)[0]
        self.v_layout = QtWidgets.QVBoxLayout()
        self.start = QtWidgets.QPushButton("Start")
        self.stop = QtWidgets.QPushButton("Stop")
        self.v_layout.addWidget(self.start)
        self.v_layout.addWidget(self.stop)        
        self.setLayout(self.v_layout)
        
        self.start.clicked.connect(self._start)
        self.stop.clicked.connect(self._stop)
        self.start.setEnabled(True)
        self.stop.setEnabled(False)
        
    def _start(self):
        ag_name = self.ag_name
        maya.cmds.setAttr(ag_name + ".atoms_XBoxControllerModule_record",1)
        maya.mel.eval("playButtonStart;")
        maya.mel.eval("playButtonForward;")
        self.start.setEnabled(False)
        self.stop.setEnabled(True)
        
    def _stop(self):
        ag_name = self.ag_name
        ag = AtomsMaya.getAgentGroup(ag_name)
        mod = ag.behaviourModule("XBoxControllerModule")
        mod.endSimulation(ag.agents(), ag)
        maya.cmds.setAttr(ag_name + ".atoms_XBoxControllerModule_record",0)
        maya.mel.eval("playButtonForward;")
        self.start.setEnabled(True)
        self.stop.setEnabled(False)
        
w = XboxControllerModuleWidget()
w.show()