Controlling a Blender animation by use of external data?

Erik · Post by **Erik** » Tue Jan 13, 2009 8:17 pm

I work with technical simulations of different vehicles, mainly aircraft. The result has the shape of time history diagrams of position (3 dim), attitude (3 dim), control surface deflections etc. Theese diagrams can sometimes be difficult to interpret - an animation would be of great help in some cases. Thereof my question:

Is it possible to control the motion of a vehicle in a Blender built environment by use of data that comes from outside blender?

I imagine a procedure like this:
0) The aircraft, some sky and a ground with a runway is created in Blender (once and for all).
1) The simulation is run (not Blender), generating (apart from the diagrams) a time history data file.
2) The data file is used in Blender to define position etc of the aircraft rel. to the surrounding world in an animation of the event. Result: An mpeg file.

Realistic? Is Blender the right tool?

jesterKing · Post by **jesterKing** » Wed Jan 14, 2009 12:41 pm

Sure you can do that. You can write a python importer script for your data and apply it to your blender scene as approriate. You could create an IPO for your object with appropriate curves to control its position and orientation based on your data.

/Nathan

Erik · Post by **Erik** » Wed Jan 14, 2009 4:46 pm

Thank you Nathan!
It seems worth the effort to learn to use Blend and this script language Python (PHP cannot be used instead, I guess ...). I will start at once.
So I suppose this was not my last question to this forum.

/ Erik

bigjat33 · Post by **bigjat33** » Tue Mar 19, 2013 6:51 pm

Hey, I know this post is pretty old but I am looking to do the same thing but really don't know where to start.

Erik where you actually able to get your project to work?

jesterKing, is there any documentation that you can think of that will get me started on the right path?

Thanks

Erik · Post by **Erik** » Wed Mar 20, 2013 4:37 pm

bigjat33 wrote:Hey, I know this post is pretty old but I am looking to do the same thing but really don't know where to start.

Erik where you actually able to get your project to work?

jesterKing, is there any documentation that you can think of that will get me started on the right path?

Thanks

Unfortunately a lot of things came blocking the way (for more than a year), so I never went through with that - instead I chose to use simple coordinate plots without Aircraft Pictures. You can see it on "User's Guide" at "http://kueng.se/QSafir-X/" if you like. At present I am working on an improved thrust control for that model.
If you find a way to drive a Blender model by an externally produced time history data set, I would be very interested!

/Erik

bigjat33 · Post by **bigjat33** » Fri Mar 22, 2013 2:02 pm

Erik wrote:
Unfortunately a lot of things came blocking the way (for more than a year), so I never went through with that - instead I chose to use simple coordinate plots without Aircraft Pictures. You can see it on "User's Guide" at "http://kueng.se/QSafir-X/" if you like. At present I am working on an improved thrust control for that model.
If you find a way to drive a Blender model by an externally produced time history data set, I would be very interested!

/Erik

Hey Erik,

I have found a small portion of information that suggest that doing this in blender is possible with the use of python but have not found any examples yet and my attempts are not going well.
I am still going to try and get it working during my free time but for the project I have I am just using Simdis because it was designed specifically for this kind of thing but doesn't look as pretty as you could get with blender.