MotionSampler 3 assumes that the default (untransformed) directional light will point down the negative Y axis. All directional lights should be either defined in Y-up space (and never zero-transformed) or should be rotated and zero-transformed so that the default direction is down the negative Y axis.
MotionSampler 3 will read the toggle status of the NumLock and CapsLock keys when you launch the application. If you change this toggle state during the session, it will create problems with the applications' hotkeys.
With extremely large models, using the flag "-tess 1 1" will reduce the overall polygon count and memory usage significantly compared to the default of 2 2.
"Use Min/Max" (in the Playback menu) includes shader and visibility animation. The "LookAt" function (accessed through the eyeball button to the right of the view movement controls) considers animation and tracks all nodes that have attached geometry.
When MotionSampler is in RECORD mode, it is often desirable to abort the recording without transferring and computing the sampled data. The Esc key can be used in RECORD mode to abort recording without saving any data. All samples are discarded. Abort can also be accessed from the Capture menu. Note that the Abort function leaves the system in Sample mode; it merely ends a record session and discards the recorded samples.
Ascension Technologies' new Ethernet based motion capture system is supported by MotionSampler. The motionstar driver is a plug-in and can be found in the SourceModules lister and is called "MotionStar." See the motionstar help file for further information about this driver.
Users who combine performance animation with synchronization to sound have encountered the problem of "lag" between various motion capture devices and the audio track. The fader console, which is available at the bottom of the "Playback" menu, addresses this problem.
The fader console provides eight separate controls which can be thought of as offsets to the way animation is written into channels. In the dag_group source module, an additional parameter has been added to the "inlet" command. This additional parameter specifies which of the eight fader console sliders will be used to offset the final animation. See the help file for the DAGGroup module for further information.
MotionSampler 3 and Expressions/Constraints/IK
While MS3 can evaluate expressions and constraints, it is not recommended that this feature be used in applications where real-time performance is needed. In particular, MS3 will not recognize IK end effector handles in the current release. Users who want to take advantage of motion capture with IK should place the motion capture data on dag nodes and then use expressions in the interactive package to control the end effector movement.
On machines that support hardware texturing, there are known bugs in MS3'sability to display and manipulate those textures. For best results, all textures MUST be sized in powers of 2 (i.e, 128x128, 256x128, 512x512, etc.). In addition, when textures are enabled, the initial display is often incorrect. Toggling the "Toggle Shader" selection under the Display menu on and off will generally correct these problems.