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The Channel->Channel Setup command in the Motion module allows you to select, activate, and configure one or more channel drivers. This command also allows you to view the current channel assignments, as well as activate and deactivate individual channels, and change their offset and scaling.
Driver
The scroll box at the top of the dialogue box displays all available drivers in the current channel setup and shows if they are currently active. Click on a driver name to select it in the CHANNELS scroll box. All the relevant channels associated with the driver are displayed in the CHANNELS scroll box, and the list of the channel connections are listed in the CONNECTIONS scroll box.
A driver may be an input driver, which has only input channels, an output driver which has only output channels, or an input/output driver with both types of channels.
If more than one driver of the same name is displayed in the Driver list, numbered suffixes are automatically added to each driver name to distinguish one from the other. For example, if two mouse drivers are listed, one is named mouse_1 and the other is named mouse_2.
Some drivers, such as Ascension, Polhemus, and Kissdrv, have their own Channel Driver Setup dialogue boxes in which you can modify the driver's parameters and use .cus files.
To display the Channel Driver Setup dialogue box for a specific driver, double-click the driver name in the list. In the dialogue box, the Active option allows you to turn the driver on or off. Depending on which driver you are working with, other editable parameters may include a serial port communication baud rate, file names, degrees of freedom, and others. Each setting is saved in the .chn channel setup file.
Channel drivers that use .drv files, such as the mouse, dialbox, and spaceball, don't have their own custom dialogue boxes: double-clicking activates or deactivates them.
For more information about the channel drivers that are provided with SOFTIMAGE 3D, see Channel Drivers Reference.
New
Displays the Database Load browser from which you can select a new driver to add to the Driver list. Find the new driver and double-click, or highlight the name and click Load to exit the browser and add the driver name to your Driver list.
Note:
You may have as many drivers as you like, but the total number of channels cannot exceed 1,000.Replace
Replaces the selected driver in the driver list. The Database Load browser opens in which you can select another driver. All connections using the previous driver are transferred to the replacement driver.
Remove
Removes the selected driver. Any channel connections that involve the deleted driver are also removed.
Options
Opens a dialogue box containing the options that are common to all channel drivers. You can set the Driver Run Mode to one of the following:
- Synchronized with Soft
- Free Run
- Frequency
You can also set driver to run remotely by specifying the path at which it can be found.
Synchronized Drivers
You can set channel drivers to be synchronized with the update of SOFTIMAGE 3D; that is, the driver is activated once for each channel update and refresh cycle of SOFTIMAGE 3D. No data is ignored or skipped.
If you are displaying a complex scene, and the drivers are synchronized with SOFTIMAGE 3D, the drivers are slowed down by the refresh rate. In this case, recorded data is low precision. Alternately, if the drivers are slow, SOFTIMAGE 3D is slowed down.
Note:
This is often a problem with drivers that read from a serial port.Free-Running Drivers
Activate this option to have the drivers run as fast as possible, unconstrained by SOFTIMAGE 3D. The driver executes and writes its information to SOFTIMAGE 3D as fast as it can, and SOFTIMAGE 3D picks up the latest information whenever it has time.
Note:
When drivers are free running, they may miss some data, and the keys may not be spaced evenly throughout the function curve because SOFTIMAGE 3D picks up information from the drivers when it can. However, if you use the Channel->Take Recording command with free-running drivers, all the data acquired is recorded to disk.This option is important in the following scenarios:
- The channel driver you are using is slow to update.
- The channel driver is blocking on external hardware, for example, reading from a serial port.
- It is critical that the channel driver responds as close to real time as possible to the device it is servicing.
- You have a multi-processor machine and can afford to have a driver consume an entire processor.
Note:
If you set all your drivers to free-running mode, the display rate may suffer (especially on a single-processor machines). Certain drivers are not suitable for free-running mode. For more information, see Channel Drivers Reference.Frequency Drivers
With this option, you can specify a target frequency at which the driver attempts to run. If your driver takes longer than you have requested, it runs as fast as it can.
As with free-running drivers, the SOFTIMAGE 3D update/refresh rate does not influence the processing rate of frequency drivers.
Remote Drivers
You can operate your channel drivers remotely by entering the path and name of the target machine on which you want to run the driver.
Note:
For this feature to work, the driver executables and dialogue files (.drv or .cus) need to be on a remote machine, and the person running SOFTIMAGE 3D must have an account on that machine. For more information, see Channel Drivers Reference.CHANNELS
This scroll box lists the active channels and their current offset and scaling values. Double-click on a channel, and the Edit Channel dialogue box is displayed. You can then edit the minimum and maximum values, as well as the scaling and offset.
CONNECTIONS
This scroll box lists the existing connections associated to each highlighted channel or driver. If no driver names are highlighted, all channel connections are displayed. Double-click on an item, and the Connection Setup dialogue box is displayed.
Note:
When an object is renamed, so are its channel connections.
When an object with channel connections is deleted, the channel connections are no longer displayed in the dialogue box.
Last updated 03-apr-1998