View source for Talk:SFM/Python script commands

Thanks immensely for these commands! The documentation is going to make some tricky rigging shenanigans easier to accomplish. --[[User:Mystfit|Mystfit]] 08:42, 29 July 2012 (PDT)

== Working on figuring this stuff out, may merge this into the main section eventually ==

So, I'm new to Source modding and animation and everything, and I'm just writing this to try and put my current lessons learned in a single useful place so that at the least, I can go back to it and remember some stuff. FYI, I'm working on a tool to use the Kinect to do facial animation in SFM, so I'm working on using Python to mess with controls and animation curves


Lesson 1: The Element Viewer is your friend. It will give you the names and structure of the model data

Lesson 2: Controls modify the underlying gameModel, and you can get them programatically with 

rootGroup = animSet.GetRootControlGroup()

controlNameYouWant = rootGroup.FindControlByName( 'canonical name of control in the hierarchy', True )

Once you have it stored in a variable, you can access all the data (read-only data is a darker grey text in the Element Viewer) with dot notation, like controlNameYouWant.name

Lesson 3: Read the code in sfmUtils.py and the example code, since the API is not completely described by a long shot.


Notes: I'm still having no luck trying to script changes in the slider controls. If I try and change the fromElement values on a control channel, the control slider value seems to override any changes made to that script-set element.  On the other hand, if I make my own control, for whatever reason, the control bar doesn't retain its value once set.

I also don't know the difference between the 'controls' and 'rootControlGroup' sections of the models. Maybe this is where I'm screwing up, or maybe one is just a pointer to the other?