Hi ,
im a vj and i want to sinc movements with music .
what i want to do is this:
put some music in winamp
grab an object , and record the movement of the object as i move the mouse , so like this is very easy to sinc movements with music.
this in 3dmax is called motion capture. and it can be donde with the mouse or with a midi controller , im only asking how to do this with the mouse.
so is this posible: to record my movements and then , they are stored as key frames ???
Please help .
;D
Select 1 or 2 channel to affect to x and y of the mouse, Press RKey in IPo windows choose from still/play anim to know if you want to play anim while you record or not. then press CTRL and hold it to record your movement in realtime.
Yup… that is a rarely used feature that is but it does exist. Never saw the point to it myself but now I am curious to see any animations you make synched to music!
Koba
P.S> Actually you could do some really neat stuff animating an empty with the new array modifier in this way. See the tutorials here:
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=74205&page=3
And more importantly this:
thank god this feature exists in blender , do you know how to config the mouse , for example with the camera , i want to control the camera , i do it , but now then when i move the mouse up , the camera goes left , you know , so there most b a way to config this.;D
I was playing with this last night, it’s pretty cool.
There’s no “rec” button, you can either press ‘r’ while your mouse pointer is in the IPO window or select ‘Record Mouse Movement’ from the Curve menu.
To select the channels you LMB, then SH-LMB additional channel names on the right side of the IPO window. The channel names will highlight (in white) when selected.
If you get an error “Maximum 2 visible curves”, that means you have more than 2 channels selected : hover the mouse pointer over the list of channel names (LocX, LocY …) and press a to toggle all/none selected.
If you get an error “Select 1 or 2 channels” that means you haven’t selected any channels.
-When you press r, youll get a prompt for Still / Play Animation. You’ll want “Play Animation” to be able to “play along with music”. After clicking on Play animation, the animation counter will start counting up. Move the mouse while holding down the CTRL key. (You can release the CTRL key to reposition the mouse, which toggles recording off … the ctr keeps going … hold down CTRL again to resume recording).
-I would suggest setting the end frame for the animation to a high number like 50,000 (F10 Scene) or more (300,000 is max = ~2.7 hours @ 30fps ), other wise the animation will loop and truncate your recording !
The recording mouse sensitivity is governed by the zoom factor of the IPO window. The larger the Y axis scale, the more sensitive the mouse will be. You can use the NUMPAD+ … NUMPAD- keys to zoom the IPO window or use CTRL-MMB.
When recording you don’t need to keep the mouse pointer confined within the IPO window
LMB to end the recording ESC ABORTS AND DISCARDS THE RECORDING
After recording press HOME (View /View all in the IPO window). You can select indivdual channels and/or move entire curves using ‘a’, g(rab)/move or scale the curves (Curve/Transform Menu).
When using any object other than a bone, the 3d transform manipulators axis correspond with the IPO channels when the manipulator is in GLOBAL mode. If you use an Armature in POSE mode, the IPO channels correspond to LOCAL/NORMAL mode.
When using an armature you need to initially create IPO channels by using the “i” key.
When using armatures you’ll probably want to be in POSE mode for the armature.
That’s about all I can think of right now.
EDIT
Instead of recording an armature-bone directly, it’s sometimes easier to create an empty or other object and animate/record it, then use a copyLocation or copyRotation constraint on the bone(s) to be affected
I copied this post to my Wiki page, any further neat discoveries / tips etc, I’ll add there.
Hmm… this is interesting… I never knew about this feature, mainly because I’ve never had a need for it.
Aligorith
I’ve known about this feature for years, but I always thought it was broken. Now I know the truth… You have to hold down “Control” to toggle between mouse-recording, and not mouse recording. I would always click, which ends the process. These controlls, you have to admit, are pretty stupid… I can’t wait for Blender 2.5 
I think it is one of the coolest features in Blender. You can do the same thing in After Effects as well.
Kernon covers this feature in detail on Blender Newbies…
There is another method. There is a script in the link below, that takes the sound from a .wav file and converts it accurately into an IPO curve. I’ve used scripts like this many times to sync actions to music and they work amazingly well!
Woah woah, wait up, slow down…
are you saying that i can record movements in realtime?
how can i do this? can someone point me towards a beginners tutorial on this?
say for example, instead of using frames or curves, i can just grab bones and stuff and blender will record what im doing.
how can this be done?
Use the Blender newbies link above, watch the tutorial.
some tests,
it is only cause i thougt about some kind of puppeteer thing,
where one use the mouse moving a puppet around,
it uses the game-engine, and does a recording of every
3thrd frame, -> so the used moves in rendering will
only use 20fps instead of the 60fps of the game-engine.
the example-blend uses a kind of ragdoll-setup…
(setting up some special moves on key-responses … like in a game
could pimp up such thin a lot)
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showpost.php?p=1331508&postcount=26
Im doing something wrong,
I tried to use the mouse record for charachter animation on an armature.
However, it dosent seem to let me animate a single bone, instead the mouse movement moves the entire skeleton as a solid shape.
is there something obvious im missing here?
Mouse recording with CTRL:
can you create a Cube and record the mouse-moves for this Cube?
If you can,
then add an constraint to your desired bone to copy the location of this cube,
or stretch to it … or (there are other constraint methods… check)
and you will have the bone moving like the cube.
But i have just checked it with a single bone of an armature
and recording works -
if ! ! you have to select the pose-ipo of the bone,
not the object,
and you should insert (key: i) the basic LOC-ROT-IPO entries,
so you see the curves of LocX … QuatZ
and then
do not select the Loc? ipos,
you normaly cannot move there because the bone-base
has a fixed location to the root-bone,
use the QuatX-Z curves for the rotations to check it works.
this is an excellent and interesting idea, and it seems to work for individual bones when i use the “track to” feature,
but it wont function with IK and thus a chain of bones.
anyone know why?
Hey bringing that up again,
That was a very cool feature indeed, but it seems to have disapeared in 2.5 
… there seems to be a
“Bake sound to F-curves” features in its stead, sounds cool too but kinda more limited … or maybe it moved to somewhere else ?
“Autokey”, it’s the new rave. Just turn it on, grab your object, press play,(or vice versa, i forget), and move it around. Wallah!!
