importing emg data

[cmus]

Hi-- Has anyone established a workflow to import EMG data into XROMM
in order to animate them in Maya? Fuzz Crompton and I will be doing
that this year and I don't want to reinvent the wheel if it's been
done. Thanks.

--Catherine Musinsky

[Gatesy, Stephen]

Hi Catherine.

I'm not sure what aspects of EMG you want to animate and how you want to display them.  Can you describe in more detail what Fuzz wants? 

If you have a rectified signal it's straightforward to import those values using the xyz data type within the import script on the XROMM tools shelf.  You can assign these as attributes of a locator or simple geometry if you want to see it go up and down (translateY) with activity level.  I'd use simple expressions to scale and manipulate timing so that bone and EMG are on the same time scale.

Ken Dial and I have talked for over a decade about making simple muscle models that move with the skeleton.  The idea here would be to animate some attribute of the muscle with EMG.  I've played a bit with transparency and glow, so that a silent muscle is relatively hidden and it becomes more opaque and obvious when activity increases.  We think that will be a great way to show coordination among muscles on the moving skeleton.  Jaws might be a good place to start.

Let me know if that was too confusing.

steve

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[Catherine Musinsky]

Steve!  Thanks for your response.  Fuzz has been working on motor control of jaw movements and would like to be able to see what muscles fire when, and in what order, during chewing in the opossum.  I have been playing with Beth's pig skull model and used Maya muscles to create rough nurbs that move with the skeleton.  As long as they interpenetrate with the bone at approximate insertion and origin points they stick to those points once it animates.  I love your idea of using transparency and glow rather than, or in addition to, color changes.   Once I have figured out how to import the data, and you say the XROMM import shelf will help me do that (yay!) if I can animate a translateY there's no reason I couldn't animate the r, b and g components of a material's color.  Thanks so much!  I'll let you know how it goes.  --Catherine