Cycle 2

The goal with Cycle 2 was to create the leap-motion driven firing mechanism for the game environment. My idea was to use the leap-motion to read a user’s hand position and orientation and used that to set an origin of and trigger the launch of a projectile. TouchDesigner’s Leap operator had an overwhelming amount of outputs that read nearly every joint in the hand, but they didn’t quite have a clean way to recognize gestures. To keep things simple, the projectile launch is solely based on the x-rotation of your hand. When the leap detects that your palms is perpendicular to the ground, it sends that pulse that causes the projectile to launch.

Creating launch mechanics was a bit of a difficult feat. The system I built in Cycle 2 had no physics and instead relied on some fun algebra to figure out where a projectile should be at a given time. When the hand orientation trigger is pulsed, a timer starts that runs the duration of the launch. When it’s running, a torus’s render is toggled to on and its position is controlled by the network shown below.

The timer numbers undergo some math to become the z-axis value of the torus. The value of a timer at a specific time feeds into a pattern operator formatted like a parabola to grab a y-axis value on said parabola and map it to the y-axis of the parabola. The x-axis of the user’s hand is used to manipulate that amplitude of the pattern operator parabola to cause the torso to go higher if you tilt your hand back. Using a slope formula: y=mx. the x-axis position of the torus is calculated. The timer value is multiplied by a value derived from the y-rotation of your hand to fire the torus in the direction that your aiming. When the timer run completes, it resets everything and puts the torus back at its start point.