The new Gamepad Camera is a great addition to Houdini 16.5. Is there a simple way to control the camera with simple mouse/keyboard WASD setup (like a PC game)? I want to be able to fly through my world but I don't have a gamepad near my computer.

Any tips would be appreciated thanks!

The game pad camera only listens for gamepad input. There are the ancient mouse and keyboard chops, but it's not a simple affair to integrate their input for use controlling a camera.

Yah agreed that it doesn't look very straightforward - I can make it work by using the keyboard chop instead of gamepad inside of the camera constraint but then my keys are still triggering hotkeys in houdini

Tap the scroll lock key, that'll bypass houdini and send all keyboard input to chops (you'll see the frame indicator turn orange to let you know this is happening).

It'll still be fiddly to setup the controls though.

KB+M is something we considered for the gamepad camera, but didn't get time to investigate. Since the mouse and keyboard CHOPs are available, it should be doable (except for the “scroll lock” requirement which is a little strange to most, but maybe we can HOM that). The CHOP that grabs the gamepad input is a different CHOP than the one that takes that input and produces a transform, which we deliberately split to allow a variety of input mechanisms going forward.

Hm, unfortunately I'm on mac so I don't have a scroll lock key. I looked in the hotkey manager for something mapped to ‘scroll’ but couldn't find it. What's that hotkey called?

Not sure, I'm not on a mac much these days. A few googles suggest fn-shift-f12, or using maybe trying a virtual on screen keyboard (it's what I had to do on a little surface pro 4 under windows to make this example):

http://www.tokeru.com/cgwiki/index.php?title=HoudiniChops#Using_the_beat_chop [www.tokeru.com]

KMcNamara
Hm, unfortunately I'm on mac so I don't have a scroll lock key. I looked in the hotkey manager for something mapped to ‘scroll’ but couldn't find it. What's that hotkey called?

You can't change the hotkey for this one (not sure why, maybe Scroll Lock isn't a bindable key). But there is a toggle in the Edit menu - Intercept Mode.

I made a project with chops for fly mode but there are a lot of problem to make it ideal. I cant get an up vector for rotation and make looking around by mouse more useful, change gamepad data to interactive values instead of always increasing
Press Scroll Lock to activate hotkeys WASD and toggle “1” hotkey to mouse look around
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qA_xkXqVetHEM2aIR7ZwssxswYUh5wCI/view?usp=sharing [drive.google.com]

so, I made it, almost what I need, if somebody interested in or want to try, welcome! and any comments and changes welcome too)

Fly Camera

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1NsoI_5LCUGwXKkNW8Zf6_OWkIJcldrZH [drive.google.com]

its an asset camera, help and instruction inside right on asset

Thanks for sharing this. Unfortunately no ‘scroll lock’ key on my laptop.
Any chance you could provide a simple tutorial on use?

As twod said a few posts up, from the main edit menu, Edit -> Intercept mode.

Great work Konstantin!