MAX on MIDI

So.. I was in the labs the other day and i was welding a shit ton of verts and my hand was getting tired from stretching up and forwards and hitting CTRL+Z and holding ALT all the time and i found myself flipping my normals and going through the process of Resetting and collapsing my X-form far too often and it was really pissing me because the amount of time leaving the scene to head to the menu's was far too much.. scrolling and surfing around.. 

This is not an excuse to talk about maya but.. in maya, all your controls are on the mouse with right-click drag hidden menu's that are much more intuitive than actually moving back and forth from menu's and having to right click to reset values and what not, So i had an idea..

Sometimes for a bit of de-stressing i make drum & bass and dubstep and do some oscillator based sound design work just to piss around and make noises and from that i learned a shit done about MIDI interfaces and just how primitive these circuits are based upon, So it got me thinking why not find a way to use my keyboard to fire one-shots of poly modelling scripts and shortcut commands to aid the process of modelling

Oneshots like

- Reset and Collapse X-form
- Reset and Center pivot
- Weld, Chamfer & Extrude

Or even any kind of script you can possibly need by google searching all the way across rainbow

Quick snap of my keyboard:

After a bit of research and a bit of trial and error i managed to overcome a lot of dated, dated repeat dated program versions to a one that would run 64-Bit Win8 and it worked with just two programs, A Translator for the Midi input signals and a converter for output signals from the device converter from the controllers MIDI signal to what i think is a DMX signal type, So now any part of my interfaces functions can be reprogrammed using the translation into any command desired, Whether your working in UDK, Cry, MAX Maya, Mudbox, Zbrush or even Houdini or the random pyro fx, hell you could use it on paint if you wanted so long as you program your shortcuts it's purpose is universal and that's why it's more conventional then keyboard shortcuts in general..

I was in the cintiq room listening to kat and anna talk to some first years about the irration of moving between softwares in the pipeline and i can understand that pain from first person and another cool thing is that you can program banks or shortcuts with a button switch for either bank like so..


Setting up this system required such references from 'Midiox.com' for audio synth converters most to all questions i needed for the circuit to work was from FAQ's on their website referenced at 'You obtain the best sounding synthesizer you can find, perform the MIDI file via a sequencer or MIDI player, and record the output in a sound recording application'

So as far as portability is concerned all you need is ONE pen drive and my setup is sorted

Both softwares when installed portably with the support and build files being rooted into the USB you can run the programmable interface straight from any PC, and edit them 'On the fly' (like a pro).

And best of all it fits in my bag with ease..
I'll be testing this out over the next few weeks to see how useful it is and if it's worth it.