Point Oven 1.3

[Sil3]

Cool :thumbsup:


Now when can we expect PO to work with XSI to? :D

[Nando]

Mark,

Ive been clicking on yer website almost everyday to see if 1.3 was released yet.

Thanks for the update ;)

Could you show us some of the 3D Max point oven support that's what Im realy interested

Thanks

[markpassion]

The max side of Point Oven is in the earlier stages as its the new kid on the block. 1.3 won't have motion curve baking for Max, just mdd baking and reading. Once 1.3 is released I'll add the motion engine to the max version, and bring it inline with the others. The max version is however being used in production right now so its definately usable, just not as flexible as the other plugs yet.

Mark

[Nando]

Mark,

Awesome

:drool:

[dfaris]

Any chance of a C4D version?

[GCL]

Any chance of a " special " 1.3 sale ? Be nice for those that were left out on initial plug release.

[EDDIEthePIRATE]

I'm all for XSI support. :thumbsup:

[thomey]

I'm hoping for a XSI version as well. I have here LW, Messiah and soon XSI adv so it would fit nicely. To help develop PointOven for XSI I did do one think : I placed a order hopping that I get a XSI version and while ordering to support great work that Mark is doing.

Thorsten

[Panikos]

Baking motion ??? hmmmm :shrug:

Will it be in LW-mot format or a custom PointOven format ? :deal:

[markpassion]

The XSI reader is in the works, and almost done, but won't make this 1.3 release.

The C4D version will happen.

Motions can be baked directly into the scene file or to either mot or mel at present. I'll probably need to add other formats as more apps get added.

The cost is still going to be $99 which I think is a bargain considering how much its doing now.

Mark

[dfaris]

The XSI reader is in the works, and almost done, but won't make this 1.3 release.

The C4D version will happen.

Motions can be baked directly into the scene file or to either mot or mel at present. I'll probably need to add other formats as more apps get added.

The cost is still going to be $99 which I think is a bargain considering how much its doing now.

MarkGood news for the c4d people and the xsi folks.
I think $99 is a good price and will be happy to pay as soon as my version comes out.
Thanks.

[Panikos]

Mark

I am thinking about items/objects that are under a hierarchy or their motion is controlled by expressions.
Naturally, these motions can be baked as mot-files as keys-at-every-frame.
Is there any other way ?
:scream:

Why not having a common global-position format (like MDD) for all aps, yeah I know, kind of difficult, but the benefits would have been great.

[markpassion]

I'm not entirely sure what you're saying Panikos. Which ever way you bake you're always gonna have a key on every frame right?

Mark

[Panikos]

Yes, you are right.

Together, we discussed this issue so many times :)

[chikega]

XSI and C4d support - yipee!:thumbsup:

[Julez4001]

Hey Mark is the camera motion interchangeable between say Lightwave and Maya via PointOven, really smooth. Have you add any successful runs doing that in a production environment? Is there anything to look out for if one wanted to continually transfer camera motion between the two apps.

[markpassion]

Yeah you can do that and yes there are ways to work. I will be making videos to explain stuff as they are faster than writing a massive manual and faster to learn from usually.

Mark - "The man that doesn't sleep" :-(

[Julez4001]

Oh yeah ..is this a paid upgrade for previous version owners.

[markpassion]

Free Upgrade.

Mark

[Gwot]

Hi Mark,

So would point oven be a viable option for getting bone animation into LW as well then? I've been having trouble with the messiah xform plugin for LW. It works fine in that I can send nulls from a LW scene over to messiah but once they are in messiah, setup and animated I can't seem to close down the host connection without losing that specific setup and animation connection. Saving an fxs and the original lws with the xform plugin breaks the connection permanently. The animation comes back to LW fine so long as I leave the connection up, but this isn't what I need.

Ideally I'd like to be able to save the fxs as well as the lws and be able to reuse them afterward for doing animation cycles for game work without having to constantly redo the setup in messiah. Could point oven do this?

Maybe I'm just doing something wrong but I can't seem to get past this one-time connection between messiah and LW and I'm currently looking for options.

[markpassion]

well PO doesn't actually support bone processing but I guess it could do very easily, or at least in Messiah anyway. Once 1.3 is out I'll look at adding it. In the meantime a workaround would be to switch out the bones for nulls but I understand thats far from being ideal.

Mark

[Wegg]

Gwot, once you have a model that is displaced by xForm and you have animated it in the Messiah interface launched from within LW, all the animation and work that you do is saved into the .lws when you save in Layout. There really is no need to save an .FXS or even use Point Oven to create .mdd files. This is how we have done it for years in full production. Point Oven works and works very well from the few tests that I have done. It solves a lot of things that come up when you try and introduce dynamics. But it certainly isn't nessisary to work with Messiah and Lightwave.

[Gwot]

Mark: That would be great and well worth waiting for. There are two things missing from messiah that would make it a great addition to any game animation pipelinie. Number one is the bone processing. Being able to just send over whatever bone animation you have to a skeleton in the host app is very much needed. Motion Builder does this perfectly without any extra work involved.

Number two is weight map data. I would absolutely love to be able to access all the bone influence info that is created when you setup a character in messiah, and dump that to the host app as a series of weight maps. This would allow game animators to utilize messiah's wonderful bone influences and cut down on the work involved in weighting characters by hand. We absolutely have to use weight map data so being able to do this stuff right in messiah would be great.

I know this stuff is beyond the scope of point oven, but it seems relevant in a "flipside of the coin" kinda way.

Wegg: Thanks for the response! I don't understand though... are you saying that saving a source animation file in .fxs isn't done when doing film work? I absolutely need to be able to save out my animation sources for future editing and even reuse/modification. I guess maybe I've been going about this whole xform dealy the wrong way then. However, I did find a work around it seems in Marek Schneider's BVH converter. It works great in that I don't need to have a host connection and I can save out all my animations as separate fxs files. Just convert my deformation bone group from fxs to bvh then import it into layout, and run Colin Cohen's new Motion Map plugin. It grabs all the motion from the bvh import skeleton and copies it to the LW skeleton.

It's a bit more tedious than a simple motion builder connection, as the exporter creates extra bones in the bvh export to stabilize the bone orientations. At least it works though. I just have to make sure I create my main rig in messiah first, send that over to LW as a reference pose, and use that from then on to receive exported motions from messiah.

[Wegg]

You do save out .fxs files for your rigs. For example.. . . you have one character in shot one. You load up that character mesh into LW, apply Messiah Displace, Launch the Messiah interface, merge in the FXS with the rig, swap out the mesh that the bone deformer is pointing too and your off.

If you NEED bone information then XForm nulls on all your joints that you attatch bones too in LW would. . . work but like you said. Bit of a pain.

[Sil3]

Number two is weight map data. I would absolutely love to be able to access all the bone influence info that is created when you setup a character in messiah, and dump that to the host app as a series of weight maps. This would allow game animators to utilize messiah's wonderful bone influences and cut down on the work involved in weighting characters by hand. We absolutely have to use weight map data so being able to do this stuff right in messiah would be great.

Agree 100% on this one, not only game animators would benefit but also the "other" animators as well :D

Messiah "SmartBone" Weights are simply THE BEST, let us take advantage of it by being able to use them in whatever other packages we have to work with. An exporter to various (LW, Maya, XSI, Max and C4D) formats would be ideal, or probably even exporting some kind of UV Weight map as an image file. Of course this file could later on be "refined" if needed in the host applications, since it would become it´s "native" Weight info, like if it was done from scratch in there. To be even more killer, being able to Import this "refined" file also into Messiah would just :buttrock:

Im also in favour (and said it many times) that a more "regular" aproach to making Weight maps in Messiah should also be available, MetaEffectors are cool, but sometimes they are overkill IMO. I dont always need to change my mesh later on and trying to use only one MetaEffector to Weight only the points of a characters head most of the times it´s impossible :(

Point selection in Messiah is a MUST, it´s needed for various reasons, and Weighting it´s only one of them. Im kinda perplex that this feature it´s not available in Messiah by now, it´s also one of the TOP requested features, since Messiah came out (5 years ago), what´s stopping u guys? :shrug:


About a Bone Exporter, yeahhh...this would be :bounce: :applause: :bounce:

So i had an idea...


-----
note:

Im not a programer and i cant code a single line to save my life :sad: so if this idea seems the most stupid thing ever written and should be erased from here so that mankind will never know such enormous display of ignorance and stupity...
...feel free to do it :)

-----


Right now we can export Nulls motion, with that in mind i though in some kind of plugin that would take the distance between 2 Nulls, made a Bone in that lenght and then use the Nulls motion info to control the new created Bones, let me try to explain:

Messiah:

- Place Nulls at joint breaks and parent them to the specific Bones,

Since it would become quit tedious... like, place a Null at the Shoulder, another at Arm, LowerArm. Wrist, Hand, Fingers and so on...ZzZzZzZzZz...i though of creating a Group of the Bones that will only need to have this new Nulls and this Group would tell the Plugin what Bones it should place those Nulls at, automatically renaming the Nulls so they have the correspondent Bone name would be ideal, something from Null25 to NullExport_R_ShoulderBone.

- Make a new Group of the new Export Nulls and export it´s motion and location (so that we dont have to manually place them in the other package)



Package X:

- Load plugin and run the exported Messiah Plugin file.

- Plugin would create and place Nulls at the same exact location that where on Messiah (this might be hard because of diferent world scales in diferent packages, dont know)

- The plug would measure the distance between 2 Nulls, add a Bone and parent the Bone to the first Null, this Null would drive the Bone (automatically renaming this Null so that it matched the Messiah Null name is a request also ;) )

This would make another skeleton with the same Bone Lenghts that where in Messiah, without the hassle of rigging or re-rigging, now tell me that this combined with a "WeightExporter" wouldn´t be an amazing killer features combo? :scream:

Probably impossible to do, like i said earlier, im not a programer, but if the idea is not that bad and can be adapted, let me say i would pay good money for this plugin.

[lmilton]

As far as support for games, if there are any programmers out there, you can already get all motion, skeleton, & weighting info from messiah into your development environment via the API. It's easy to do and we could walk you through the process.

On (greater) support for other host apps, anyone can develop a connection to any program with a capable plugin API. In the includes that ships with messiah, you'll find a file called messiahHOST.h (no notes or examples at this time). It's this file that has everthing necessary to build connections. Anyone interested in building connections for *any* app, even to replace the existing connections, should feel free to ask questions over on pmGDev yahoo group. I'll walk you through the process.

-lyle
ps: we'll use pmGDev exclusively for dev questions until the moderators are able to set up the CGTalk messiah subforums.

[EDDIEthePIRATE]

Another option might be to use dotXSI. I don't know much about it but I know a few companies trying to use it as a standard for transfering scenes. I found this link if any one wants to check it out:

http://www.inframez.com/papers/dotxsi_dev.htm

:bounce:

[markpassion]

dotxsi is good but it's so tied into xsi that its not an ideal generic format. Also the FTK they supply has parts missing thus its not entirely complete. I found this when writing my LW->XSI plugin. Having said that, at least they went to the effort of providing an FTK. :-)

Mark

[Julez4001]

So in the camera workflow

animate camera in lightwave
export camera to Maya via P.O.

Do you have to change any zoom factor or camera format or does P.O. handle all that.
Does it draw a keyframe at every frame (like kaydara FBH)

[markpassion]

yes to all that. Of course you could just animate the camera in Messiah and export that motion directly to Maya also, or LW, or Maya to Messiah :-)

Mark

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