Any LW commercial tools to recommend?

[TRick]

From the little information you give, I could say buy everything available ;) BUT...

If you're going to make your first 5 min.animation with good texturing and lighting and some character animation, I would say try doing everything in LW and certainly get yourself FPrime to speed up your final texturing and lighting. Most plugins are for specific needs: you need fabulous hair, get Sasquatch, you need very powerfull control over particles, get Napalm, you're doing complex simulations, get Impact, you wanna be an expression wizard, get Amelie, etc. In the last 10 years I got almost all plugins that are available, but I either bought them for a very specific task or there was some great deal.

LW is a very powerfull allround animation package, so before spending your money, be sure you can NOT do it in LW...

[TRick]

About Motionbuilder:

If you're in a pipeline where a lot of different softwares are used for specific tasks and you are only doing general character animation, consider MB since it's the most stable and interactive char.animation package there is. IF you are a one man shop try to avoid it: first you'll have to learn a new package and second you'll be very annoyed by the importing/exporting between both apps. LW may not be that easy compared to MB but once you're acquainted you'll take that complexity for granted; there is also much more control over your mesh and everything is way more integrated with your end-result...

[SplineGod]

I would say just use Lightwave and then determine as you get into production what other tools you may need. Its impossible to predict most of the time what you MUST have until you get into it. Ive done lots of production work that required few if any plugins or 3rd party solutions. :)

[slipster70]

Since you say you will be doing character animation, I would highly recommend Thomas 4D Rigging Tools. For the price, you can't beat the functionality and flexibility it gives you.

www.thomas4d.com (http://www.thomas4d.com)

[Celshader]

MechEvil, I strongly recommend that you bookmark Flay.com (http://www.flay.com/). If you ever catch yourself doing something repetitive or mechanical in LightWave, search Flay's plug-in database to see if someone wrote a useful free tool that can help you out.

Here's two of the many tools that I found through Flay that helped me over the past year:

C_Bend (http://www.flay.com/GetDetail.cfm?ID=1341) -- great when I had to twist a length of rope into knots for a ship's rigging.
Load Objects from Scene (http://www.flay.com/GetDetail.cfm?ID=1760) -- great when I had to turn a scene of arranged objects into a single object in Modeler. It only took 30 objects at a time or so, so I had to break up each scene into mini-scenes containing no more than 30 objects, but this plug-in still saved me HOURS of work.

Heck, Flay's plug-in database has often saved me many hours in my professional work. I hope it might help you out, too.

[mechevil]

thanx guys... i really appreciate your time for your recommended plugins...

and btw, how is it possible to make:

- a man walking with swaying cape on his back

- a robot walking with a tail of sprite/sort of electric trail at its joints

- any texturing method/skills useful

- moving clouds

+thanx+

[3DDave]

Here is an excellent set of training DVD's by Todd Grimes.

http://www.desktopimages.com/CharSeries.shtml

[SplineGod]

3DDave has a good point. If you arent sure how to do the things you mentioned (and all are very doable in LW) I would invest in some training materials. I have courses and CDs that cover much of the information youre asking about. Check out my site. :)

[leigh]

For textures and lighting you don't necessarily need any special plugins at all, just practise, experimentation and a decent general knowledge of each which can be studied on the internet - although FPrime would certainly help to speed up the process of setting these up. Stuff like Hypersmooth and G2 and the like are great when you want a more extensive set of shading options for realism, but I'd only recommend them to advanced users with specific needs.

With regards to rigging, T4D's rigging tools are really swish :)

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