Lightwave to Max animation conversion issues.

[LFShade]

You might try the FBX plugins from Kaydara (http://www.kaydara.com/support/download/index.php). The plugins are available for both LW and Max, and are capable of exchanging a great deal of scene information.

Best of luck:thumbsup:

[=RnL=young_dog]

Wow, thanks for the useful plugin! I have tried it and it works much more nicely than deep exploration did for me when I first converted the animation file. I am not familiar with either deep ex or the FBX exporter/importer too much really, but based on quick and dirty transfers in both, FBX takes the cake.

The only thing when I imported the lightwave animation into max is that the polygons were flipped for some odd reason and I think that maybe one or two of the weight maps didn't convert right. The UV maps on the weapon in the particular scene also seem to be slightly off, but I'm sure with tweaking, these issues can be taken care of. Regardless, I think you may have just saved me a lot of pain through dealing with deep ex.

If any of you happen to have a near-flawless or flawless method of converting animations between platforms like lightwave, max, and maya, please help me out! Until then, I'll be sticking with FBX. Thanks a bunch, LFShade!

Also, I hate to plug anything here, but Shade, if you're into WWII games at all and you have UT2003, I encourage you to check out our mod development from time to time. The web address should be in my signature. Seeing the help spread around in this forum just makes me happy and realize why I'm going to be in the gaming industry in the near future. It's almost like I'll be rewarding so many fellow gamers for helping me out in the process. Definitely one of the best experiences of my life. :D

[Aaron Moore]

How is this plugin working? I am curious because I had a similar issue where I need I/O between Max and LW. I ended up getting DE2 but is this fileformat more stable?

[=RnL=young_dog]

FBX is actually a physical plugin for each program as far as I can tell whereas deep exploration is its own program. I just had to install FBX and it asks which programs you need plugins for. Max and Maya are able to have the plugins install automatically apparently, but you have to manually install the plugins in Lightwave which isn't a really big deal.

Once you have the plugins in their proper directories for whatever 3d package you're using, you just have to export your animation(s) as an FBX file. The cool thing I'm noticing with FBX is that it can save any of the main 3d filetypes into the FBX format at any given time. I haven't tried it, but theoretically, you can save an LW animation into FBX, then go to max and merge a totally different animation with the same FBX file from LW. If you wanted to, you could even then take that FBX file and open it in Maya.

It all sounds awesome on paper, but it still does have issues. But personally I have had a much better experience with FBX than with Deep Ex. I am also looking into this program that my mod team leader ran into: http://www.okino.com/conv/conv.htm . It's called 'Polytrans'. It looks quite versatile and verrry useful. The only problem is that juicy little price tag at the bottom there of $499. Also, I'm still a bit skeptical of Polytrans. If you look at those screenshots, I don't seem to see any textures on the model nor animation data (The coloring job looks more like assigned surface color, not texture). Those are two key things I need transferred (I don't want UV data overlapping eachother and the whole 9 yards). But anyway...I'll let you know if I personally come up with any more stuff. Again, if any of you can contribute, I'll gratefully accept with open arms. :D

[LFShade]

It's been a long time since I've converted anything with Polytrans, but I remember it handling textures properly. The only thing that bugged me about it was that everything came into Max (from any other app) completely triangulated, which is pretty useless if you need to do any mesh smoothing. That might have changed by now, though, with the popularity of sub-d's.

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