CGTalk - Exporting maya animation

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spaz8

01-05-2003, 09:25 PM

Here's my challenge, take two characters rigged and animated in Maya and bring them in to Lightwave to render. Up to this point the only way i've found to really combine LW and Maya is just to composite the tga's together in a compositing package. I was just wondering if it's possible for LW to use the animation info from maya. At the moment other than exporting the two charcaters at every single frame:annoyed: and importing them in LW, i dont know how this could be done. Just wondering if someone could enlighten me on a way to do this since it would elimainate the headache of matching lighting etc. on the characters to make them fit the LW scene. - Thanks for any imput!

tropistic

01-05-2003, 09:29 PM

give these scripts a try for starters:

http://www.3danim.de/pages/free_stuff/maya2lw/maya2lw.html

Jay

MDuffy

01-05-2003, 10:39 PM

You can try using The Beaver Project (http://www.thebeaverproject.com) which will export Maya objects as MDDs (LW's Motion Designer Data) which can be applied to objects in your LW scene. For Jimmy Neutron we wound up writing our own internal plugins to handle MDD exporting from Maya.

Hope this helps,
Michael Duffy
mduffy@ionet.net

bentllama

01-05-2003, 11:37 PM

FBX file format.

www.kaydara.com

iso

01-06-2003, 12:30 AM

Has anyone been able to get the one at 3danim to work?Sometimes I got errors other times no .lws file was created. I haven't tried the beaver project though, maybe will give it a go

CIM

01-06-2003, 12:33 AM

The current version of FBX is buggy, and does not work with Maya 4.5.

SheepFactory

01-06-2003, 12:35 AM

the new one that got released a couple weeks ago works with maya 4.5

CIM

01-06-2003, 12:37 AM

Does not.

tropistic

01-06-2003, 01:01 AM

Does so. I just succesfully tested it with Maya 4.5 & LightWave 7.5, both on W2k.

But I'm not impressed by the format's compatability between Maya & LW - so much not translated. Gonna stick with the Maya2lw scripts until Beaver is released. If that ever happens...

Jay

SheepFactory

01-06-2003, 01:02 AM

CIM can you go to:

www.3dfestival.com

and type 'kaydara' in the search box below?

Ali

skello

01-06-2003, 03:39 PM

Is there any advantage in exporting a finished animation back to LW for render?.....at least for Maya 4.5 users you can render with mental ray and get similar results.

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