Beaver Project (Maya 2 LW)

[twidup]

yup, it supports up to Maya 5 and LW 7.5+

Support is great via Christian and an email group he runs for support, so you can see what problems others are in countering and how to solve them, thought there are not a lot these days.

It can export not only the deformed mesh, but I believe he recently added stuff so you can export channels as well and you can turn a Maya particle cache into a PFX file for use with Particle FX in LW.

-Todd

[ngrava]

Originally posted by twidup
yup, it supports up to Maya 5 and LW 7.5+

Support is great via Christian and an email group he runs for support, so you can see what problems others are in countering and how to solve them, thought there are not a lot these days.

It can export not only the deformed mesh, but I believe he recently added stuff so you can export channels as well and you can turn a Maya particle cache into a PFX file for use with Particle FX in LW.

-Todd

What do you mean by exporting channels? Can you export characters with animated bones from Maya and load them up in Lightwave?

-=GB=-

[theKwyjibo]

This is one plugin I definately would like to get a hold of, any ideas of how to get into the beta program (even if it is at a cost)?

[twidup]

Originally posted by ngrava
What do you mean by exporting channels? Can you export characters with animated bones from Maya and load them up in Lightwave?

-=GB=- I will have to check it at home tonight to see xactly how it works, I havent used that feature yet, just saw it in the tab the other day.

its a waste to animate in Maya only to export the channel data back to LW for use on its bones, becuase you dont keep your deformations, unless you save out them as well, but that just creates an MDD file, which is LW's softbody system cache file. I think the channels were added so that you can export them and use the curve data with expressions and such in LW. or for rigid body objects

[beaverproject]

BP can export both defomation and channels (translate/rotate/scale) animation. If you have a deforming model in Maya, it'll be exported as vertex animation baked on a per frame basis. Lights and cameras will be exported as channel animation.

[Kaiser_Sose]

WHats the status on its devolopment

[ngrava]

The reason I'm asking is that Sasquatch need the bone rotations in order the calculate the fur dynamics. That's the main reasion I'm interested in BP. So, I'd still like to know more about this channels thing.

Thanks for all your help!

-=GB=-

[jjburton]

The Beaver Project site hasn't been updated in a while. But if you email the guy (think it's Christian), he will get back to you. When I asked him last fall what the price was, I'm pretty sure he said $500, but you'll have to ask him.

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