JONO
06-11-2003, 05:12 PM
hi
some of you may remember me biaaaatching for a week or so a short while ago about how lightwave has problems exporting rigged characters to shockwave w3d format and asking how to do it and asking again and again and so on. well, after some great help and much trial and tribulation this is what i have have come up with.
at first i thaught it was number/ complexity of bones, then the theory centered around expressions,IK and modifiers as the problem.well, these were all right but were not the main problem. these all have work arounds. the big bugger is when one uses 'record pivot rotation'. this step is often taken when rigging a character and hence most rigs dont work!
what i did was set up a simple bone structure whick can be seen in the pics and is a mixture i think of evil-lab and michael blackbourne rigs. went about parenting the bones correctly the applied contraints to the calves and upper arms only. i then set up very basic one null IK to each foot foot. the same can be done to the arms but i leave it cause as far as i know that is normally done using FK for game characters - yuor choice. the key is now to use a plug-in called BakeIKtoKEY ( you can get it at www.flay.com ), it goes through all the channels using IK and bakes the motion - then deactivate 'enableIK'.
dont use any modifiers like follower, it wont work. expressions can be used but all channels using expressions must be baked from within the graph editor and the expressions then deactivated or deleted.
now you can export the animated character to w3d format ;)
also note this is my first game character ever so please crit it.
1688 poly's ( including bones ) after tripled
textures at 512 x 512
some of you may remember me biaaaatching for a week or so a short while ago about how lightwave has problems exporting rigged characters to shockwave w3d format and asking how to do it and asking again and again and so on. well, after some great help and much trial and tribulation this is what i have have come up with.
at first i thaught it was number/ complexity of bones, then the theory centered around expressions,IK and modifiers as the problem.well, these were all right but were not the main problem. these all have work arounds. the big bugger is when one uses 'record pivot rotation'. this step is often taken when rigging a character and hence most rigs dont work!
what i did was set up a simple bone structure whick can be seen in the pics and is a mixture i think of evil-lab and michael blackbourne rigs. went about parenting the bones correctly the applied contraints to the calves and upper arms only. i then set up very basic one null IK to each foot foot. the same can be done to the arms but i leave it cause as far as i know that is normally done using FK for game characters - yuor choice. the key is now to use a plug-in called BakeIKtoKEY ( you can get it at www.flay.com ), it goes through all the channels using IK and bakes the motion - then deactivate 'enableIK'.
dont use any modifiers like follower, it wont work. expressions can be used but all channels using expressions must be baked from within the graph editor and the expressions then deactivated or deleted.
now you can export the animated character to w3d format ;)
also note this is my first game character ever so please crit it.
1688 poly's ( including bones ) after tripled
textures at 512 x 512