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simon-s

07-23-2010, 10:35 AM

Hi,

Just wondered if any you guys use both Lightwave and Blender and if so what is your preferred way of getting your animation out of Lightwave into Blender.

I'm working on some game content which doesn't use any deformations like bones etc...just object rotation, scale and translation.

So far I have been baking my keys in LW, saving out a motion file and loading that into Blender.
Up until now this has worked fine (for simple stuff) but now i am noticing that when I use a bank rotation, it doesn't appear correctly or is flipped in blender due to blenders different rotation order.

Has anyone come across this problem before? Is there anyway of specifying the rotation order in LW or maybe there's a save motion file plugin with options?

What other ways are there for exporting my animations?

(.mdd files aren't an option as the game engine will only support node animations.)

Also fbx import isn't supported by Blender and I have tried collada export too without success. I've also tried exporting fbx from LW, converting it to collada,3ds or dxf using autodesks fbx converter...nothing seems to be working for me.

Any help on this would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers,
Simon

simon-s

08-13-2010, 12:57 PM

I just wanted to bump this post up as I am still desperate for help with this. :banghead:

a_joke

08-22-2010, 05:07 AM

i'm sorry but all i have is a suggestion. have you tried looking in the blender forums for help? They have stuff like this all over. I for one thought about collada, but it doesn't work for you. sorry. again try blender.org or the forums.

kattkieru

08-22-2010, 03:48 PM

If you can wait for LW10, I think you'll have an easier time of this by using the new Collada features.

If you can't, this is a bit of work, but:

If you're not doing deformed meshes, I recommend writing your own exporter in LScript. You can use LScript to get per-frame locations of objects in worldspace coordinates and save them out to a Python file, like a dictionary just a list of values:

positionsListFrame1 = [ ("ob1", 0, 0, 1), ("ob2", 0,0,2) ]

Expanding these is easy:

for (obName, x, y, z) in positionsListFrame1:
# do something

You can then create empties or set keys on bones or whatever you like on the Blender side after you get that data into Python.

As far as how the two systems work with regards to coordinate space, the easiest way to go between Blender's coordinates and other packages is to export everything at worldspace, key per frame, then parent the keyed objects to a null and rotate the null. There are smarter ways, but they all have their downsides and all require a lot more math. :)

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08-22-2010, 03:48 PM

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