AM to Lightwave pipeline

#81

Martin’s exact quote from the chat was “The renderer is static (except for HDR),” which means to me that he’s still working on it, but probably at a much slower pace. HDR is tentatively planned for v12. I think that would up the realism plenty. He may be wary of adding more things to the renderer which could slow it down and maybe screw up what’s been improved. If he wants to go slow and say it’s “static”, that’s OK by me. I’m tired of what was the ever increasing improvement track where you just keep holding out for more cool features. I’m to the point now where I just want to get something done that means something instead of constant experimentation with ever-changing features like I’ve been doing for the past 10 years.

It seems his focus now is making the program easier for more to use, getting cloth to work and make it easier to make water work well, too. Those things added to what’s already been done to hair and spriticles does quite a bit. I really like his idea of adding to libraries. I’ve been saying that all along. Bigger and better libraries of models, actions, material, textures, etc. It’s what is really needed to get people to use the program, not just the wanna be model makers and TD folks.

I’m with you, Wegg, on the one man band argument. That’s another reason I’ve been an A:M holdout for so long. Only way I can do it with bills and my full-time radio work and free-lance voice over work. No time other than for a one man band approach. I’ve only recently started exploring Vue for creating backgrounds and using Poser for modeling ideas and accessing some of the very cool DAZ textures and Carrara for looking at and adjusting polygon models for props. But making A:M do the bulk of the work has been my only good option for years in the terms of expense and ease of use.

New work is going up soon on my new site http://www.pixelplays.com

Martin did say in the chat that they are planning on working on another film. Maybe they’ll find they have to adapt or change the renderer for that and he doesn’t want to get locked into something right now that won’t work for the movie. Speculation on my part.

Kevin

#82

These are just great posts on this-thanks!:thumbsup: Boy do I see your point Wegg. Thats alot of $:eek: The only thing I bought was Darktree which is so cool. I guess what was freaking me out was maybe some posts where people had problems with stuff like volumetrics and shadows and raytraced rendering problems-it could be them and not AM.:shrug: Maybe I felt that AM still needed to be fixed and the features dont work all that great like a crap shoot. But damn your right about AM it does have a killer workflow its so easy to work in. Thanks for sharing so much-thanks Wegg. You are the man!:applause: Hey Kevin I hope your right sounds great. HDR is going to really push the realism in AM. I bet Yves is working on that. Thats another reason I think AM is going to be great in 2005. Yves is that good.
Thanks-

#83

As I already said above, I love AM as you love it.
This is the reason why I spent A LOT of time to re-done a fully new exporting mesh and scenes processing code to render outside AM. I would not waste my time to START from AM if it does not have wonderfull abilities to work with and the fundamentals to make GREAT work (The market to sell the kind of converter I’m working on has no interest because AM community is very small - no significative money to gain).

No doubt for me AM has a great renderer. But to fire a rendering, I personnaly need something to render : featuring animation to rendering. But several things cannot absolutely not done in AM. For recall, in many polygons software (as cinema4D XL5 4 years agos) any polygon model can be a particle of an emmitter. This is not the case in AM for now. … and I have a long list of such examples. Keeping in mind the wish to do ALL the animation (even with soft bodies, rigid bodies, cloth and so on…) in AM, I have NO OTHER CHOICE to do by myself my own exporter to take what laks in AM into others software (LW or C4D for the moment). Martin HASH himself said one of the problem with the AM user is that many users are starting with AM but as time goes, quit AM :
Martin said : " We really need more users to stay in the game. Only 1 in 100 continue to use the software (3D is hard). We’ve got to deliver a product that gets 5 of those 100"
About 30 of my friends have quitted AM not because “3D is hard” but because of some great lacks or gates closed of AM. They have choosen another software altough thincking AM has a wonderfull workflow. And, I agree when you say LW has an horrible one.

Nevertheless, to be able to have the possibility to touch up any part of the animation done in AM into LW is a great wish; I’m trying to get it, but it is difficult because I must dive into complex mathematical process and coding. Furthermore, I want the final converter bi-plateform (PC and Mac).

Hope maybe one day could it help somebody to ACHIEVE a project done in AM vxx.x with current LW vkk.k (and once more Y E S , Y E S, Y E S : all theses LW features will be a couple of years later in a next AM version ; but the professionnal user need the work to be done TODAY - HDRI implementation is one more example -. Live is short and imprevisible, as a medical doctor, I know what I say… :sad: ).

Best regards,

Alain

#84

I think the pipleine is already there DrRIEGER. Someone just has to prove it.

#85

Heres what I dont get people say AM is lacking features. Like your friends left AM because it didnt have whatever it is they thought they couldnt get with AM. But whats really lacking? But I thought particles could be created out of anything to? Like you create images and you have your sprites? One of the reasons that got me thinking LW isnt about lacking features in AM. But it looked like the features that are there really dont work all that hot. I mean I would love to have subsurface scattering but Im happy with HDR!:bounce: It s like some of the movies over at Hash. I think the movies are funny and really good but they dont really look like the stuff you see on TV and movies. Not to take away anything from them becasue they are really really good! But I sure cant do better now I hope some day!:eek:

I cant wait for more of your plug in DrRIEGER.

#86

I think it’s great that Alain and others are working on plugins like this. It will help keep around the people who are learning how to do fancier things which will benefit all, or those who need it for a production pipeline where they have to make A:M work with LW. That being said, I still think A:M is no slouch, and can do wonders for many, like me, if I just had more time and energy (slowly but surely I will get something done soon!).

Wycoff3d, some probably ran off when A:M had problems back in v9.

Some may have run off just because they read that another program was cooler, etc.

Yet others may have run off because A:M just doesn’t fit their understanding and experience with CG programs. I’ve been using A:M and following these discussions various places for ten years and it seems many people who learned with a polygon program, could never get their heads around splines.

And maybe others have run off to other programs just to make a cooler looking demo reel, not realizing that might not be the key to getting a job. Maybe focusing on doing a couple of aspects of CG really well will do the trick more efficiently and for less money. And you can do cheats in A:M similar to the cheats for LW and get the same look. Less can be more.

For those needing the features to stay up to date for what they do for a living, to meet client dictates, that’s another matter. Funny thing is, I know a guy with a small production house here in the Detroit area, and he owns LW…got it because he thought he’d need it when he went off on his own and started his company. He’s only used it a few times over the past five years for the commercials and corporate videos he’s made. In fact he hasn’t upgraded in quite some time. The bulk of his work, though, is done in AfterEffects and related motion graphics applications. The rest of the time he’s just working with graphics, video and sound, though he does market animation as one of his specialties.

Possible reasons for your perceived lack of sparkle with the some of the movies at the Hash site are probably just because of the level of talent involved, and more importantly resource and time factors. I myself think a few are really good and Hollywood level. In fact, if shorts were more popular like they used to be, you could see some on TV or before feature films (Thank you, Pixar, for bringing that back!). If someone has enough talent, time and resources (computers for rendering, money for extras like voices and music/sfx) to get a higher end animation done, you’ll see it. But if you go to other software sites, you generally still won’t see animations that are consistently much better. You might see some great stills, or some cool demo animations (like at the Vue site) but that’s about it. That might change as more and more high powered computers are being used and if people don’t waste time on resource hogging rendering features. Until then simpler animations rule just because of what’s involved.

Kevin

#87

I think the pipleine is already there

What do you mean Wegg :slight_smile:

#88

Model in AM, Rig in AM, Animate in AM. . . texture and render in whatever you want. Anything that Point Oven talks too.

#89

OK.
Thanks Wegg :slight_smile:
( But that one needs to export with available exporters that do not work well for professionnal usage due to wrong export geometries from AM ).

#90

Well like I said earlier I dont’ think that is possible. Hooks and 5s are not sub-d friendly. You will always have to spend some time re-working your mesh in the host app. Best of luck though.

I hit a snag on the .mdd pipeline. . .

So far so good. Nice clean simple LW model. It loads up into Animation Master just fine using <this> plugin.

Throw a couple bones in there, open up an action window. Move it around and save out a .lwo sequence using that same LW import export plugin. Then I convert that sequence using <this> tool that markpassion made. . .

And. . .

Boom.

Point order got mixed up somehow. I suspect it is the LW import export plugin. If the point order isn’t exactly the same between the imported .lwo and the .lwo files it exports. . . you get this. :banghead:

I can see things moving correctly when I scrub the timeline. So I know this COULD work.

Hmmm. . . .

#91

OH weird. . . it is exporting my AM bones as skelegons! I wonder if it is choking on that. . .

#92

Oh man this is cool. It works if you use the first exported model as the base model that you apply the .mdd too. So that PROVES that it isn’t Mark’s converter. . . but the A:M import export plugin.

Hmm. . .

#93

Wow that looks really good Wegg!:thumbsup: Are you saying that 5points came in? How did you get the MMDCompiler to work? I click on it and nothing happens? Its like a dos window opens and is gone in seconds. How do you use it? Looks like the Watanabe plug in adn MDD might work except your saying the problem might be in the export?
Hey Kevin really good points. A friend of mine got LW then maya because he said Maya is the best. Now he uses Final Cut and After Effects. When he needs 3d he uses Silo3d. That was a real expensive upgrade path!:eek: But I think your right tha most AMers dont have the $ or time and knowledge to really make a killer animation. But folks like Wegg and Zandoria probably could use AM to make killer stuff!:slight_smile: But Martin did say 1 out of 100 use 3d and they want 5. But I think Martin also said that he knows a bunch of people start with AM and then leave. I thinks he said its ok because they used AM to learn. I dont get it if Martin knows there leaving AM for “better” apps then AM might be missing something. Why not fix it. Look at the great work Wegg did using old versions of AM. But look at what Wegg is trying to do with this pipeline. Isnt it crazy to do so much to make AM work with other apps? I think AM is awesome but I kind of feel that it needs to be polished more with some of the features. To many users complain about fog-sprites stuff like volumetrics and banding. What I think is great is the cloth and hair. Holy crap the hair is amazing. Cloth is going to be amazing to. Why not make all the features work that great.

#94

The lwo export plugin does not assure the vertex order from the original lwo to the exported one.
Please use the exported lwo as the base in Layout.

#95

You will always have to spend some time re-working your mesh in the host app

Heehh Wegg, that is precisely what I want to avoid !
The goal is to export a Full Mesh and directly import it into LW without any more work.
(of course, Hooks (middle hooks), five points patches and loops must be automatically converted too).

Are you saying that 5points came in?

No, 5points patches are not taken into account when exporting AM->LW in lwo format.

Mark’s mdd compiler works.
But only with quads and with very selected models.

A single mesh as a ball made in AM, cannot at this time, correctly exported from AM with any of the exporters available (lwo, obj) : in the polygon application, problems appear with loop continuity selection, problems in poles, etc… And this occurs when using the Primitive wizard plugin in AM. When using native Lathe tool, polygons are lost in the area at which loops should be closed ( try it ).

BTW, nice modeled model Wegg :thumbsup:

Regards,

Alain

#96

Great job, Wegg! Great looking model, too!

Wycoff3d, I think Martin resigned himself to the hobbyist and beginner market a long time ago. They have often thought small, which is OK. They’ve defined a niche which is Marketing 101. Think about it. From a business standpoint, he has much lower overhead than the big companies and he does robust business. He is therefore very successful. It still sounds like he wants to avoid the pro market and the headaches involved because he wants to make the program even easier to use and he said working with Avalanche had caused them to implement more complicated means of doing things.

With him hiring Yves, though, they are venturing into making A:M a killer app and very well could hold on to more users, without having to hire even more programmers to handle all the pro demands. I always said they should get regular input from the more professional/artistic users with the good eyes. Yves will give them the input to make the features they have work better.

The complaints about stability have pretty much evaporated with the latest versions (and probably people using much more stable Windows and Mac OSes! I blamed them for most stability problems people ran into since some problems couldn’t be duplicated) and it looks like he’s serious about fixing the problems that still exist. I’m happy that he is slowing down on adding features as I always put blame on those additions for adding bugs.

The fact that Billy and Alain and others are trying to get it to work with LW shows how in demand the superior animation aspects of the program are. The good thing about the efforts is that we’ll maybe see even a better implementation as it will be more software specific and will actually deal with what is needed instead of a programmer at Hash trying to figure out what is needed without really using the programs to accomplish the desired effect. I think that’s one of the reasons previous features fell away…because they were put there with limited demand or weren’t implemented as well as they could be simply because the programmers are programmers and not thinking as CG artists necessarily. The closest analogy I have is when working in radio, an engineer wires up a neat new box or switch, but the DJ can’t figure out how to use it or it’s put in an awkward place in the studio. The engineer had a great idea but it wasn’t implemented from the user’s viewpoint. BTW, the engineer where I work right now doesn’t have that problem.

#97

Hello Wata,
By chance, do you the programmer of this lwo import/export plugin ?

Hope … :slight_smile:

#98

Yes, I created that plugin.

When Lwo is imported in A:M, the model is converted splines.
And the vertex order is broken by A:M.
The plugin can not export the objects with the same vertex order.

#99

Ok I downloaded LWO2MDD and MDDCompile. How do you use them? I click on them and then get nothing. MDDCompile gives me a error window and crashes. LWO2MDD just runs and dies. What am I doing wrong?:banghead: Hey Kevin you give some great and intellegent reasons-thanks! But what I just dont get is Martin has to know hes losing people for these other apps I hope hes working on making sure this doesnt keep happening. It kills me that he has a great tool and still today people dont get it.:cry: But why are people trying to get AM to work with apps like LW? BEcasue of some problem right? Maybe people dont think the render is good enough or AM cant do real cool effects. Then why not fix these so people wont feel thay have to use LW. I can get using AM and LW because they are sharing on a project or whatever but people should think that they dont need to use LW but want to use LW. Big difference in my head. I hope Yves gets the light bulb in Martin to go off!:wink:

#100

Hi Guys

I’ve downloaded this : [b]Download of lw6_am10.hxt[/b]
Put in my hxt folder and it doesn’t work with my A.M. 10.5…!
[b]Out of luck…:sad:

[/b]