Is Lightwave Serious About Games?

#1

I need a solution for exporting boned / skinned animations from Lightwave to DirectX. DStorm plugin is buggy - Granny3d is too expensive - so is Polytrans.

I’ve spent the better part of the day trying to resolve exporter problems from Lightwave to DirectX.

I’ve found that 3dmax and Maya are supported with various DirectX export utilities - but I couldn’t find anything useful for Lightwave?? (rhetorical).

Can someone please answer the question - Is Lightwave Serious About Games?

Does the games industry use Lightwave at all? Why is there so little 3rd party support for making games with Lightwave?

Anyone got any ideas?

Andy H.:cry:

#2

I had to give up on the D-Storm Lightwave DirectX export plugin, because it crashes Lightwave 100% of the time on my system.

I am looking for the same thing you are - Export of boned animation and mesh from Lightwave.

You might want to try Right Hemisphere’s Deep Exploration tool; it converts exported Lightwave scene files with animation to DirectX format. It seems to work with some game development tools (e.g. DarkBasic Pro) but not others (e.g. Quest3d). But at least you can download a trial version and see if it will meet your needs. It’s not exactly cheap at $299, but it supports many formats.

Hope this helps. Let us know if you find anything better. (I’m hoping Lightwave 8 will allow export of boned animation in DirectX format directly). :smiley:

#3

The moment I got into the games industry I had to leave lightwave behind. Best thing to do is take it with a grain of salt…

The support just isnt there yet…

#4

Well all is not lost - I persisted with the problem and found a few things I had done wrong. Not sure if this will always be the case though.

Test using LW 7.5 and DStorm DX exporter 1.3.2 - exporting from Lightwave Layout as X file with animation.

  1. There was possibly something non-directx about the mesh - non-welded verts, stray UV. I suspect this because I used an early clean mesh (one I knew to work) changed some maps on it and it seemed to be okay.

  2. The last frame of the Lightwave scene must contain animation key data. For example one sample I tried the slider was set to 60 but I only had keyframes up to 10. The result -> Visible mesh but it was black (possibly a vertex shader interpolation issue).
    The next example I set the final frame in the scene to 10 exported and it worked.

I’ve since added 70 frames and it’s still working.

If I get a demo going I’ll post the group - crossing my fingers this fix keeps working…

Andy H.:bounce:

#5

you may have to consider not doing animation in lightwave…just export your mesh and uv textures to milkshape and animate there…or use “g_max”…lightwave is good for games if your programming team write a custom importer/exporter for it…sorry i cant help more…:shrug:

#6

:bowdown:
Thanks to everyone who contributed to this thread. I have found the DStorm plugin seems to work okay now. But I will seriously look at porting stuff to Milkshape anyway as it has much more support for games.

Being the lead programmer and artist for my games makes it a big uphill battle. Thankfully I don’t have to toss Lightwave in the bin:applause:

Please check my new thread on GeoDyne under Games Developement as it deals with this whole issue plus involves questions on what people want from a game engine.

Andy H.

#7

If it´s skeleton based character animation that you´re wanting to do, you might consider using Blender, because exporting from Blender is possible with its Python based scripting language. There are already some Python scripts that do exporting, for example I wrote one that exports to Doom3 MD5 format. I was new to Blender and Python, but still it wasn´t that difficult, and I based the script on an existing one. It´s easy to adapt one of the existing scripts to whatever format you´re using.

I checked out the possibilities of Milkshape before I ever knew about Blender, but to me it´s very clear that it´s …ahem… too restricted.
And Blender is totally FREE, open source and can do so much more than just pushing vertices.

Blender: www.blender.org

Export script to “Cal3D”: http://oomadness.tuxfamily.org/en/blender2cal3d/index.html
(I based my exporter on that.)

My md5 exporter doesn´t have a website yet.

#8

I know this isnt a direct answer, but LW [8] is just around the corner, and with ‘a big improvement for games designers’ you could be very happy.

you could of course be very disapointed, so dont go balistic. but its getting closer and closer… :bounce:

#9

Firstly, im not attacking anyone… I just wanted to say this…

I’d like to think that LW8 might handle games programmers wishes better than previous version of LW but really… it’s up to version 7.5 already and if they can’t get their stuff sorted for handling developers needs they by now, they probably never will.

It seems that 3rd party development will always be required for this sort of thing.

I think maybe the solution is to what Discreet did for Max with gmax… make a GWave utility or something.

Andy H.

#10

thats funny cuz actually g-max is crap for games…3dsmax however is waaayyy better for games…so why use lightwave…id rather use blender(free) than lw(35.00$$$) for game stuff and animation

#11

Reading the last post… Im still shaking my head over that one…

#12

Yeah, LightWave is alot more than 35 dollars :scream:.

#13

I think he meant $3,500 but the fact remains (LW $1,600 )seems to be getting eaten alive by Max. I use blender a little bit myself and I must admit as freeware acm software goes it really is king of the hill but knowledge of it doesn’t seem to translate very well to other high end 3d apps and without raytracing it can be sort of limited when creating certain effects as for lightwave it’s a great 3D app and with a little determination I’m sure it’ll do whatever you want it to and you should definitely keep using it still I don’t think anyone can argue that you wouldn’t be better of with Max personally I use LW now but I’m planning to switch to softimage just as soon as I can afford purchase it alongside a graphics card that won’t choke on it

#14

but there is a free plugin to export lightwave frame by frame as obj file… maybe you could do this and then morph from one to another inside of direct x without the need for bones… the dstorm plugin is ok, but it’s got major problems… wish someone would update it… someone on the newtek boards mentioned that dstorm gave them the sourcecode to play with to get endomorphs supported, but I don’t think they’ve done anything with that yet… ?

#15

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