Cool lightwave plugin/previewer !

#41

Thx enki for sending me a message regarding exe files…too bad it doesnt work on my dumb laptop…lol

good thing it works on one comp in my house!

#42

so much programming powder on one place… this thread is gonna blow:)

hehehhehe

keep up great work guys… one day ONE DAY cheer me as cg animator with IK solution preview as well!!
till than all other will serve me well

#43

i’m sold !! :drool:

#44

Is it going to work for Mac also?

#45

I’m afraid there are absolutely no plans for Mac support right now.

#46

I guess my Macromedia Director will soon be booted out the window :slight_smile: Web applets… are you talking about a java based applet for viewing 3D scenes… ?

#47

I’m still working on that … it’s an ocx component, so a one time download of about 500k …
sort of like a flash-thing that plays lw scenes directly :slight_smile:

The pimplugin will then compile a compressed and encrypted archive of your scene and lwo
and images … the plugin downloads this file and voila :slight_smile:

#48

Amazing. This would/could make MB less useful for full time previewing of animation… This looks awfully tasty.

Very interesting…

#49

And that includes its scripting too, so the interactivity of it all remains? I still need my interactivity you see :slight_smile:

#50

Off course :slight_smile: … that includes downloading, rendering, scripting, … everything you get with
the standalone exe’s really. (so also playing (surround) sound (ogg/mp3); using video or live webcam textures (with or without chromakeying…); using sound analysis to drive morphmixer, it even includes a basic html renderer that outputs to texture (although that’s still really basic …))
You can create and preview all of that without ever leaving lightwave…

#51

‘Kay, the only i haven’t seen asked yet is, is this also usable like , say Mayas’ Hardware Renderer (which is way cool)…
Because i hate doing sprite rendering with Hypervoxels as it is too slow, and doing it via Maya brings nothing but ZDepth compositing problems along the production pipeline…

#52

Hey Red_Oddity,

You should know that this plugin was originally designed to be a previewer for the PIM Engine, and just that. It just so happens to be that this previewer is much, much faster than Lightwave’s previewer ( and often yields results far closer to the render output of Lightwave) which allowed us to use it as an ‘accelerated viewport’ within Lightwave . So it really focusses on displaying graphics in realtime (realtime previewing, compiling exe’s, screensavers, applets)
, though it does have the ability to render out jpgs.( A scene running at 40 fps will render jpgs at about 10fps, depending on cpu and hardisk speed this could be a lot more ) .

Cheers

#53

Hi all,

Here’s some more comparison shots between the pim ogl previewer and the builtin lightwave one, both compared to the final render result. In both shots pim preview is on the left, lw preview in the middle en lw render to the right.

In the first one, mind the lighting difference on the cymbal. This is because the lw previewer does not implement two sided lighting correctly … the pim previewer does.

The second screenshot is even cooler. The glow-behind objects option for lensflares is not implemented in the LW previewer, this means there are artifacts that wont show up until you look at the final render result. In the pimpreviewer, exactly the same artifacts are visible (this is a goood thing :slight_smile: ) …

Apart from faster and more precise previewing, there’s another cool plus you get when using this thing. LW with open viewports (anything else than ‘none’) leaks memory like my grandmother … (just open your task manager, make sure you see ‘memory use’ and ‘virtual memory size’, and scrub the timeslider … you will see your memory use increase quite rapidly.). In my humble opinion this is one of the nr 1 crash reasons for LW-8 … and the cool thing is that if you use the pim-previewer, this effect is totally gone … no more memory leaking for just playing a scene …

#54

hello enki,
i dowloaded the gang.pim.exe but when i click on it its just an animation of the pic posted at first page.

how does one install this? or is it just the animation going round and round?

#55

it is “just” the animation. another great feature to save it as exe file!
great for previewing scenes to other people!

#56

[ADDED LATER :] Ok Avalon111, 3 mins, you’ve beat me to it :slight_smile:

Hello Trang,

The exe on the first page is a sample output of the plugin. This is a plugin that can be
used to create standalone exe’s or screensavers from lightwave scenes; the acceleration
feature is just an extra that we get because our oGl engine is quite a bit faster than the
LW ogl previewer …

The exe contains a scene with 250.000 polygons … and demonstrates how smooth this
is displayed. As I’m sure you are aware off, it is a bit smoother than the LW previewer
with this amount of polygons …

The plugin is also still under development, although an alpha release may be available soon.
Hope that this clarifys things a bit for you,

grtz

#57

Have to tell my girlfriend I’m in love with something else…

Great job boys! Please don’t push the price to hard, or at least have a academic price :slight_smile:

#58

so can u post a list of what this plug does ??

I have read the post’s and still am a little confused??

#59

Hello Zapper,

keeping it simple and straight :

  • preview content for applications based on the pim 3D engine (original purpose)
  • compile standalone exe’s from your lightwave scenes.
  • compile screensavers from your lightwave scenes
  • can be used as ogl previewer within lightwave : faster, more features.
#60

Could you use a point baker? Like. . . simulate something like cloth, export an .mdd and re-import it into the Pim Previewer?