I’ve just recently been looking into what MB6 Pro can do with Lightwave. From what I’ve been able to gather so far it appears that there is no method/capability for animating a low res/poly count character in MB and once exported and loaded into Lightwave, having that low res cage animation drive the subd version of that character.
Could someone please verify if this is correct or not? I’d appreciate any other info on whether it is possible with any other ap such as Maya etc.
MB is only sending back bone position data to Lightwave, not mesh deformation. So, it should be able to drive anything connected to the Lightwave rig.
Ahhm… that is not a problem really, though you can´t use subpatches in MB.
However, since LW has the great feature of simply replacing objects and meshes around bones and keep all skinning if the weightmaps align from mesh to mesh, you can easily use whatever mesh-representation you want in MB.
I use a character mesh built and weighted in LW, “freezed” at patch divisions 1 in MB as representation. That gives a good feel of the final shape of the model and how deformations will look back in LW.
When I import this in LW it is just to replace the character object with my full subpatched model, and this works great.
Besides this… when you once have imported your MB scene in LW and replaced the objects you can also import animation only through fbx, and simply replace the animation of the bones.
So, as I see it LW and MB makes a great combo… though MB itself is making me nuts occationally 
(I use 5.5 btw.)
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