tsm2 maya animation to lightwave

#1

anybody with experience in that matter ?

rigging and animation is done in maya
rendering and texturing and all in lightwave

using the setup machine
therefore its skinned to a proxy mesh and not bones

fbx ?
collada ?
point oven ?

#2

Good choice for character work…

Point oven would be the obvious way to go. You may also want to try Maya2LW which is free - http://thespread.ghostoutpost.com/Maya2LW2.html.

After you’ve rigged you character and tested it, I’d suggest attaching all the meshes in the character, so that they’re one object and you don’t have to fuss around with exporting multiple animation files. Then use that same object as the final obj for import and texturing in LW…

take a peek here also:
http://astrofra.com/weblog/index.php?2005/10/23/15-maya2lw-pipeline-ten-years-in-a-cell
http://astrofra.com/weblog/index.php?2005/11/01/17-maya2lw-pipeline-part-2
http://astrofra.com/weblog/index.php?2006/08/18/22-maya2lw-pipeline-part-3

:slight_smile:

#3

Thanks for the links! I just downloaded Maya2lw and I haven’t had a chance to give it try. Has anyone used it yet and what was your experience?

thanks,

wes

#4

It works and does what it does well enough to be concidered. Select the shapenode of the mesh and run the Maya2LW2 script which brings up an interface that let you do a bunch of things. The new version that came out approx a week ago had some optimizations for Maya 8.5. When doing the MDD-baking, it uses the new cache-system in Maya instead of M2MD as a middle step, resulting in much faster baking.

Just read the HTML-manual…it explains every step pretty good.

#5

Cageman do you have a link to the new version?

#6

Cough! Anybody got Maya2lw …latest version

#7

I’ve moved on to PointOven. It’s the best tool out there for this type of thing.

First off… you can have 1000 individual objects in Maya and when baking MDDs you can generate an LWS that will have all the connections setup for you. No more manual work applying MDDs to objects in LightWave. Second, even if you are just using LW, PointOven allows for MDD-baking enmasse in LightWave. Another benefit of using PointOven in LW instead of MDD_Scan, SoftFX or ClothFX is that PointOven scans directly to disk instead of memory. Maybe slower, but you will never run out of memory on objects with millions of polygons (well, make sure you have enough HD-space though :wink: )

PointOven is very cheap considering what it do and how much time you save using it!

#8

Yeah I just bought another seat of it so I know what you mean when it comes ot multiple objects.

#9

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