Posts Tagged ‘Workflow’
I have added some changes to the polygon islands LScript.
New LScript for you all. One thing to keep in mind is that the script can make Modeler stop recognizing scripts and plugins if it is clicked alot, some bug in LScript I guess.
This is a really simple script, the only thing it does is to set the weight of the currently selected points to 100%.
main {
selmode(DIRECT);
editbegin();
vmap = VMap(VMWEIGHT,0) || error(“Please select a weight map first.”);
foreach(sp, points) {
vmap.setValue(sp, 1.0);
}
editend();
}
Here is a tutorial by Mikael Burman on how to create some nice water effects on a window, by using my UV 2 Morph LScript. The plugin is just a small part of it all, so watch the whole thing and you’ll see the overall coolness. This technique can also be applied to realtime 3D scenarios, animated normal map textures in Unity anyone?
Although Nuke can read FBX files, it’s something reassuring about open text file formats, so I have created an LScript that creates a chan file from the selected item in LightWave.
This is an old and I think my first LScript I made. It keeps things tidy.
Saves increments in a folder and does not overwrite any existing files. If you incremental save your file “myModel.lwo”, this script creates folder “myModel_incr” and adds the file “myModel_001.lwo” to it.
At the next incremental save it will add “myModel_002.lwo”, but you will still be working on the original “myModel.lwo”.
This helps in having a clean incremental history of your work as well as you will always know that “myModel.lwo” is
the actual latest save together with the highest number in the “myModel_incr” folder.
The script looks for the highest numbered file in the _incr folder, and creates a new file, one number higher.
If the file has not been saved yet, it will provide a file requester to specify a destination file.
As a Mac user I use the app Quicksilver, brilliant for launching applications without having to click around with a mouse. Secondly, the caps lock key is an annoyance that has to be dealt with. There is no option in Quicksilver to use caps lock as a shortcut key (as it was with Enzo for Windows), so the quickest fix that gets you 90% of the way is to reassign the caps lock key to the option (alt) key in System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse > Modifier Keys > Set Caps Lock to Option:
Then in Quicksilver, make whatever shortcut you want the “regular” way of launching it, and at the same time set Modifier-only Activation > Double > Option
You don’t want to launch Quicksilver each time the option key is pressed, therefor the setting is Double instead of Single. Whenever you now double tap the caps lock or the actual option key, Quicksilver will come up.
I have gotten some questions about what the point is with this script, so I am just going to post a little explanation of it here.
One example of where it would be useful, is if you want to add particle effects inside AE instead of in LW. Say you want to add smoke effects to an animation but can’t afford the render time of using HyperVoxels. Just render out the animation without any particle effects or HyperVoxels, place a null in LW of where you want the particles to emit, and then export that to AE and use that as an emitter inside of that application instead.
So if you have a moving locomotive you parent the null to its chimney, export that and the camera. The rendered image sequence from LW would not be 3D but just a plain 2D backdrop of course, with a null and camera that moves correctly according to the rendered sequence.
It is also generally a good workflow to render out passes so you can tweak the end result in AE instead of having to re-render everything. Janus is supposed to be a very good plugin for rendering out passes in LW, but I have not tried it yet myself. http://janus.faulknermano.com/
Also, keep this in mind:
- 1 meter in LW == 100 pixels in AE
- Check that the x, y, z coordinates of the plane in AE is set to the same as the one in LW (with some potential reversal of some axis, but if something is placed at 0,0,0 in LW it should be the same in AE (which it rarely is by default when a layer is set to 3D)
- Make sure the zoom level on the camera matches. In AE it is specified as pixels and degrees in parenthesis ie. (45.2°). Set this zoom to match the horizontal FOV in LW and you should be good to go.
This is an LScript for transferring animation data from LightWave to After Effects. It is done by exporting the position and rotation of the selected item in LW into a .ma file (ASCII Maya file). At the same time, After Effects is either launched or brought to front and told to open that specific file. This makes it feel like you have a direct connection between the two applications.
It always exports it as a camera so that AE does not create a whole bunch of solids for the models inside the .ma file. Think of it as exporting a null that just so happens to look like a camera 
What do you think, should the script also export scale as well, or is it not needed?
Something weird happens with the sound in the end. I might re-record it, but it works for now:
I came across an issue the other day while doodling on a 3D model of a car wheel. The nuts, or bolts if you will, were too small and I found it strange that there was no tool inside LightWave to scale them individually as separate entities as they were inside the same layer (mesh) in Modeler. This would mean I had to manually select each island and scale them one by one. Not a giant task by any means as it was only a few items, but still annoying.
So I went to the NewTek forums and posted a question on whether or not there is a solution for this, either hidden somewhere in LW or some sort of plugin. I got some suggestions on plugins to use and a script to try. They weren’t exactly what I was after, but it gave me a starting point and idea of how to get this functionality working as I wanted it to.
I studied the suggested LScript (LightWave Script), got the grasps of what was going on, analyzing why it wasn’t working, and after a couple of iterations came up with a solution that worked. This was in turn taken by someone else, new to the discussion, and improved to yet another level.
At this point the script was doing what I wanted in terms of scaling each “island” of selected polygons, but in a very try-and-see-what-happens kind of way, as there was no interactive feedback of the end result while changing the scale value. So I added an interactive update to it as well as the next step.
From this it was a couple of lines extra and we had “island-rotation” as well. The only problem here is that it happens on world-coordinate axis, so if your island of selected polygons were on differently slanted angles, it could mess them up. If they were aligned flat on the same plane, they were fine.
Now this LScript is in a stage of adding scaling around each polygon-selection’s average normal (its local “up” axis) and if this works then… woohoo! Anyone with some 1337 LScript and/or 3D math knowledge is welcome to contribute.
I would not have found these solutions as fast if it was not for the community and the general attitude of sharing and contributing.
That’s it for now, check out the forum thread and follow the continued development of this:
http://www.newtek.com/forums/showthread.php?t=100587