Hello. I also like looking at illuminated screens as well as pressing buttons. We have a lot in common!
Age 40
Animator
Tanadrine Studios
Joined on 12/31/06
Posted by Tanadrine-Studios - September 10th, 2013
For anyone who has been curious as to what we're up to behind the scenes. Basically, we've developed a way to load motions relative to a character's position/orientation in 3d space. This is something that has, until now, been impossible for us to do in Lightwave.
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There is still some behind the curtain work to do, but I think things are really shaping up. Sometimes a little blood, sweat, and programming is required to take production to the next level.
I can't begin to tell you how much research I put into Newtek's products back in the 90's :) The ability to program custom apps within Lightwave astonished me into buying it, but it was just too damn expensive for my meager hourly wages at the time.
I know I post here a lot, and say goofy things, but I can't thank you enough for sharing your hard-won knowledge with other Lightwave users. I never dreamed mocap could be used on this program, even recently! Almost makes me wanna jump into programming again!
VicariousE
What sorcery is this?
Tanadrine-Studios
The motion capture adaptation is a custom program I made within Lightwave so that I can use mocap motions on my custom rigs fairly quickly (mocap skeletons aren't ideal for character animation because they are not designed well for it). Then I use Lightwave's IKBooster animation toolset to make the saved motion able to be relative to the character's current position/rotation in 3d space.
The sad thing is, Lightwave has had these kinds of tools for over a decade... unfortunately Newtek's marketing team sucked horribly and they failed to release example usage content/documentation. Part of that was because the creator of the functionality had trouble speaking english and therefor the other developers had a hard time with creating a manual for it. IKBooster had *zero* documentation paired with it when it was released... such a shame (and a lot of it is STILL undocumented to this day!).