Version 17-05-02 of LightWave to DTS Exporter Released!

#21 David,

You da man! :-) Thanks again for these wonderful tools -- your time and efforts are hugely appreciated.

When you say "scaling animations", does that include morphs?

Best,
Mike

#22 Greetings!

By scaling animations, I mean animating the scale factor (uniform and non-uniform). Morph animations (Endomorphs for us LW people) will be sometime down the road.

While working on this, I've found some errors in the DTS SDK with regards to scaling that need to be fixed. I'll be posting the bug-fixes for other export writers once I've proven out all my own code.

- LightWave Dave

#23 Greetings!

Version 03-01-24-BETA of the LightWave DTS Exporter has been released on www.gnometech.com! As always with these, this is a BETA version, so documentation is minimal. There are two included text files that should give you a sense of what has been added.

Here's a summary of what's new from the last beta version:

- DSQ export progress window
- Double sided surfaces
- Scale-based node animation
- Ability to select which animation properties are exported for each node
- Vertices may be influenced by multiple weight maps

The final item was a last-minute addition. It should be a boon to character animators as now vertices may be controlled by multiple bones. This will ideally result in smoother joint motions.

Enjoy!

- LightWave Dave

#24 Greetings!

I've released version 03-01-25-BETA of the LightWave DTS exporter at www.gnometech.com. This version removes those annoying debug dialog boxes that the previous beta version had.

- LightWave Dave

#25 Greetings!

It's that time again! Version 03-02-18-BETA of the LightWave DTS Exporter has been released on www.gnometech.com. Being a BETA version, documentation is limited, but the included text files should help you out.

This version includes a bug fix that should allow you to once again set an animation sequence to 'Blend' (it was an interface bug), as well as the new ability to export multiple collision meshes.

Tim Gift recently added multiple collision meshes to the MilkShape exporter, and I couldn't let it get ahead of LightWave!

And, there's good news for those Mac users out there. CJ Silverio and I have once again been working on getting the latest exporter plug-in to work on the Mac. So, hopefully you won't feel left out much longer.

- LightWave Dave

#26 Thanks Dave!

#27 Your work is more than cool and more than important. Congratulations David ! :)

#28 David (or somebody :) )
We had some foliage testing, and we cant to realise how to switch on
double side poligons. We had a tree with some leave groups, but the leave poligons still
single sided, but we switched on in Lightwave.
Any quick solution ?

#29 Khm...
Im just downloaded your up to date beta. :)
And im just find it :o)

Cheerz

#30 Its simple awesome, how simple to use this converter. One of our aninmator and character modeller use max, and the max converter is MUCH MUCH more complicated....we saw it today, and realised that fact, LW is LW, and MAx is MAx ;)

#31 Just a question Dave, but in the last version you had LOD support and DQS export, I don't see them options anymore in the current beta...Are they just hidden? I didn't see mention of them in the manual either.

Donald McDade

#32 Dave posted this in your Plan but don't know if you are going to see it so I'll post it here too.


Dave
Question about the last beta release.

I have a player with armthreads and death animations.

I export the .dsq's and everything is fine. Sometimes however the death animation plays with the ArmThread taking precedence so what you see is the head and arms stay in Armthread position during the death animation while the rest of the body goes into the death animation. Is this a bug? Am I doing something wrong?

Thanks Coz

#33 Greetings!

Michael
I can't think of anything specific to the LW DTS exporter that would cause a problem with the Armthread and death animations. Although I haven't tried out any death animations myself.

One possibility is an animation's priority, which I do not expose in the exporter at the moment. Perhaps the death animations should have a higher priority than then blend animations. I assume your ArmThread is using a blend-style animation?

I'll poke around the code a bit and see if I can find anything...

- LightWave Dave

#34 Thanks for your response Dave. Your a great asset to the community.

I do use my armthreads as blend animations.

I may be able to look at the code (player.cc animation stuff) tonight too but i'm home sick and not really feeling up to it at the moment.

I'm sorry to bug you about another problem with the exporter which I suspect comes from it's milkshape exporter origins.

Here is the thread. With a work around.

www.garagegames.com/mg/forums/result.thread.php?qt=12560 Just wanted to make you aware of it while I still remembered about it.


Thanks Coz

#35 Greetings!

I just wanted to let you know that I'm still looking into the death animations and arm animations.

So far in regards to the priority of animations, death animations are no different than any other one (at least in the TorqueGuy). So, this shouldn't be what is causing the problem.

I'll continue to trace through the code and see if anything else comes up. So far, I haven't found anything that specifically turns off the arm anim thread when playing a death anim, so perhaps that is the issue.

And regarding the link you provided Michael, I've already corrected the exporter to take into account LW bone rest positions so you won't need to have them set to their rest position at frame 0 anymore. As for the ground frames et all, I'll have to look into them further to understand how they're used in the death animation as I don't believe they are required for any other types of animations.

- LightWave Dave

#36 If you want some more information on the death crash issue, then you might want to look at my thread:

www.garagegames.com/mg/forums/result.thread.php?qt=12560

(This information is a few months out of date; They might've patched the latest HEAD to work around this.)

It has to do with something referred to in the Torque code as "GroundFrames", and I recall seeing something like that mentioned in the 3ds Max exporter documentation. After making that change to the code, I haven't had a single death-animation crash. However, my body will "float" and do other unsightly things now, so it looks like the "conform-body-to-ground" code is broken with my change.

(Edit: Ooops, I missed Michael's message pointing to my thread, too. Just scroll down, ignore the part about me bitching about IK/bones not working. I hadn't set my rest positions at frame 0!)

#37 @ David "Fulcrum" I want to thank you for this great resource and for you looking into my problem.
I still don't understand it. It happens only sometimes and I cannot do anything to make it happen consistently or in any type of order.

Coz


P.S. Is anyone else having this problem with their death animations in LW or with any other exporter. I really don't want to be wasting David's time if this is because of something I'm doing wrong.

#38 Greetings!

David Grace:
I haven't looked into GroundFrames to date as I was under the impression that they were no longer required. It seems that while you no longer need them for most action threads, there is still some dependency on them for the death animations, as you've pointed out.

I'm hoping I won't have to add them to the exporter as they don't appear to be at first glance a very LightWave-friendly device...however, if they are required I'll see what I can do in a future version.

Michael
To begin with, I'm not convinced that the problem you're having is limited to the LightWave exporter. The only difference in LightWave generated death animations compared to the TorqueGuy is the GroundFrame animations, as far as I can tell. As I haven't found a correlation between GroundFrame animations and the starting and stopping of arm animations, I currently don't feel this is enough of a difference to cause your problem.

So, I've been looking through the various action and arm animation code in the TGE, and I must say there's a lot going on. The most interesting thing that I've found so far is that there doesn't appear to be a mechanism to disable the arm (or head) animation upon death.

The function that updates the arm animation appears to be Player::updateLookAnimation() in game/player.cc. As a possible fix, you could try adding the following to the beginning of this function:

if(mDamageState != Enabled)
   return;

I've not tried it out myself, but in theory if the player is dead then the arm and head animation threads will not be updated. This in itself doesn't explicitly turn off the arm and head threads, so it may not ultimately fix the problem. Perhaps you could give it a try and let me know if it seems to have worked. If not, then we'll have to find a good spot to specifically turn off the arm and head animations (or track it down in the code and figure out why it's not being called for you).

- LightWave Dave

#39 Tried it out Dave and still no luck. :( I will probably try some stuff out Fri & Sat.

Coz