Torque Rigged Character

#1 Anyone, . . ., anyone, . . ., Bueller, . . . ?

#2 I'm not a lightwave user, but you could download the trial version of 3dsmax, and take a look at the orc character with max.

Most of the exporters loosely came from the max exporter, so if you're just looking for basics, that might be a good place to start.

I also think there are some Blender resources floating around here somewhere..

B--

#3 We're currently trying to get this working: getting a Torque Rig from Max... feeding it to MotionBuilder (FBX)... animating in Motion Builder... then importing FBX to LW for DTS/DSQ export. Its one-heck of a toolchain, I know, but it will give us the most flexibility up front and quickly.

Eventually we'll be looking to retrain our animators to Max (for simplicity and compatibility with Torque) but we have a project we need to pump out soon... and these are the tools we own and know.... who knows what will happen when 3d-Studio-Maya comes out.

I'll be sure to post anything we learn.

-Brian

#4 So your artist is trained in Lightwave right?

Why aren't you just working in LightWave and using the Gnometech exporter?

#5 Well, that's actually an interesting situation.

I have a team of artists, mostly LightWave modelers. We're making a "Serious" game proposal. I've assigned the animator position to someone with relatively no 3D experience, but she understands movement and motion very well. Very common situation.

Rather than have to teach her how LightWave, Max, or Maya works (which we all use in-house), it would be easier for her to learn an animation program... such as Motion Builder. That way she only has to learn to animate, not how to learn in a specific package. It also allows us to use her for character animation on some of our other non-game projects. If I were to do the animation, naturally, I'd do it in LW (where I have 14+ years experience). We use LightWave/Modo to do all our modeling/texturing/mapping then use the LwDTS exporter to get them into Torque.

I know its not an optimal situation, but its the best I can get right now.

-Brian

#6 ...hmm...

Good luck with that, wish I had a solution for you.

#7 Eh... no worries. I'm old-school... I'm used to having to define the hoops that I have to jump through to make things work. :) Maybe this will make me finally write our own conversion software! (or implement them directly into Torque).

-Brian

#8 Thanks Brandon for the advice, but I really need to learn how to do this the Lightwave way, so if anyone has even an extremely simple character that has been rigged for Torque (even without any animations), it would be very helpful to me right now. If not, can any fellow Lightwaver's recommend a process I follow to accomplish a Torque compatible result.

Thanks again -- Tim.

#9 AFAIK, the gnometech exporter already has some characters for testing, a tin man and a spider.

Exporting from LightWave is WAY easier than exporting from MAX.

You model your character in Modeler, create a scene in LW, and select the plugin to export it.

Check the docs. It's sort of a straightforward path.

#10 Thanks Bruno. I need to take a closer look at the Tin Man. I was hoping I was just missing a link to a base character in LW that already had the correct bones for Torque and the standard animations, i.e. run, death, walk, jump, etc.. I know that might have been a lot to expect from a starting point though. Mostly I wanted to be able to simply load it up in LW, examine the bone structure, mount points, etc., export it, play around with the existing animations, export again, create my own animations, export, etc., until I understand how it's put together. I'm kind of surprised it doesn't already exist, since I thought there was a strong LW/Torque following. Is there a character pack for LW that I could learn from?

It's no biggie, I'm no stranger to development and reverse engineering.

Cheers -- Tim.

#11 Did anyone help you out? I guess I could donate one of my meshes for the "team" :)

#12 Nah, unfortunately, I did look at the Tin Man, but I really wanted a character with bones that was already rigged acording to Torque that I could learn from. Trail and error is one thing, but it would be awesome if you have one. Perhaps I don't even need the mesh, just the Lightwave RIG file, but a very basic mesh would be cool too. Thanks for the help man. Cheers -- Tim.

#13 That would truly be an awesome resource.

#14 Almost got the character sorted out - I will post here, and to the freebies section when its done.
Here's what it will have.


- Unwrapped mesh with eyes (LWO format)
- Weight Mapped
- UV Mapped
- Supporting template EPS file to map your own texture (one for head, one for body)
- Partially textured png - you fill in the gaps.
- Skelegon setup.
- Bones rigged to IK system of GOAL nulls in a Lightwave scene - root pose put in - you do the rest :)
- LW2DTS Dialog configured to export DSQ "root" pose and DTS object.

#15 Andy, Fantastic! Way more than I would need, not complaining :O) All of that will make the learning curve much easier for me.

#16 There will also be an accompanying pdf so you can see how it works "under the hood". Is PDF cross platform?

#17 Hey Andy - This is great news man. Thanks so much for all the effort and taking the time to do this for everyone. I'm sure many fellow wavers appreciate it as much as I do. Thanks man. Cheers -- Tim.

#18 No problem. It's hard to do when you do it the first time - hopefully this resource will eleviate a lot of stuggling for other people. Also it will at least go part of the way to make up for the lack of documentation for 'wavers to get started in Torque.

The assets are ready, and the documentation is about 30% done. I should be uploading it in the next day or two.

#19 The document is almost complete. I will test it and upload it tonite. The pipeline thread in this forum will also benefit from this resource - 2 birds with one stone - nice!

#20 It's ready. Please go here to grab it.

Lightwave To Torque Pipeline