Smartskin help for the mac folks....?

[finearts2]

I was looking at the smart skinning tut on the discussion board, and I would LOVE to be able to do this but the plugins to do this are only for PC users.
Does anyone have a workaround or can we get someone to make the plugins work for mac users. I swear, if I knew how to code things, you wouldn't believe the plugins I would put out for us mac users. It's so frustrating to see some great tools out there that we can't have access to:(

here is the link by the way...
http://www.newtek.com/products/lightwave/tutorials/animation/smartskin/index.html

thanks for any ideas you may have on this.

finearts

[Lynx3d]

Well, why don't you learn programming then?
No ok, don't do it...you'll waste your time with it and stop doing creative things...like me :rolleyes:

Unfortunately there's not even a contact on the download page, and japanese guys generally seem to be reluctant to write some kind of manuals...
What i wanted to say, if there was a contact you could try to convince him to ask Richard Brak for compiling the plugin for Mac.

Problem is that i don't know of any tool for PC that would compile CFM binaries, so it's just impossible for the PC guys to provide LW/Mac binaries :(
If LW for OSX was Macho-O than perhaps one could build a cross-platform GCC...donno.

[Julian Johnson]

I think Mike's tutorial is similar to the Joel D's except that it uses plugins to accomplish what you can also achieve on a Mac with expressions and morphs (and no plugins). Here's a few links that might help:

http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=16383&perpage=15&pagenumber=1

http://www.newtek.com/products/lightwave/tutorials/animation/smart-skin/index.html

and here's some further stuff from NigelH on how to get AfterIK to work:

http://vbulletin.newtek.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=15927

Julian

[Lynx3d]

But if i understood that correctly it's mainly about MiniMo which allows to edit the mesh in Layout and save to Endomorph...

That's something i may be using soon extensively too!
It's quite a pain doing it in Modeler, especially if you tweaked your bone setup in Layout so the Skelegons don't reselble your Bones correctly, and rotation planes are not parallel to one of the coordinate planes etc...

[Julian Johnson]

Lynx3D - I agree about the pain of doing it in Modeler :-). For the moment, without MiniMo and the other plugins it's the only way to do it (expressions and morphs in Modeler).

The author of MiniMo, Fujio Ichikawa, has done some Mac ports in the past and it's definitely worth emailing him for a Mac port of MiniMo. His old email address used to be:

f_ichikawa@livedoor.com

Not sure whether that changed when the website changed, though.

- Julian

[NigelH]

The "LightWave-only" technique that comes closest to the 'MiniMo' process I have found can be seen in this tutorial:

http://www.3dluvr.com/content/article/118

It's fairly simple, though it does require that the corrective work be done in Modeler (of course).

[PeteS]

I think your talking about the rotate pivot point right? i thought lightwave 8 has this built in? I thought i saw an 8 video where the bone can be bent in modeler and move the points...no?

[NigelH]

Not exactly. The key to the tutorial I mentioned before calls for deforming the joint with bones in Layout, then saving the deformed version as an endomorph. Then going into Modeler, making a duplicate endomorph, making the adjustments to the duplicate, then finally using 'apply morph' at -100% to subtract the bone deformation from the final endomorph. 3rd party plugs and LightWave [8] not needed.