Exporting lw animations to w3d

[Kaiten]

HI

Im having a few probs with exporting a simple animated character to w3d. Its a basic set up four legs with a bone each (no bends needed). Ive found that the animation exports fine when its the only object in the scene ( no world objects etc.) and imports into director and i can see my character merrily walking along.

However when I animate it with the world objects in the scene it looks fine in lw but when i import the w3d file into director its feet are all over the place. ( this is getting really frustrating now) :eek: .

Does any one have any ideas?

Thanks

[Original1]

Without digging into your files I can't give specific advice,

Try Inspecting the w3d file with 3DPI

http://www.3dpi-director.com/

see if that give you any useful info on the properties of the file and why its funny

the only thing I can sugguest it to export the 2 objects seperately

import them into director seperately

open your world object on stage and try

the cloneModelfromCastmember method in Director using the walking object

That way you can have more than one clone

[Kaiten]

Hi Original1

Ill give the 3dpi app a try. Thought id sorted it by renaming my bones to the same as the weight maps but still no luck. Im wondering if the orientation of the bones has anything to do with it ( - x degrees etc.).

Could i mail you a stripped down version of the model/scene/.w3d file to have a poke around in?

Cheers

[Kaiten]

p.s

Have you any experience at merging two seperate .w3d files together, if so are there any limitations to the havok effects etc or do the files interact correctly?

[Original1]

Hi Original1

Ill give the 3dpi app a try. Thought id sorted it by renaming my bones to the same as the weight maps but still no luck. Im wondering if the orientation of the bones has anything to do with it ( - x degrees etc.).

Could i mail you a stripped down version of the model/scene/.w3d file to have a poke around in?

Cheers


sure It may be a couple of days before I really have chance to dig into it, I am a bit under the cosh with a Director Project, but I might spot something blindingly odvious,

On the Havok behavoirs I am not sure, since its been a long time since I really sat and played with them. I build quite a lot of 3D stuff when Director 8.5 first came out, but I have been doing a lot of Flash Actionscript the last couple of years.

I came back to Director Lingo Programming this year for a couple of non 3D projects so my Shockwave 3D stuff might be a bit rusty.

will give you an email via PM panel

[Original1]

Couple of things to try, Remember that Shockwave handles bones and weight maps a little differently.

Try a bone from each leg to a small root bone in the centre of the body. it may be that shockwave has nothing to anchor the bones, so the ends of the bones are floating, that means you may have to add a couple more weight maps.

There is something floating in the back of my mind that all points need a weight map

It a matter then of tweaking the bones and their maps until you get the look you want.

[joschy]

Hello Kaiten,
have you scaled your objects in the LW scene? If so, all the transformations are different in director. All position datas are then changed.
Don´t scale anything within your lw scene.
May be it helps...

[Kaiten]

HI

Been awhile but still no closer. Ive got some good things happening without animated cast members though ;)

Ori1 > thanks for the reply, Ive attached seperate weight map to each of the legs Im moving but havent included the body, ill play around with this and see what happens.

Joschy> Hi, Im begining to wonder about this. I created the character, added the skelegons, then copied and pasted it into a layer in the world object. I then took this into lightwave and adjusted the "grid square size" from aprox 50m to 1m.
Im wondering if this will affect it when I import into dir? Im away from my machine with lw and dir on for the next couple of days so ill test this out when i get back. May it will work if I try importing the character model into the world, add the skelegons and then dont resize in layout.

Its worth a try.

Thanks for both of your help

Cheers

[MentalFish]

As joschy said, scaling baaad :)

Apart from that, you can not transform the topmost bone (the parent of them all), as it has the same problem as cameras and lights, it cannot be keyframed and you need to attach it to a model (be it a null or the character its is animating). Rotate and move the null/model instead of the topmost bone.

Once again, tutorial coming up on this issue too.