Native IK + Native Expressions :(

[Phil]

Anyone else surprised to find that LW's own in-built expression system cannot see IK driven channels? I was. Relativity manages it, but cannot be driven by LScript. It certainly makes the extension of Maestro's rigs to support muscle bones very tricky indeed *sigh*

It's been a rather frustrating day, all told. Serious elbow work is still needed, NewTek.

[ericsmith]

I don't want anyone to get the wrong impression. You can easily add controls, expressions etc. to a Maestro rigged character after the rigging is done. It's just that we can't incorporate Relativity expressions into the autorigging process, because Lscript doesn't have access to them.

More to the point, however, I agree that GE expressions should be able to see a bones rotation after IK. I don't know why this is so hard, considering the values are right there in the little text fields at the bottom left of the main Layout window. It must be that expressions are calculated before IK, and switching that around causes some other problem.

Eric

[dballesg]

Hi Phil and Eric,

I didn't notice that. Thanks for pointing out.

And sorry in advance to hijack this thread.

As well I would like to ask you if you have Maestro and can try it on Lightwave 9.0 (32 bits or 64 bits) under Windows XP 64 bits.

I am doing my own version of the Maestro rig and panels, but I found now that in Lightwave 9.0 if I load the man.lwo object that came with Maestro, open maestro, use the biped rig on it. And select any object and press the 'm' to open the motion panel crash Lightwave (32 bits or 64 bits) working on Windows XP Pro 64 bits, on TWO machines (both of them dual dual core).

It would help me to determine if it is a problem on LW or maestro. This doesn't happens under 8.5 under the same systems.

Best regards,
David

[Phil]

Yep. Known problem - I just emailed Eric about this earlier today. The likely cause seems to be a LW bug where the sheer number of commands causes some kind of overflow internally. It surfaced during 9.0 OB, seemed to get fixed and is back again.

I've already emailed NewTek about this, but haven't had a reply yet.

This is the second major cause of frustration with LW I've had today. The third is the crappy slow *** bone deformation in Layout. Seriously, you add a few bones and the whole OpenGL performance tanks. It's pathetic and needs some serious attention in short order.

Really, really irritating day.