MDD Problem

[Limbus]

Hi all,
I have a scene with 150 similar creatuers that are animated with a particle system and FX_Linker. The secondary motion comes from on MDD file. I have the following problems with the scene:

- Load times for the scene are ridiculous. I think that LW loads the 300 MB MDD file for every creature even though its the same file. I would consider this to be a bug.

- When rendered on our renderfarm the motion from the MDD is not rendered. All creatures have the motion from frame 0 from the MDD file. I use the MD_Plug displacement plugin to load the MDD file. In the iewprot everything looks fine. I also tried the MDD loader from Denis but it does not work with our renderfarm because of some errors in the way the path to the mdd file is stored.

Maybe someone has some hint how to get this scene to render correctly. I could use bones and MotionMixer to do the secondary animation but I really do not want to try to use MM with 150 Actors with 40 Bones each.

System Specs:

LW 9.0 64 Bit
Windows Pro x64
Dualcore Athlon
4 GB RAM

Florian

[andy gee]

Hello

Ok I may be off on this one but if your using MD Plug for your characters then you shouldnt need any bones in the characters.

MD scan scans the motion of the character and MD plug applys that motion to the points on the geometry !! which you can then specify a start time in the motion options.


If your scene of 150 characters uses alot of geometry, then that will bog down Lightwave. 40 bones per character thats 6000 bones thats alot fpr Lightwave to calculate. if you get rid of the bones, provided that the motions are the same for each character ( not including start times for the motion )
then i think that it should load quickly.

or you could try to composite them in AE or some other effects package.

Thanks

Andy Gee

[dpont]

Just in case I could fix something with MDD_Loader,
Where is located your MDD file?
Under Lightwave "Content" directory or
another path?
MDD_Loader uses relative path under "Content"
and full path for others.

Denis.

[Limbus]

I got it working now with the MDD loader from Denis.

Just in case I could fix something with MDD_Loader,
Where is located your MDD file?
Under Lightwave "Content" directory or
another path?
MDD_Loader uses relative path under "Content"
and full path for others.


Hi Denis,
the MDD file is in the content dir. Our render guy made some changes to the rendermanager and now it works with you loader.

Thansk for all replies,
Florian

[jeremyhardin]

Glad you got it sorted. I've felt your pain with loads of MDDs. I wrote an lscript a while back that creates a copy of the scene with all object plugins disabled (to turn off all the MDD readers for loading the scene and working). So I could manually enable 1 or 2 that I needed in the scene, and load/work very quickly.
Then when I'm done, I ran another lscript that enabled them all and submitted the scene to the farm.