ik joe/biped style character rigs

[cresshead]

hi
i'm just wondereing if there was any interest in making an object based
addition tolightwave or the acs4 rig system so you can
hide the "mesh skin" and not bother with lightwave having to calculate
deformation in the viewport but you still get a good
visual feedback of the volume of the mesh...
if you could use objects as bones we'd be there already....

you need to have rotational points on each object such a upper leg, foot,
head forearm etc
having been a max/character studio user for 5 years i'd love to see this
functionality in lightwave..
i'm not sure if it's a request for acs4 or lightwave...or if indeed you can
do this quite simply already?

thoughts on the subject?

steve g


www.cresshead.com

[Emmanuel]

I think that the wheel has already been invented, be it with ´Character Studios BiPed or with Motionbuilder.
An approximisation like the BiPed is (for me) the way to go.
Bones are so boring and unintuitive, You never quite know what their rotation is, cause they look always the same.
Objects as bones would be very, very, helpful.
There is a big visual difference between our bone skeleton and the BiPed from Max.
With the BiPed You really can previsualize a character, which You cant with our bones, period.

[cresshead]

so just to clarify, you can't have objects as bones in lighteave currently and there's no workaround method either?

so this really should be on the feature list for lightwave 8?

steve g

[Castius]

sockmonkey under the deform plugins will do what you are looking for. only weight maps though. Lw need a deformation system that can use any item in lw. I hope we get one soon.