polysNstrats
02-14-2008, 06:27 PM
First let me introduce myself since this is my first post to this forum. I've been writing lw 8.5 motion plugins for tracked vehicle animations for 2 or three years. My client paid me to learn Modeler and Lightwave which is really cool. I'm an independent contractor working from home in Utah and started programming on a DEC PDP-10 which dates me. I also do 3D simulation tools work and simulations using VegaPrime and create models using Creator. Different world. But I really love doing this animation work for one client.
I've never had to write numeric characters in a scene but got an order to add in some static and non-static text "Vehicle Speed ##.### KPH", where the ##.### is the non-static part and gets updated every frame, to a scene. I composite this over the frames I've already rendered of the vehicle moving down a road.
I came across a sample, ancounter.c, in the sdk samples which creates a time counter using the lwanimhandle_hclass and it works fine for my purposes with some changes of course, although I haven't figured out how to change the color of the text from black.
Having done all this I'm thinking there's got to be an easier way to do this. To invoke the plugin I have to go into the surface editor, select the surface used on the small poly I created to frame the text and hit the texture button. I then select the ".jpg" file (really just text file but with .jpg extension to fool the loader) I created that contains the key words that cause my plugin to be invoked. The file also contains the font name and size. This all seems awkward to say the least. It works and the client could care less how I do it.
Surely there must be an easier approach and I was hoping one of you plugin developers out there could perhaps enlighten me and suggest a simpler method or approach.
I just purchased LW 9.3 hoping (foolish me) that the sdk and especially the docs would have improved. Doesn't appear the 9.3 sdk I just downloaded has changed much from 8.5. Other than I can't use my dev 2003 or Dev 6.0 c++ compilers. I caught the thread about how to get 2003 to build the server lib. And I wasn't aware that MS had a free (Express) compiler so I learned a lot today already.
Paul
I've never had to write numeric characters in a scene but got an order to add in some static and non-static text "Vehicle Speed ##.### KPH", where the ##.### is the non-static part and gets updated every frame, to a scene. I composite this over the frames I've already rendered of the vehicle moving down a road.
I came across a sample, ancounter.c, in the sdk samples which creates a time counter using the lwanimhandle_hclass and it works fine for my purposes with some changes of course, although I haven't figured out how to change the color of the text from black.
Having done all this I'm thinking there's got to be an easier way to do this. To invoke the plugin I have to go into the surface editor, select the surface used on the small poly I created to frame the text and hit the texture button. I then select the ".jpg" file (really just text file but with .jpg extension to fool the loader) I created that contains the key words that cause my plugin to be invoked. The file also contains the font name and size. This all seems awkward to say the least. It works and the client could care less how I do it.
Surely there must be an easier approach and I was hoping one of you plugin developers out there could perhaps enlighten me and suggest a simpler method or approach.
I just purchased LW 9.3 hoping (foolish me) that the sdk and especially the docs would have improved. Doesn't appear the 9.3 sdk I just downloaded has changed much from 8.5. Other than I can't use my dev 2003 or Dev 6.0 c++ compilers. I caught the thread about how to get 2003 to build the server lib. And I wasn't aware that MS had a free (Express) compiler so I learned a lot today already.
Paul