Import physical camera motion data?

[WYoder]

I have a project for a client where they are going to film something with a physical mocap camera in front of a green screen, and they want us to import the camera's motion in to a Lightwave scene so that my animation will match perfectly. I'm probably just using the wrong keywords when searching for a way to do this, but most of what I seem to find is info on how to import mocap data to a character model, rather than importing the physical camera motions. Is this a feature i'm missing in Lightwave itself, or is there at least a plugin for it? In case it's needed, i'm using Lightwave 2015.3 currently.

[Sensei]

If you can write camera data to CSV file (using e.g. Python/Perl/PHP script), you could try TrueArt's Node Library CSV Reader node to import file inside of Motion Node Editor.
http://nodelibrary.trueart.eu

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjD5_dusXSg

[tcoursey]

I'd have them send you a sample file of what you will be getting and see what searches that brings up. I would hope that with all the "studio" tools Lw has included something like this may already be in LW. Or at min by a third party developer.

Key is what kind of format will the data be in, or can be converted too. Good luck.

[Thomas Leitner]

I have a project for a client where they are going to film something with a physical mocap camera in front of a green screen, and they want us to import the camera's motion in to a Lightwave scene so that my animation will match perfectly. I'm probably just using the wrong keywords when searching for a way to do this, but most of what I seem to find is info on how to import mocap data to a character model, rather than importing the physical camera motions. Is this a feature i'm missing in Lightwave itself, or is there at least a plugin for it? In case it's needed, i'm using Lightwave 2015.3 currently.

Hi,
usually you use alembic or fbx to transfer the camera motion from a motion control camera to lightwave. I would make a test before the real filming. In the past we sometimes had problems with the lens data (aspecially with zoom lenses). They have to provide the corect field of view of the camera in sync with the motion data. For some lenses (e.g. wide angle lenses, aspecially cheap ones or anamorphic lenses) you also need to take lens distortion in acount.

ciao
Thomas