Uh ohh, Sasquatch in LW2020

[vncnt]

I think I can guess the answer to this, but one can always hope.

Will there be a Sasquatch update for LightWave 2020?
It generates an error message when I add the plugin to my object.

"This version of Sasquatch requires LightWave version 6.0 or later."

In LW2019 Sasquatch seemed to work but it is not functional.
I can only confirm that LW2015 is the last version on my PC that works, I've deinstalled LW2018 so I can't test that right now.

[Sensei]

In LW 2015.x (and earlier) LWSDK, Image Filter plugin handler and Pixel Filter plugin handler return array of integers, with information about which buffer plugin requires.
In LW 2018.x, LW 2019.x and LW 2020.x, Image Filter plugin handler and Pixel Filter plugin handler return array of strings, with information about which buffer plugin requires.

If NewTek developers removed legacy support for integer buffer identifiers, any old Pixel/Image filter plugin won't work.
From LWSDK they were removed.

Fixing it would take half hour or less.

[vncnt]

I just sent an email to [email protected] with the request to consider an upgrade to LW2018 / LW2019 / LW2020.

The website http://www.worleylabs.com is still online.

I have added your suggestions.
Let's hope for the best!

[vncnt]

See also https://forums.newtek.com/showthread...84#post1604584

[raymondtrace]

At least once a year, for the past several years, I've sent an email to worleylabs.com in an attempt to buy plugins, even if they'd only work in my older LW licenses. I've never heard back. Good luck.

[Sensei]

At least once a year, for the past several years, I've sent an email to worleylabs.com in an attempt to buy plugins, even if they'd only work in my older LW licenses. I've never heard back. Good luck.

Find somebody who has old LW with Sasquatch or whatever else, locked to his/her LW license/dongle, and wants to sell it, and buy full package..

[raymondtrace]

That's a little too extreme for me.

The demo plugins are fully functional, just lacking the control panels without a license. So if I'm desperate, I can just hack the settings in the LWS file with a text editor.

[erikals]

[Ma3rk]

I guess Sasquatch was a bit ahead of it's time in some ways; really liked it but I never fully realized it's potential, but it did have limitations with lighting as I recall. I haven't given Fiber FX a decent test drive, but this topic got me thinking.

I import a lot of furred creatures in from Daz, using the Look At My Hair tools. I realized there's no reason to not go the other way as in from LW into DS and then back out but with fur. I'd have to hone my tonsorial skills certainly.

Daz is free; the full LAMH editor is $50.

I've never had any luck bringing anything other than OBJ files into Daz which would be just fine actually. LAMH works with existing UV & surface assignments; texture maps are used to color hair or fur, and geom surfs can be used for follicle selection, creation, etc.

I'd most likely do any rigging back in LW anyway, probably using RHiggit.

Worth some testing anyway.

[Sensei]

Fixed colors in LW 2020.0.2.

[fishhead]

Sensei, that indeed looks interesting - can you elaborate a bit more? I understand that this makes use of the original Sasquatch by Worley? Are there limitations?

[Greenlaw]

I relied heavily on Sasquatch when I was at Rhythm & Hues years ago. It was quite awesome for its time, but there were definitely limitations: No motion vector output, fiddly lighting behavior, and it was never really designed for rendering a separate pass for compositing. In spite of these limitations, we managed to use Sasquatch successfully for most of our character jobs (Call of Duty, Crash Bandicoot, Banjo & Kazooie, Turok, etc.) You can see some of that work on my old R&H demo reel.

I switched to FiberFX when we started working on the Devil May Cry theatrical game trailer because the LW devs were actively responding to many of my requests during that time. I pretty much stopped using Sasquatch after that job, and started using only FiberFX, which continued to improve over time. I still used FiberFX as recently as the Trolls TV show a couple of years ago (using LW 2015). IMO, the advantages with using FiberFX far outweighed using Sasquatch.

My one complaint with FiberFX was that it could be sometimes be unreliable with surface based guides (Layout's Edit Guides). Sometimes I would get a little chatter, even when rendering locally. But I found using separate guide objects (created in Modeler or ZBrush using FiberMesh) and baking the guides with MDD usually solved this problem. This was when I used LW 2015. I played around with FiberFX in LW 2018 & 2019 and got some nice looking renders but I haven't applied this in real production work yet. (These days I'm usually working in 2D cartoon animation, so not a lot of 'fiber' work.)

I confess I haven't really used FiberFX in LW 2020 yet. If I have time, I'd like to try making something fun with it over my holiday break.

[erikals]

(Layout's Edit Guides)

- far from good, so i stuck to Modeler guides instead.

- there was also the stray / splay bug in Layout
https://forums.newtek.com/showthread...=1#post1524608

- and other gotchas. if you knew / know about them it is do-able, and can actually provide a good result.

tried FiberFX in 2018, but found the FiberFX rendertimes to be incredibly slow.

because of this, perhaps even Sas could be of use in 2018 and beyond.

[Greenlaw]

Edit guides can actually work well with a little practice. I have versions of the Brudders characters that use Edit Guides and I was able to comb the fur very quickly...like 30 minutes to and hour. The problem was, I got it to look great in a still render but it chattered in render. To be fair, this was pretty early on in FiberFX dev and I know it got better later, but by that time I'd switched to using FiberMesh to make FiberFX guides. Edit Guides does have one big advantage: it can use surfaces and UV maps directly from the character's surface to color the fibers, something you don't easily get when using FiberMesh (you need a third party tool to transfer the UV data to the root points.)

That said, I still occasionally got the chatter problem with surface based FiberFX in LW 2015. I reported it back then but LW3DG was already well into 2018 at the time, and I wasn't sure if the problem was fixed because I wasn't using 2018 at work.

Oh, well...maybe I can check that in LW 2020 over the holidays.

Maybe it will be something good about 2020. (I mean the year, of course.)

[fishhead]

Thanks for your comments, erikals and Greenlaw. I am generally interested in your findings, Greenlaw, so would be curious to see what you might find out over a weekend with FFX in 2020 :-)
I have to admit I never got really far into FiberFX, as I always found it rather cumbersome to dial in changes (and have to wait for how they turned out... ) and hardly ever got the feeling I have real control over the result.
I always felt more at home with sasquatch (don´t get me wrong, I am/was by no means an expert there at all. I actually rarely ever used in production) and I got much easier to something that I am was somewhat happy with.
That is the reason, why I am actually quite interested in what Sensei´s teasers might lead to.
And my inquiry about limitations where mainly geared towards limitations that using 2020 as a host for sas might bring with it (on top of the already mentioned limitations of the sasquatch from the olden days...)
Cheers :-)