JamesCurtis
Active member
Lightwave Devs,
I just thought of something that would be awesome to add for the better functionality of Instancing!
I had posted this elsewhere on the forum, but thought it might be good here.
Suppose you needed an animation that required hundreds or thousands of virtual clones of an animated object.
It would be similar to flocking, but different in a number of ways. For one, you would be able to offset the animated character you create for the first one by a number of frames. Right now, this can be done, sort of, but requires manually offsetting each normal cloned polygonal character item one at a time.
What would be good is, if you could place Instances in Modeler and have those instances be able to be tracked somehow in Layout [using remembered ID's?] and that they then can be used to drive the [instanced] animated character you created. It would be sort of like having an instance which currently [normally] right now having to be a time-locked physical clone of the current animated character with bones, etc., but allowing time-shifting the animation forward or backward in time by X number of frames or seconds.
This would make a large body of characters [think armies or hordes of characters etc.] able to be seen in a sort of random motion. It would all be driven by the placement of the point instances and where they are placed. If driven by Point ID's, could conceivably work, at least in theory. You could also use the random size parameters in instances to control difference factors of basic shape.
I would like to make this a formal feature request for Lightwave 3D.
Comments are welcome.
I just thought of something that would be awesome to add for the better functionality of Instancing!
I had posted this elsewhere on the forum, but thought it might be good here.
Suppose you needed an animation that required hundreds or thousands of virtual clones of an animated object.
It would be similar to flocking, but different in a number of ways. For one, you would be able to offset the animated character you create for the first one by a number of frames. Right now, this can be done, sort of, but requires manually offsetting each normal cloned polygonal character item one at a time.
What would be good is, if you could place Instances in Modeler and have those instances be able to be tracked somehow in Layout [using remembered ID's?] and that they then can be used to drive the [instanced] animated character you created. It would be sort of like having an instance which currently [normally] right now having to be a time-locked physical clone of the current animated character with bones, etc., but allowing time-shifting the animation forward or backward in time by X number of frames or seconds.
This would make a large body of characters [think armies or hordes of characters etc.] able to be seen in a sort of random motion. It would all be driven by the placement of the point instances and where they are placed. If driven by Point ID's, could conceivably work, at least in theory. You could also use the random size parameters in instances to control difference factors of basic shape.
I would like to make this a formal feature request for Lightwave 3D.
Comments are welcome.