Considering Shake want to know if it will "play nice" with Lightwave3d
by Todd George
on
Feb 13, 2007 at 4:24:16 pm
Hello all
I currently use lightwave 3d for modeling and amination, I have combustion ver3x for composites but I want to learn Shake
I am seriously looking at making that purchase but was wondering if there were any people out there who had first hand experience with using lightwave files in shake
I assume that my work flow would be to render out rpf files or targa image sequences and bring those elements into shake to composite ... am I even close ?
thanks in advance for any help and or advice take care
I am running a powerbook G4 1Ghz and a G5 1.8Ghz at the moment both run under 10.0.4x
take care
Todd George
Instructional Media Services
John Carroll University
University Heights, OH 44118
Re: Considering Shake want to know if it will "play nice" with Lightwave3d by Andrew Shanks on Feb 14, 2007 at 7:35:11 am
Hi Todd,
I don;t use Lightwave but I think I can answer in a general sense at least (I use XSI). Shake is great, and will work just fine the way you suggest. By rendering out RPF files you can do some post DOF work (altho there are some issues you get with doing that due to the way rpf works, but that is the same in all compositing software, the work around is to use a utility like DOF Pro to get correct DOF happening).
http://www.dofpro.com/
You then render out a series of passes from lightwave (in tga, quicktime, etc). Usual passes are Diffuse, Reflection, Specular, Shadow. Of course you can add as many additional passes as you like (such as Occlusion, vector speed/direction pass, and the RPF depth pass you already mentioned).
The other thing you will probably wish to port across from shake (or from shake to lightwave), is camera motion data. There is an old utility that used to do such things:
I'm not sure if they are even still supporting it, but maybe send them an email and ask if it would allow you to transfer camera/tracking data too and from your version of Lightwave and the current version of Shake.
The Multiplane node in shake works with Maya .ma files (for camera data) so if you can track down an exporter for Lightwave that can save your scenes out to that format you 'should' be able to import the camera data into shake.
