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Old August 21st, 2009, 08:00 PM   #4
kageryu
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Default Re: Colonial Space Marines - or not

Quote:
Originally Posted by Fretslayer View Post
I have a question for you now.
I have Lightwave 9.3 and 9.6 (I still have my v.8 install somewhere in case I ever need it again) and I have Poser Pro & Poser Fusion. I'm supposed to be able to use my Poser/Daz content in Lightwave but I can't seem to figure out how. Since you obviously did, would you mind sharing that info with me? The closest I've gotten is I can make my P/D figures work in Max but all things being equal - I'd LOVE to be able to use my P/D content in Lightwave.

Nothing aginst 3DsMax but IMO Lightwave eats Max's render engine alive, spits it out, feeds it back to Max and then eats Max. :laugh:


Thanks Ger for the vote of confidence.
I'm not sure I deserve it though. LOL!
Thank you for the kind words. I hope to have more to piece with these soon, though setting up the animation is painfully slow.

With Lightwave 9.6 and Poser Fusion I am honestly not certain. Though I will have Lightwave 9.6 within the next month, it will be some time before I have Poser Pro with Poser Fusion yet (several months at least). I can share what I did use though.

I am still clinging to an older version of Poser primarily for the Lightwave support. I still mainly use Poser 4 (aka Poser artist), with the Poser 4 Pro Pack extension. The Lightwave side of this set is a Lightwave Layout plugin (written for Lightwave 6, but it works 75% of the time in Lightwave 7.5). This plugin allows me to host a Poser .pz3 scene in Lightwave, and take full advantage of Lightwave render engine, texturing, lighting, and speed (it is much faster than the best of Raytrace settings on P7). The down side, is the PZ3 must be created in Poser first, and the movement of the figures, and morphs planned out in Poser. Once the PZ3 is ready, it can be loaded into Lightwave, where you will lose all Lighting information (may or may not be a big deal, once you realize not to waste time setting up lights in the Poser scene), as well as all camera movement (same as with the lighting). So once in Lightwave you will need to set up lights, camera movement and angles (which Lightwave has a far better camera system IMHO). The other downside is that you can not directly use .cr2, pz2, pp2, or other poser files in lightwave (you need to create PZ3 scenes).

The upside...and I think it is a fairly big upside in some respects, is that you can host multiple PZ3 files in lightwave simultaneously - thus combining several scenes/renders into a larger scene. Also Lightwave handles memory much better than any of the Posers I have used thus far, and can render far larger and more complex scenes.

It did take me a great deal of time to get Poser 4 Pro and Lightwave 7.5 working in harmony. Even now, occasionally, Lightwave will crash on load of a Poser scene (I believe it's the inherent instability in Poser personally). To add the Poser Lightwave plugin, simply open a new Lightwave session, select add plugins, and navigate to the location of this plugin. The Poser 4 Pro version is 1 file, and states "3 Plugins successfully added". I am not sure if it will work in Lightwave 9.x, but if Lightwave 9.x supports Legacy Plugins (Lightwave 6.5 and earlier) it should. Once the plugins are added, of course exit lightwave to save the cfg, then restart. Even now, though, to open a PZ3 file, when loading you must select "Show All File Types" or the pz3 files simply wont be listed as compatible. Once selected, it will take some time to process, load textures (some textures occasionally get lost or fail to load...another side effect), then everything will disply in Lightwave.

One very important note - Though Lightwave creates .lwo files in a directory for PZ3 scenes, and you can alter the textures and attributes of these figures in lightwave, do not save the .lwo objects back out. Instead set lightwave up to save surface attributes with the scene data on a surface by surface basis (instead of global surfacing). When lightwave saves the LWO files, it alters the point/polygon order, which causes the Poser deformation plugin to crash horribly.

Once I do have both Lightwave 9.x and Poser Fusion, I intend to devote a great deal of time to getting them to work together, and then I should have some very specific answers on how that is done. I also intend to test the P4 Pro plugin in Lightwave 9.x as sonn as 9.x arrives here. In any event I hope this information is somewhat helpful.

Last edited by kageryu; August 21st, 2009 at 08:05 PM.. Reason: Typos
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