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DaliLlama's Lightwave [6] Web Page Gallery |
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Tutorials Weight Maps Alternative Methods of using Bones and WMaps Advanced IK Setup Set Driven Key Basics Assigning Motion Capture Customizing Lightwave Lightwave Basics Gallery Links Flay VisualFX Pro The Lightwave Mailing List Lightwave Tutorials on the Web About me |
Not really much of a gallery, but more of a collection of movies that demonstrate various techniques in Lightwave. Geocities isn't the fastest site in the world, but don't worry, each of these AVIs is about 1.5 megs. Demonstrates Set Driven Key. Each Finger is controlled with it's own Null object. In a later version, I added a 5th Null which controls all 4 fingers for making quick fists. Demonstrates how to use Set Driven Key to animate bones in a face. Most of you out there are wondering, why not use Endomorphs? Good question...the reason is I work on Computer Games and we don't get to use all those nifty new features. We have to animate everything with bones so our skeletal animation system can understand the data. The setup is pretty simple. There's only 7 bones active (4 of those lie in the center of the head, so the full head would only be an additional 3 bones). Each bone has a specific weight map assigned to it. The first Null drives the jaw and scales the mouth inward as the mouth opens. That Null has a Driven Key set to itself, so as it moves upwards (thus lower the jaw) it automatically scales inward (thus making the mouth form an O). Pretty neat eh? The eye is just one bone and scales really fast. It doesn't really need a Set Driven Key assigned to it, but oh well. It's hard to appreciate what this movie demonstrates by just watching it, but once I get to the tutorial on applying meshes to mocap data, you'll see just how elegant Lightwave can be when it comes to working with mocap. Those of you who poked around your Lightwave 6 disc may recognise this animation as the Jog.lws from the motion capture folder in the content directory. I loaded in my character, moved the bones around and scaled the rest length to get the skeleton to fit my model, cropped the animation down and made it loop in place, applied IK to the legs to get good solid foot plantings, calculated how fast she was running and sent her on her way. What you are seeing is 2 cycles long. This file is the same as the firstmocap test, except I replaced the female character with a male character. Since the male was taller and broader than the female, I had to adjust the skeleton. I also be adding a tutorial on how to re-use animations for characters of vastly different sizes and proportions. This animation uses the IK setup from this tutorial. It's a great tutorial from the guys at Evil Plan and the best way to setup a foot (unless you work on 3d games and have export bones for your skeletal animation system, in which case you can't have any Match Goal Orientation on, see my own tutorial on making feet stick without Match Goal coming soon). But as you can see, you can lift the heel of the foot and keep the toes planted, very cool! Everybody knows how to use IK for legs and feet, but ever thought about using IK for the entire figure? This movie shows a figure who is being animated with a single Null attached to the base of the skull. Another example of the IK setup in action. Here we see a character being animated with just 2 Nulls, one at the base of the skull and the other at the wrist (and technically a third, the other Wrist Null, which isn't doing anything except keeping the arm at the character's side). These 2 movies will the subject of my next tutorial on, what else? Advanced IK Setups. Character Studio for 3dsMAX has a nifty function that keeps the center of mass centered over the position of the feet. This movie shows a similar setup in action in Lightwave. As you slide the feet around, the character's center of mass moves to keep the balance evenly distributed. The center of mass even lowers itself to keep the feet planted on the ground when the feet move too far apart! Thanks to Hugh Suh for setting up and writing the Expressions (I'm twisting his arm to write a tutorial on the subject!) |
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