Hi guys, probably a very debatable suggestion, but go get Lightwave. Big price reduction, it's down to $1595 if I'm correct. I read the thread about the upcoming release of the Project Magellen ship and the suggested pricing, and I thought, Lightwave is $1600. now, and there are free spaceship models all over the net...just go and check Moebius' space deck, it's awesome. You get the best rendering engine around, unlimited texturing possibilities and a learning curve that will age you 150 years. But hey, it's the most fun I've had in a long time. The plugin support (Poser --> Lightwave) is non existant and it doesn't work anyway, so you have to manually go Poser-->.obj-->Lightwave. I bit the bullet and bought it a year ago and would do it again in a hot second. Expand your horizons, support your local pharmacy (anti- depressants when you can't get things to work s) and know, in your heart that the truth is out there.

um poser pro pack has a poser to lightwave plugin, moves pz3 files to lightwave. there is one for 3ds too, it works really well.

I never had any luck with the plugin. You've been luckier.

Anyone care to donate the money so I can do this?

Mmm... money... drool

I know for a fact that the LW Poser plug-in works preety well. What problems did you have with it Movida? I think I already know what you are going to say. ;-) I might be able to help you get around the oddities of the plug-in. ScottA

Movida, I DO have Lightwave. I bought it the Christmas before last when Newtek had a really odd sale on Lightwave 6 at their web site where they were selling it for only $600.00!!! Care to provide a link to the deck by Moebius? Thanks in advance.

I downloaded that free starship multi deck bridge model by moebius and its truly amazing!!
do to the lightwave forum and click on the white newtek
logo and get it from lightwave free stuff
cinema4DXl has dropped thier price to around $1600 also and the propack hostingplugin works flawlessly.

the poser to lightwave plugin for the MAC has never worked for us either.

"the poser to lightwave plugin for the MAC has never worked for us either." Details. I need details. ;-) ScottA

Speaking of Cinema4, their Go! version (y'know, lite ver) has a cute pic on the cover of the pdf info sheet, same pic is on the site. It's a pic of a futuristic space bike... and Posette. (!) :] FishNose

Scott:

We opened the lightwave command line and added .pz3as a file format that lightwave will open and save the command line
( not that the propack manual bothered to mention this little fact)

we load the pzrforlw plugin as described by the propac manual
the dialog says "three plugins added"
we go to load scene and select ALL file types
we actually SEE the poser file unlike PPP SR1,SR2 where it remained
invisible.
The first time we tried we were asked to locate the poser ".dat file"
we did this( as we did when we first used the cinema plugin)
the usual loading scene lightwave dialog begins
and an error occurs( SEE PIC).

the good news is that we do get the poser scene but no animation data
and lightwave has the BEST cell renderer for still illustration print work for cilents who dont want a 3D look and LW has the best modelor on the planet!!
the better news is that the Cinema 4DXl 7 poser plugin is rock solid
and cinema will import BVH files from our poser characters and convert them to aligned animated bone rigs that we place inside our hosted figures for attachment of camera targets ,animated wigs etc, .
and cinema hair plugin is free.

:-)

I have tried taking a pz3 to lightwave and I get all the lighting which looks like planes when it gets to lightwave. If I take things object by object it works ok. Since I haven't done much in lightwave yet and hate reading manuals, I haven't figured out how to move the camera well yet. I am on a mac with PP.

Got to agree with Movida. Lightwave is the best modeller out there , a beautiful rendering engine, and the cheapest of all the big boys. Also the most tutorial resources on the web IMHO, and very helpful forums all over the place.

Hmmmm. Ok. Thanks for illustrating the problem Wolf. I don't use a MAC. So I don't have an answer about this one. I do know from playing around with the LW plug-in for PC. That there are a few quirks with it: 1.)you need to add the textures by hand 2.)if you have more than one figure in a scene. It will say it can't find the second figure. And will ask you to find an alternative. If you select "yes" then go to the accompanying LWS folder (it created in the process of opening that .pz3 file) and click on the next figure in the scene. They will all load just fine. Kinda quirky. But it does work. I'll see if someone from CL is lurking here and let them know about the problems. ScottA

Scott, Thnaks for pointing me to this thread. I'm going to have Brian, one of QA guys pop-in and see if he can figure out what might be happening. The problems you guys are having are something we want to take a look at. Sorry it hasn't been working for you. With a little bit of help, maybe we can solve those issues. Steve Cooper

Thanks Scott
but frankly Cinema4DXL7+ with its very reliable poser plugin,ultrafast radiosity render engine and powerful particle system,
is our Holy Grail for rendering our poser character animations so
its not a concern for us weather the Poser to lightwave plugin ever works for our one seat of lightwave at this point inour workflow
and Cinema4DXL will open and convert ANY Lightwave scene file with lights
cameras and textures intact
so combined with LW world class modelor we
are fortunate enough to enjoy the best of both worlds.

Hi Scott, "if you have more than one figure in a scene. It will say it can't find the second figure. And will ask you to find an alternative. If you select "yes" then go to the accompanying LWS folder (it created in the process of opening that .pz3 file) and click on the next figure in the scene. They will all load just fine." Yes, this is an actual bug found during localization testing and has been documented. It's in the top list of PzrForLW plugin bugs. Hopefully, we'll be able to address it after we release Poser 5. Thanks, -Brian

Thanks Brian, It's not really a problem once you know how to deal with it. Any Idea what's going on with the MAC issue Wolf359 mentioned above? That one seems a bit more serious. ScottA

I'm looking in to it right now. It's working on my G4, but I'll post when I found out what's going on. -Brian

Hi Wolf359, I had a thought: Can you check to see if you have your LightWave Extensions 3 Prefs file? Go to your Systems Folder> Preferences> LightWave Extensions 3 Prefs. I noticed that this was missing when I re-installed LW 6.5./7.0 I'm not 100% sure but it appears you have to save out a LightWave scene before this gets created. Do you launch the Hub? It's not really necessary. In fact, on the Mac, it requires alot of RAM, so the you'll only want to launch with the Hub only if you have a large amount RAM memory. How much RAM do you have in your system? Are you running with Virtual memory on? How much RAM is allocated to LightWave? Personally, I don't use the Hub. However, if you want to launch the Hub when you launch Layout or the Modeler: 1. Go to the LW Programs folder, make sure there is a useHUB.txt file and it is empty. If it's not there, open Simple Text and save the file into the Programs folder as: useHUB.txt . Leave the file empty. 2. Open the LightWave.cmdline and remove the -0. 3. Open the Modeler.cmdline and remove the -0. When you open Layout, you should be able to send to Modeler now and visa versa. Also, check to make sure that the PoserLocation.txt file is in your PzrForLw plugin folder and that the path correctly writes to the Poser.dta location. It should look like this: Macintosh HD:Poser4:Poser.dta If the path is written incorrectly, open up the PoserLocation.txt file in Simple Text and edit the path to where Poser Pro Pack resides on your system. Other considerations: Mac Users: Allocate more memory to LW Layout. (Select the LightWave icon, press Command I > Memory> Preferred Size. Especially with the Michael and Vicky figures, more memory is required for their high-res textures. I would suggest that you up the allocation memory (280,000) and then launch LW and try to load the Poser Scene. -Brian

Attached Link: http://www.apple.com/creative/video/features/theone/

Last year when Curious Labs was developing the Poser Pro Pack plugins, David Allen's company, Team Works Digital, beta tested the PzrForLW plugin on the Mac. Little did we know that he was going to use Poser and the Pro Pack plugin in previsualizing effects for a Hollywood movie. After months of discussions with David over the phone and through e-mails, he finally announced that his 'tests' were used for the Jet Lee movie, "the One".

Attached Link: http://labreport.curiouslabs.com/article/articleview/45/1/27/

>> The plugin support (Poser --> Lightwave) is non existant and it doesn't work anyway, so you have to manually go Poser-->.obj-->Lightwave If you are having problems installing the LW plugin, please contact tech@curiouslabs.com. I'm sure we can resolve the specific problems you are having. As far as not working, here are other examples where professional animators have used the Poser to LightWave plugin in their professional work. Last year, Micah Henrie of Daz3D won a WAC first place award using our plugin: http://www.daz3d.com/pages/dp/ads/adsmain.html http://www.wacfest.com/winners2001.html 2. An article from DV Magazine which features NASA animators using our plugin http://www.dv.com/features/archive.jhtml article: "Wrestling for Science" For those who have the plugin installed and working, here are some tips I can offer you. They're included in an article I wrote for the Curious Lab's online magazine. 1. When you load in Poser Scenes (File>Load>Load Scenes> All Documents) select Convert to triangular mesh. This will tessellate the geometry and correct raytraced shadows. 2. Poser by default Multiplies textures. When the Poser scene is loaded into LW6.X, change the Surface texture blending to Additive. This will make the sure appear less washed out. When the Poser scene is loaded into LW7b, change the Surface texture blending to Normal for the same affect. 3. If the textures aren't showing up, most likely the LW I/O plugins need to be installed. Launch LW 6.5 Layout Plugins>Add Plugins Plugins folder> Input-Output folder Add the necessary file formats. i.e. TIFF.p, TGA.p, PICT.p etc 4. When you load Michael into LW6.5, you'll notice that the Pubic Hair region appears 100% black (kind of looks like a black patch of hair) to correct this go to the Surface Editor, select Pubic Hair and increase the transparency to 100%. Eyeball, eyelashes, brows and hair need the transparency brought up to 100%. Control F3 brings up the Surface Editor 5. Transparency maps need to be inverted. Control F4 brings up the Image Editor. Click on the Editing tab and check the Invert box. -Brian

OK Default Guy: remember an email a long time ago?.... A second email from me got no reply. I figured I'd just do it the long way and have been, successfully, since. Sorry

thanks for the tips Brian

we will check them out :-)

ScottA: ok, I'm home today later in the afternoon, and I'll copy all these suggestions and try again. It sure would make life easier, thank you.

Hi movida, I don't recall getting any e-mail from you in the past. I usually don't respond to tech support issues since we have a separate department from engineering that addresses those issues. There was a point last year that our former tech support guy resigned to take care personal issues, but since was replaced by our technical writer as an interim and then by an excellent tech support person who formerly worked at Metacreations, Digidesign and Adobe Systems. That said, please directly IM me and I'm sure we can figure out what issues you are having. When I'm not involved with engingeering tasks at work, I'm usually at home on Renderosity during my spare hours (up late or if the wife says it's okay after all of my house chores are completed) ;) -Brian