How many signed up in here is also using Lightwave?
I know of a few, maybe 5-6 Lightwave users that for sure have invested in embergen, but it must be by far more than that, some of them awaits newer computers I think before going deeper in to using Embergen.
So I am just gathering a little info about who else is out there.
The Lightwave forum, the new one since the Lightwave digital team isn´t finished on fixing their forum, is a bit inactive thanks to that, they have their discord though I just don´t go there.
Just signed up on a Lightwave facebook group as well, and I may gather some more info there.
The reason is that I´ve been testing various exports from Lightwave, and I simply want to share what I have concluded to be working, and what isn´t working.
A lot of stuff can be done in Lightwave in regards to deforming meshes, strip down all bones and export to alembic with mdd baking intact, so no needs for bones and so on, though it is limited to Alembic it seems and you can then only have the whole mesh, or part mesh masking, but no vertex paint mask for alembic.
So this can be good to use if you have a rig that is to complex, to unknown factors on how it is rigged by various axis values etc, just scan it to mdd, remove bones and it works…at least in Lightwave, in blender I have to check but there shouldn´t be any difference.
But otherwise using motion modifiers works such as…
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Fx motion modifier
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Breaking parts with bullet physics and single pre-fractured meshes, that works too.
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Painting the color vertex masks works too, for fbx that is.
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Using the envelope motion modifiers on bone channels like oscillators, noise and others, that works to when exporting the mesh to embergen …if you use the right export options.
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Nodal motion, works too.
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Nodal displacement, and Standard displacement works too.
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Particle export from Lightwave to Embergen, sort of works as long as you export with linked meshes, and only per frame generation with static number of meshes.
Allowing particles to generate per second and with dynamic particle amount, that would be awesome, this would allow for really advanced particle collision and spawning that is in scene context with Lightwaves scene, and all you would have to do is simulate the fluid brushes so to speak and export back to lightwave as vdb or camera match and render from embergen and compositing in the end.
So that would be a huge one, including if we could be able to import animated image sequences to emitt the fluids from.
Great to see we now have forces that can be parented to meshes, in the newest embergen release, I have to try that.
I actually was about to suggest that feature, then recently read on the trello board that it was planned, then the new release now …and it´s there 