November 16, 2006 . Weight Maps and Plug-ins permalink ] [ trackback ]

The rigging of my model is taking longer than expected, mainly because I hit a speed bump this week while trying to weight map my character. Based on someone’s advice, I added a plug-in to LightWave that is supposed to make the mirroring of weight maps extremely easy. Of course it worked when I initially tried it, but subsequent tries failed by crashing Modeler! After trying different config options and tests, I still can’t figure out why it fails so miserably on my model.

So, I took a different approach. The crashing plug-in is written in the C/C++ SDK, which makes it difficult to debug. But there is another alternative for writing plug-ins: LScript. LScript is a C-like scripting language that gives you programmatic access to many of the features of LightWave. Armed with the Reference Manual, User Guide, and someone else’s code as a base example of how to create a plug-in, I actually wrote a working version of the plug-in, although it doesn’t have all of the flexibility of the original. However, it works and satisfies my needs.

I’m excited because I use scripting all the time for other tasks on the computer (in fact, my day job involves writing and maintaining a large collection of scripts that do a ton of work automatically). Extending those skills to LightWave has the possibility to be extremely beneficial down the road. I look forward to building a nice library of scripts to automate those tedious, repetitive tasks that computers are soooo good at finishing in seconds.

Posted at 12:49 am [ 1 comment ] [ Categories: 3D ]
 
1 comment:
On November 16th, 2006, at 8:07 am, PI Visuals said ... [ permalink ]

I smell sabotage! What kind of bastard would send you a plug in that crashes your program?

 
 
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