Lightwave

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‌4. Change back from COPs to OBJs. ‌

The Lightwave exporter produces a lightwave scene file (.lws) with several options, one of them crucial to maintaining proper synchronization.

The lightwave exporter writes a lightwave object (lwo) file for meshes in the scene, including the texture, and references them from the lws file. There is a separate exporter if you would like to export only a Lightwave LWO2 file.

The Lightwave exporter includes these exporter features:

 Advanced-Camera setup for 360VR, rolling shutter, and motion blur;

 automatically-generated lens distortion projection screen (you must have run the Lens Workflow script);

 trackers can be exported as a vertex-only mesh with vertex colors, instead of a large number of nulls, or all trackers can go in the mesh and only selected trackers appear as nulls;

 mesh export supports quads and vertex color maps, far meshes, and GeoH deformation by writing an MDD vertex cache;

 object hierarchy export from GeoH tracking;

 animated mesh and light colors;

 ambient and shadow scene colors;

 shadow cast/receive and back-face polygon flags;

 better texture transparency setup including lit vs unlit textures, shot-based textures (for blocking proxies and 360VR screens), and automatic saving of unsaved textures (for SynthEyes-generated shadow maps); and

 option to automatically start Lightwave after export.

NEW: Lightwave has an obscure preferences-like setting on its Compositing panel (on the Windows menu... on the left-hand side, find File... Edit... Help... Windows) named “Image Sequence Global Offset.” This was typically 0 or 1 but can be any value. You must give SynthEyes the same value as in Lightwave. Otherwise you will cause a subtle velocity-dependent error in your Lightwave camera matches that will drive you nuts until you fix the setting. Zero is best, and is the Lightwave default.

OLD: Lightwave has an obscure preferences-like setting on its Compositing panel (on the Windows menu) named “ Synchronize Image to Frame.” The available options are zero or one. Selecting one shifts the imagery one frame later in time, and this is the Lightwave default. However, for SynthEyes, a setting of zero will generally be more useful (unless the SynthEyes preference First Frame is 1 is turned on). The Lightwave exporter from SynthEyes allows you to select either 0 or 1. We recommend selecting zero, and adjusting Lightwave to match. You will only have to do this once, Lightwave remembers it subsequently. In all cases, you must have a matching value on the exporter UI and in Lightwave, or you will cause a subtle velocity-dependent error in your camera matches in Lightwave that will drive you nuts until you fix the setting.

Export SynthEyes units as. Drop-down. Select what Lightwave will think each unit in SynthEyes is. SynthEyes numbers are unit-less: by changing the units setting in the lightwave exporter as you export, you can make that 24 in SynthEyes mean 24 inches, 24 feet, 24 meters, etc. This is different than in Lightwave, where changing the units from 24 inches would yield 2 feet, 0.61 meters, etc.

Enable motion blur. Checkbox. Turned on automatically if rolling shutter is present.

Shutter Angle. Number. 0-360 film-style control. Always configured symmetrically (-45 to +45 degrees, for example) so that a frames data correspond’s to the average position.

UV screen mode. Drop-down. Controls when the alternate form of projection screen is use. The normal screen re-positions vertices based on distortion, with a fixed set of texture coordinates. The alternate form uses a fixed set of vertex coordinates, creating a modified set of texture coordinates. The normal version is fine for computed distortions in general. The alternate form is necessary for 1-pass lens workflow setups when the distortion is expressed as a UVMap (STMap), and may also be necessary for some 2-pass setups. The alternate form cannot be used for animated distortions. The settings for this control are Never, If a UVmap is present, and Always. The “If a UVmap is present” setting is the default and is generally a reasonable approach, though you can use the other settings as the specific scene warrants.

Relative screen distance. Number. Multiplied by world size to determine the distance from the camera to a projection screen for lens distortion, if needed.

Screen horizontal grid. Number. More grids means the distortion is more accurately exported, at the expense of a heavier scene.

Master Frame Offset. Number. Offset the frame numbers by this many in Lightwave. Zero is good! You may want to adjust Image Sequence Global Offset to match this, on Lightwave's Window > Compositing Options.

Export trackers as … Drop-down. The form each tracker should take in the exported scene. While normally a tracker is exported only if it is labeled as exportable on

the 3D panel, when the 'Both' option is selected, all trackers appear in the vertex mesh, so you can export specific trackers as named nulls and all of them as vertices.

Tracker size. Number.

Include meshes. Checkbox. If exported, they will appear as separate Lightwave Object (.lwo) files; don’t forget to include them if relocating or archiving the scene.

Output quads. Checkbox. If checked, does the additional work to produce quads in exported meshes.

Smoothing Angle. Checkbox. The surface smoothing angle for all exported meshes. If the value is zero, no smoothing is done.

Use DirectShow for AVIs. Checkbox. The exporter also has a checkbox for using DirectShow. This checkbox applies only for AVIs, and should be on for most AVIs that contain advanced codecs such as DV or HD. If an AVI uses an older codec and is not opened automatically within Lightwave, export again with this checkbox turned off.

LW Content folder. Browsable folder. Select the Lightwave Content folder (typically in your Documents folder) here, and files within that folder will be stored as relative file names, which can simplify access to shared resources.

Default volume. Text, macOS only. This is needed to 'fill out' file names that are on your main drive.

Open in Lightwave. Checkbox. When on, Lightwave is automatically started and opened to the just-exported file (as if it had just been double-clicked).

Lightwave application. Browsable location. To open files automatically, you must select your desired Lightwave installation here.

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