I’ve had to do some of this – but that was a few years ago. It was not easy to get things right – and at first the scenes looked FUBAR. The knowledgeable tech people on both platforms at the studio said it couldn’t be done – but in the end I got a perfect match between the lightwave and softimage scenes – so it definitely is possible – but it is a minefield. If you aren’t already, make fullres screencaptures in wireframe/hiddenline and add framenumbers – and perhaps even embed camera transformation and fov data into the images – it never hurts to have some hard data to refer to, in the context of the current image/camera/frame – at least in the beginning while figuring things out.
I think I brought over camera parameters manually, and when animated, stored them as fcurves on dummy objects - those never fail to come across – while the camera itself often fails one way or other. Scale of the scene – well you’re going from a system with real world units to one with abstract units – not sure how scale can be wrong if XSI doesn’t really have a scale? IMO, If it looks right in camera, it is right. z-axis-up to y-axis-up, as well as one axis (x or z?) having to be negated is more problematic. This can seriously mess the transfer up, but in a predictable way. In our case this was with envelopes/bones – so I also had to mess with the kinematic state of the envelopes, as well as normalize the envelope weights (by adding 0 weight to one deformer on all points – thank you very much xsi weight editor) But I’d much rather use pointcaches to avoid this altogether – pointoven/mdd is a good bet – lightwave has them too. Another one thing that took a long time to figure out – and which I was rather shocked about – was this: exporting/importing the camera from LW back into LW through FBX was fine. Export/import from XSI into XSI was fine. But when going from Lightwave to XSI there was always a slight misalignment. Believing that I/O wouldn’t change actual values, at first I didn’t want to modify values, but if I recall correctlt, I needed to add +1 to the x, y and z rotations of the camera (camera was fcurve animated – no interest, no constraints) , to really nail the camera to lineup. I suspect the FBX importer in XSI was to blame – this was about 4 years ago, so perhaps it has been fixed in the meantime, but autodesk being autodesk, I wouldn’t assume anything. So if you’re close but not quite perfect – double check those camera rotation values. (pitch, roll, bank – OMG! what were they thinking, camera’s don’t have to be little airplanes you know...) anyways – in the end, taking these few issues into account, I scripted most of it, and got a perfect match for all shots I had to transfer - with fairly large and complex sets, intricate camera animations (moving around only, no animated fovs luckily) and a handful of characters. Hope it helps? From: Paul Griswold Sent: Monday, February 25, 2013 8:04 PM To: [email protected] Subject: From LW to Softimage - FBX scale? Does anyone have any experience going from Lightwave to Softimage via FBX? When I try, the scale of the scene comes in totally wrong and the camera's FOV also is totally wrong. I've tried every version of FBX I can think of, but I get the same results. Thanks, Paul
