Importing Lightwave 3d into AE 7?

[Matthias]

I really appreciate everyones help and input. Im sure i could just create the lion in lightwave and use the lighting in lightwave to create the shadows and export it as a .mov with a blue background and use mattes and key out the blue background so i can put in the actual footage. The whole ideal is i want the lion to be able to just walk across flat ground in the footage with a casted shadow. I think i could just not have the lion moe in direction but have is legs move and other things and in ae just set keyframes for position
to move him forward. i could pry do this exporting the model out of lightwave as like i said a .mov with blue background.

Thank You!

[Steve Roberts]

You should create the shadow in Lightwave by placing a white plane underneath the lion, then rendering the lion and plane separately. I seem to recall that you can set the opacity of the plane relative to its shadow density, but I haven’t used LW in a while.

Then you import the two renders into AE and adjust the mode and opacity of the shadow.

Steve

[Shawn Marshall]

Matthias:

It sounds like you want to set up an animation in LW (3D plane model flies by, etc.) render it out and bring it into AE to composite the plane onto real clouds or whatever. This is very easy to do. When you’re ready to render, go to the Render Options panel in LW and select Save RGB. Doing this will bring up a file requester to name and save an image sequence. You should probably make a folder to hold the sequence. When you’ve done this, select Photoshop32 or Targa32 or some other that has 32 in at (as opposed to 24). Selecting a file format with 32 means you’re saving the RGB info (24 bits total) plus an alpha channel (an additional 8 bits=32 bits total). This is like selecting RGB+Alpha when rendering in After Effects.

Render your sequence. Once rendered, import the sequence into After Effects by selecting a frame of the sequence and specify Photoshop (or whatever) sequence.

Your previous posts talk about putting blue in the background of Lightwave and keying that out in After Effects. This is a very crude and unnecessary way to composite your animated object. Just render it out with an alpha channel and it should automatically key perfectly in AE.

I used to render Quicktimes in Lightwave but I now generally render image sequences. I network render a lot of animations now, so I have to render individual frames, but even if you don’t network render, rendering as a sequence would allow you to start and stop a render if you needed to, or it would be easier to resume if the render crashed.

Good luck.

Shawn Marshall
Marshall Arts Motion Graphics