Lightwave NULL's

Hello

I'm using the Lightwave exporter by Lee Page but I'm having troubles exporting the null's. I have a craft in an LWS file and have positioned null's where I want the exhaust's to be.

When I load the .b3d file all the null's are at 0,0,0. I've tried animating the .b3d file and that doesn't fix it. Looking at the .b3d file in the viewer that comes with B3DPipeline the null's are all at 0, 0, 0.

entity = LoadAnimMesh( "craft.b3d" )

For i# = 0 To 1 Step 0.02
SetAnimTime( entity, i# )
Next

pivot = FindChild( entity, "NULL: exhaust1" )

MoveEntity( exhaustPoint, EntityX#( pivot, 1 ), EntityY#( pivot, 1 ), EntityZ#( pivot, 1 ) )

Any ideas?

Thanks

Scott

dont use nulls...they dont export it says so in the converter docs

also if your using findchild() for some reason i found lightwave saves it all out with a space in front of name

say i wanted to find a bone called "neck"
i would have to use findchild(entity," neck") weird that little gem took me nearly a whole day to figure out

Hi

Reading the docs the rigid exporter does export nulls. Yeah, I got caught out by the space thing except ours stuck "NULL: " on the front on the null names.

umm i stand corrected..i always use deform never used rigid

dont panic im sure Lee or mustang will pop up from somewhere with the answer

Yup it's an animation thang! Since LightWave has animation (and nulls) in a separate file, they are positioned absolutely (i.e. not relative to start position). This means that unless the object is animated, the Nulls will stick to where they are created (0,0,0) which is kind of useless. The problem then comes to if you start them at their animation 1 Frame, the absolute positioning adds their current position and sends them into oblivion.

I'll take a look to see what can be done.

Sorry for the delay, I hadn't reinstalled LW8 yet.

Well, the first problem seems to be that there is not any animation on the file.

The animation needs to be in the form of 'All Items Keyframes' and you may neeed to place a few keyframes over say 60 frames or something. Blitz needs some keyframes and cannot interpolate in the same way as LW does. Then Load as an animmesh and set the animation going and it should work.