Maestro is out! (Character animation and rigging plugin for LW)
 

Hey All,

I'm pleased to announce that Maestro for Lightwave has been released. It can be purchased from Kurv Studios. It is available right now for an introductory price of $120.

http://www.stillwaterpictures.com/Controller.jpg
(The image above is of the Maestro Controller in action. See how clicking and dragging turns the character's head?)

So what is Maestro? Simply, it's a character rigging and animation tool. We're working on a full-length animated movie. During the course of developing this movie, we've developed a really nice character rig + the tools to quickly apply this rig to any character. We needed flexibility, though, so we based the rigging on a simple LScript Commander-style script, thus making it very easy to customize.

We also developed a Controller that started out as a character picker, but evolved into a panel you can directly control your character from. The image above tells the story pretty well, I think. If you click inside the hotspot that controls his head and drag left and right, his head turns. Move the mouse up and down, his head nods. Use the right mouse button and his head tilts from side to side. Use the middle mouse button, and his head snaps back to the default pose.

That really only tells a small part of the story. That's why we have demo videos!

Check it out. If you've got any quesitons? Please, feel free to ask. :)

EDIT: Nevermind, must have skipped a step.

Got it to work & loving it!

oh! Hehe. Glad ya got it working. :)

May I ask what happened? I'd like to improve the documentation if necessary.

I was a bit too excited i guess, when recieving the registration code in the email, I failed to read the rest of the email, which clearly stated that Auto-Key and Parent-in-Place had to be on. After that, everything worked fine. ^_^