[distrakt]

Hi hi.
I'm doing my first LightWave scene of any complexity... and I'm running into some questions.

My question is: Can I have an object in my LightWave scene exist for only part of the scene? Like have it exist only from frames 300 to 390?

Any advice appreciated! Thanks so much.

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(Just for reference, what I'm trying to do is consolidate all my rendering for a movie into one LightWave scene, like "5 seconds: opening long view of building, 5-10 seconds: show tumbling capsule at building" and so on. So the capsule is just from frames 150 to 300 here. Is that reasonable?)

[Mark]

Well, you can dissolve the object out 100% so that it doesn't appear visible in the final render (look on the object properties panel render tab).

[distrakt]

Dissolve -- That will work perfectly! Thanks Mark! I didn't even know about that till now.

[distrakt]

Ok, so my 60 second long Lightwave scene is divided into twelve 5-second segments, with different camera angles, moves, &c. I render out all 60 seconds as a QuickTime movie and then dice it up in After Effects and Final Cut Pro for my final movie (which totals about 5 minutes).

I keyframe the Dissolve property on objects which are only needed for certain segments.

Unfortunately, Layout shows them all, all the time, making it hard to see what I'm doing.

SO, I used the following modifier expressions, and all is well!

Dissolve: (additive) (Time < 5 || Time >=10) ? 100 : 0
Position.X: (additive) (Time < 5 || Time >= 10) ? 1000000 : 0

(Change Time range deppending where object each object is needed.)

So my unused objects fly 1000 kilometers off to the +X, and dissolve, when they're not needed.

[Mark]

lol -- That's one way of doing it I guess.

I still reckon that you'd find life a whole lot more easier if you made a single base scene that contained all the main, common elements, then copied that out to secondary scenes for each segment of your movie.

Then all you'd need to do is stitch the whole lot together in your favourite NLE without having to resort to disolving objects and whipping them off to infinity and back...

...

[distrakt]

I know it sounds round-about... but here's my reasoning.
Maybe there's a better way.

First -- this is all just me, so I've tried to set it up so my workflow can have lots of back-and-forth. Also, I'm a software guy, so expressions are smooothe and delicious to me.

The thing is, I've got my one 3d virtual set (ok, it's a space station, are you happy?? ), and several scenes to render in and around it. As I work on the whole piece, I go back and forth adding lights, tweaking animation curves, modifying textures and positions.

And about once a day I start a full render, either at night or when I leave for the day job. And-- cool! it gets every one of my segments in one fell swoop, with all the latest lighting and such.

So that's why I don't want to have a handful of separate scene files. I'd have to keep reimporting stuff in unpredictable ways.

Though hmmm perhaps scripting could address all that...

But so far the master graph editor been very good to me.

[Mark]

lol -- Agreed, for a relatively simple - one off project I guess it works OK. However, you'll tend to find as project size increases, breaking it down into manageable chunks really does help.

Hell, I'm a software guy myself in real life - and that's the way most of our projects are handled - break the thing down into individual, separate packets of work and then bring it all together towards the end of developement.


To address the issue of not being able to render multiple scenes whilst you're out, then you should look at using a Screamernet controller such as Lightnet (free) or Butterfly NetRender (or one of the others out there) since these can batch-automate the loading of scene files.

[distrakt]

Mark --

Heh.

I totally hear you about "breaking it down to smaller pieces". This is just where -- for this project anyway -- the sweet spot seemed to be.

The whole piece actually has a second virtual location, with another 30 or 40 seconds of 3d LW stuff, which I'm doing the same way.

If it was bigger I could definitely see how separate .lws scenes for each actual scene would start to make a whole lot more sense.

Thanks for the LightNet pointer! Fortune willing, I'll work on something big enough to need it sometime .

--> david