By Beam Tracer (Beamtracer) (203.109.241.109) on Tuesday, January 07, 2003 - 05:44 am:

Has anyone managed to successfully move Lightwave motion files into Adobe After Effects?

I know they can't go directly (I hope either Newtek or Adobe are working on a solution to this) but I can't find an alternate method.

I've tried exporting RLA files from Lightwave, but After Effects produces an error message to say that there is no motion information in them. I assume that Lightwave hasn't taken advantage of this RLA feature.

I even ressurected an old version of Maxon's Bodypaint, which can import a Lightwave scene and save it as a Cinema4D scene. Maxon wrote a plug-in for After Effects that can import C4D scenes, but again I couldn't get it working. Maybe my copy of Bodypaint is too old.

Is there some other method that people are using that I'm not aware of? I'd be interested if anyone has thoughts on this.

After Effects is not the best compositing machine, but it's the most popular, and the one that Lightwave users would most likely use to composit their animations. It's pretty hard to use AE with LW when the camera motion information is lost. A fix for this would be a tremendous advantage.

By adam stern (Adam) (24.76.115.42) on Tuesday, January 07, 2003 - 10:26 am:

There is no motion data in RLA.

One way to get your lightwave camera motion into AE is by translating it to a Maya file. AE can read the camera information from Maya natively.

I've messed around with 'transmotion utilities' - find it at flay.com - but haven't had a lot of luck.

By Dany Roth (Dany) (217.162.138.97) on Tuesday, January 07, 2003 - 02:13 pm:

Hi,

it's easy with TransMotion Utilities Pack from Al Street at http://www.ats-3d.com/
It was updated to work with the Mac OS X version of LW 7.5

By Beam Tracer (Beamtracer) (203.109.241.109) on Tuesday, January 07, 2003 - 05:32 pm:

Thanks guys, I'll try it as a Maya file first, and if that doesn't work I'll take the Transmotion route.

After Effects has a filter to extract motion data from an RLA/RPF sequence. This made me think that motion data can exist in these sequences if the application supports it.

By Beam Tracer (Beamtracer) (203.109.241.109) on Tuesday, January 07, 2003 - 09:26 pm:

Dany, thanks for that link to Al Street. His software and LScripts are incredibly useful. His tips are also very handy:

http://www.ats-3d.com/transmot/zoom/zoom.htm