Animate in Messiah | Render in LW:

1. assets
When working on animation project.
BREAK your scenes down.
foreground elements and background
What characters need bones
Special FX
Multipass works especially when your camera has been approved and your animation has not.


1b. Do a rough animatic
Nothing spectular...just something to get timing issues down.
Don't wait till u get the animation stage.



2. Blocking
In lightwave, I block all of my movements down in Layout:
The camera in lw will be the final camera but at times I need to see the same thing
so i load the camera motion from lw into messiah.
But in the end, LW camera was totally controlled in LW not messiah plugin.
2b: Create a translate and rotate null for characters. I load the undeformed mesh and moved these guys around with the former nulls..when it came time to character animate I loaded the translate/tortate motions to their counterparts in messiah (not messiahxform plugin). Nothing wrong with using them but I always like making changes in layout since it was final destination.
***also load any lw object into messiah that u may need for placement (if a character has to kick a bucket, then animate bucket in messiah witht he character) I rarely load all the background elements into messiah.


3. Watch outs

DO NOT scale / move object in Layout. If its not working then do it in modeler or better -- save transformed and bring it back in.

Get PointOven lite to fix motionblur instead of object sequence (it currently has a fps error-sticking to 24.99999 Mark will get to it when he can or just buy the fixed plugin pro version)

Lw 8.0 and messiah have a problem with lws embedded files. When u save, it trunicated the messiah data out of a scene file so if its normally 1500 k it may be 312 K... temp solution just keep saving until u see the file back to normal (keep a explorer file window in that directory) Hopefully this gets fixed..7.5c doesn't have this problem.
In host linked mode, always save a fxs file for your personal backups (This save my ass a lot) even though the aniamtion gets saved (most times) when not, you wn't lose everything. On PMG site, there is a bug fix for LW 8.3. However I am using a POINTOVEN Pro pipeline exclusively since I work in Maya as well.


Superblender always have a jump in distortation when you save and/or first load. Scrub the timeline..fixes.

Fprime doesn't like highpoly objects. You can't see deformation unless u set it in the display mode. Really dropped it out but it does wonders for reflections/shadows.

Consider multipass renders When making matte pass, use the "constant" black.