IK Lightwave character rig problem

Unity Engine
1

Hi all,

I’ve read a few posts on this issue and the FAQ but now I’m stuck on getting a LW character into Unity with animations.

The character is set up with an IK rig. I’m not using any motion plugins, just keyframed target nulls. If I can, I’d like to salvage the IK animations I’ve already made for Torque.

I’m using the FBX exporter downloaded from here.

The model will import as a static object, but if I include animations the model vertices explode. My problem sounds similar to lgiant’s post only I’m using Lightwave and no other plug-ins.

I’m using Lightwave 9.0.

Any chance someone could share some detailed descriptions of LW rigs they’ve used with Unity? How about a IK rigs?

2

Aha! Problem solved. I had recorded (zeroed) the rest positions of the bones. I didn’t manage to save the animations but I do have my rig set up now to export to DTS and FBX successfully.

If weird bone deformations happen to your IK rig in Unity when the rig still looks good in LW:

  1. Delete all bone keyframes except for the T pose (frame 0) and the IK goals;
  2. Reset all bone rests: Setup > More > Orientation > Remove RPR;
  3. Make sure IK, bones and deformations are on: your limb targets should now be correctly set in LW and bones should be looking good;
  4. Make a copy of this scene (“File_bake.lws”);
  5. On the File_bake scene use DStorm’s free baker plugin to convert IK to FK;
  6. Export to FBX;

This set up gave me a working bone animation in both Torque (DTS export using IK) and Unity (FBX export using FK).

3

I’m having problem getting IK to work for Unity too.
Can you help us explain more on this matter?

SO… do you use the baked file as a reference T pose or as a starting point and reanimated everything?

:sweat_smile:

4

I have since found that if you do use RPR (record rest positions) on bones that the exported FBX does not honor the new rest position, so bones go all over the place.

It’s best to avoid RPR altogether, but if you already have used it you can try to save your animations using this script to revert an RPR operation.

Once RPR is removed the rest position becomes the zero frame T-pose.