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Iron Sky – Day 28

It’s Saturday afternoon here in Tampere and it’s muggy. Thankfully Samuli and I are the only two people in the office. I think Luke is dead. He came in last night at about 4AM after being here since 2PM Friday non-stop, working through that time on our Death Blimps in Space objects. It would have been nice in many ways to have the models built originally in LightWave after having dealt with a few major symmetry problems and some very odd “additional polys” weirdness that’s taken place somewhere along the line. Thankfully LightWave has tools to deal with these kinds of situations, but in a lot of ways we wish they could be improved on and indeed they can. We have been taking a lot of notes. It’s no one’s fault really its just that I know from experience that maya models can be very, very dirty on export to obj or fbx. One of the tools that came in incredibly handy for fixing a lot of problems with the models from purely a technical aspect has been 3D-Coat. Something Luke and the other guys were trying to do in Maya, Max, LightWave and even XSI but couldn’t sort out why it was exploding those applications on import after a mangled FBX transition, 3D-Coat corrected immediately and even told us what the problem was so we could track it back and fix in the first place and re-export properly. Very smart coding on Andrew’s part over at Pilgway. I think Luke promised right there and then to buy a copy after it saved him hours of work. I told them to try out 3D-Coat when I first saw them having this problem with the FBX files (and its a very odd ball problem, but its a known problem if you understand how FBX deals with UVs and other point data) – but no, they wanted to do things the hard way! Sigh… Just kidding. It was a worthy experiment for what they were trying to do but in the end the only thing that could handle the issue and kill it dead was 3D-Coat and it even fixed some other garbage in the model data set along the way as a bonus. Awesome! Many years ago when I first saw 3D-Coat (back then it was 3D-Brush) I email the then goofball in charge of NT’s 3D development (a clown by the name of Jay Roth) and said flat out – Buy this guy out, get him on board and have him write the modeling tools that LightWave needed to keep it on top of the competition. But noooooo…. detecting a pattern here anyone? Thankfully times have change a little bit and JayWave is looking like its dead finally and LightWave3D – the program I WANT to use when doing work like this is getting better every build because people who actually use it and love it are making it better and there are new, dedicated people at NewTek pushing it forward in the direction that makes the best sense for its future and are happy about doing it. Good stuff! Better late than never. Ok, it may be beer o-clock time here. I have to check with Fax and Stripes… Hmm, yeah they look about ready for nap time so good to go. BTW, the chick who helps her mom clean the office here on Saturdays is really REALLY smoking cute/hot. I just thought I would share that. Laterz Kat.


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2 Comments to Iron Sky – Day 28

  1. Jeric says:

    A known problem(!). Since I’m actually pretty fuzzy on even what an FBX file is, that’s pretty tantalizing.

    Sounds like LW will be picking up more seats in Finland during this production.

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