Using Lightwave to Animate

[Springheel]

I noticed that there's a Doom3 md5mesh importer/exporter for LightWave. Does that mean we could theoretically use LW to create our rigs/animations? It seems like that would require a lot less switching between formats. I'm far more comfortable with LW than with Maya, but maybe there's some limitation I'm not aware of?

[oDDity]

Lightwave is shit for character animation. That's why no one uses it.

[Domarius]

I don't know why they added support for it - maybe some of the modellers at id were better at Lightwave than maya, or maybe they soon found out it was shit for animating, but basically, you only use lightwave for static meshes, when making Doom 3 stuff.

[oDDity]

THe lightwave plugin, like the max plugin was just a hack done by some doom fan. The doom guys used lightwave modeler to make the models, and used maya to animate them. That tells you all you need to know about the organic modeling capabilities of maya, and the animation capabilities of lightwave.

[Springheel]

I wasn't really interested in using it for animating, as I doubt I'll have the time/desire to get good enough at that to contribute anything useful. I was mainly interested in using it for rigging meshes to a skeleton and exporting existing animations. But it sounds like it's easier to just use Maya.