Lightwave problems

[Marcus Farrar]

Greetings

I am putting together a 3D animation for a video. I have modeled a bridge that we shot a few months ago. The bridge took me a few weeks to model. I have all my cars and camera movements and so on put together.

Now when I render it and look at the mov/avi (tried both) file it looks bad. I have done other projects and they look great. This project looks great in Lightwave but when I render it comes out like the resolution is super low. I have changed some of the render settings as best I know but I have no idea why this project will not render.

Help please!

[Robert Poulton]

render it out as still frames. Targa (.tga) that way you will have zero resolution loss and you will then be able to bring it into any application without loosing another generation until your final output.

[Marcus Farrar]

thanks for the reply

I will try that when I get a chance. How will I get an animation. It is about a 15 second movie. Thats where I am having a problem. I can't get a good movie rendered out. Has this ever happened to you?

Marcus

[Yang Wen]

What is your render setting? You said it looked great in Lightwave, are you saying it looked great in that tiny preview box when rendering? Please tell us the rendering settings you used in Lightwave. Otherwise, we'll have no way of solving this

[Robert Poulton]

Marcus,

Take a screen shot of the render settings and post the image here. Otherwise just go down the list and run off the settings.

Rob

[Marcus Farrar]

thanks for the response I will take all the advice and reply when I get back in the office tomarow

[Rob Lohman]

The first thing is to make sure you camera is set to D1 at
720x480 (NTSC) or 720x576 (PAL). No half D1 or something.
Also make sure you have options like anti-aliasing on etc.
if you need that (probably).

Now when you output you have two options (you can do
both at the same time). You can output it as an AVI movie
or as seperate files. Most LightWave folk seem to do the
latter because if they need to re-render certain sections
they don't have to render out the whole movie again.

Also in the past LightWave was known to be buggy when
creating AVI files, that's another reason.

If you go down the AVI route make sure you are using
no compression or a lossless compression codec to maintain
your quality.

As you are probably aware, those renders eat up disk space
fast!

[Marcus Farrar]

I got fed up with messing with this project and started over. I used all my models and put them all in a new project. It works. I think something in that project got currpt or something. Anyway thanks for the help. I have never seen anything like this in Lightwave so it kind of got me scared.

[Rob Lohman]

Which version are you using? Some older versions are know to
have such problems... Sometimes the project file goes corrupt
as well.

With all package I use I have a project file for each day basically,
like: "project name 1007.lws" which would be for today

I also do this in my NLE package etc.

[Marcus Farrar]

I use Lightwave 7.5 the latest version.

Are you saying you resave your projects every day and have a new project every day? I don't think I get what you mean on that one.

Marcus

[Rob Lohman]

I just copy the project file to a new file and open that instead
of the old one (Or open the old one and save under a new name).

This way I automatically have different versions of a project
and also have backups in case something gets corrupted. You
might also do this with objects etc.

Whether a new project file is doable for you everyday depends
on your workflow, how much you work on the project etc. The
day was just an example....

[Marcus Farrar]

Sounds like a good idea. I work in Avid and it has a simular function built into the system. I will start to do this with my Lightwave projects. I have had some bad run ins with Lightwave I am sure some it is becuasuse I taught myself and comming from a video editors background. Anyway thanks for the advice.

Marcus