Topic: Importing Animated People?

[Goughy01]

Hi Guys.
I was wondering if anyone could shed some light on Lumion's ability to import animated people. I'm presently putting a business case together to present to my boss in order to purchase Lumion 3 when it is released. One pretty crucial issue is that I would ideally need to show animated Arabic characters due to the location of much of my work. I have a small library of such characters in 3ds Max format. Will Lumion have a library of animated Arabic characters or the ability to import them from other software?

Thanks in advance
Dave

[Gaieus]

The pace the Lumion Team is able to add rather specific characters cannot get you too far but there are ways to import animated characters although I am not sure that the format you have can be animated. Here is a video however with animated arab people:

http://lumion3d.com/forum/gallery/al-noor-park/

[Morten]

Hi Goughy01, it is only possible to import simple object animations in Lumion, i.e. move/rotate/scale animations. It is not possible to import bone and vertex animations, and as far as I know, there are currently no plans to make it possible to import these animation types, so your only option would be to import static characters - or use the labour-intensive method that Gaieus is referring to:

http://lumion3d.com/forum/general-discussion/importing-animated-characters-%28poor-man%27s-version%29/

[Goughy01]

Thanks Guys. I don't think it will be a deal breaker - just a "nice to have". I'm sure I could get by with using a mix of statics and available Lumion animated characters. 

[hizbullah313]

is anybody know how to import animated characters from 3ds max, C4D, iclone and daz studio into the lumion?

[peterm]

Please see reply to your topic of same question.

[Lennartsa]

Hello,

I've gone through the thread and I'm still unclear -- it seems in a previous post Lumion pro byzantium was able to bring in animated people by animating them before hand and dropping them in to Lumion. Any idea what format they came in as?

I am looking to purchase these ready-made animated people off of Turbosquid:http://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/3d-animations-8-pre-animated-people-casual-model/415874

But don't want to have to pay $265 unless I know it will work! Has anyone ever tried importing animated .max models?

Thanks, 

[Jared G.]

Basically, no.

The files from Turbosquid are vertex animations, and will not work with Lumion.

What byzantium did was break apart the meshes of those characters, then created simple animations (rotate, size, position - these are the only animation types Lumion can currently support) for the different body parts. The end results are usually pretty stiff looking.

If you check out this video you will see the arab people don't have smooth nice animations. they are pretty hard and not very realistic, thus he kept them at a fair distance from the camera and only briefly within frame.

[Lennartsa]

Thanks for your reply Jared, ok -- I will figure something else out.

Cheers

[peterm]

As Jared mentioned and as in some topics (but some are in the licensed user area of the forum), plus as in the Tips and Tricks: see LUMION 3: Tips, Tricks and Shortcuts re it is not possible..:

HOW DO I IMPORT ANIMATIONS?
It is possible to import move/rotate/scale animations from some 3rd party modelling 3D applications, e.g. 3DS Max and Maya. The frame rate has to be set to 25 frames per second and the preferred export format is FBX file. Collada format (DAE) also works but the interpolation between keyframes will be linear.

It is not possible to import vertex animations, morph animations or bone animations in Lumion.

Note: there are so many other things Lumion is great at doing, that it's possible to ignore/bypass this limitation