AssignBoneVMaps is a plug-in for Lightwave 6.0 or greater. It provides a series of bone tools to aid in setting up hierarchies. It contains six Generic plug-ins: Assign Bone VMaps, Activate Bones, Deactivate Bones, Toggle Active Bones, Record Bone Pivots and Rest Bones. All of these plug-ins operate on all selected bones, or on all bones in the currently selected objects. This plug-in requires Lightwave 6.0 or greater.

To install AssignBoneVMaps, just follow these steps:

• If any copies of Layout are running, quit them now.
• Create a new directory in your Lightwave Plugins directory called TMPro and copy AssignBoneVmaps.p into it.
• Load Layout
• Select Add Plug-ins.
• Find and add AssignBoneVMaps.p. Layout should report that six plug-ins have been added.
• Quit Layout. This will update your Lightwave config and ensure that everything works properly.
• The next time you run Layout, you can launch the AssignBoneVMaps plug-ins from the Generics pop-up in the Plug-in Options Panel, or assign them to keys or buttons on the interface with Configure Keys and Configure Menus. Please refer to your Lightwave documentation for more information. The plug-ins will be prefixed with TM_P under the Plugins heading of the Configure Keys and Configure Menus panels.

AssignBoneVmaps includes the following plugins:

Assign Bone VMaps

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Assign Bone VMaps automatically assigns a weight map with the same name as the bone to each selected bone, or to each bone in the selected objects. While this is is done automatically by Layout when the object is loaded, it is helpful when you change bone names after the fact, or when you are having troubles with third party software failing to load objects with weight maps, and thus you must manually re-assign them in Layout.

Assign Bone VMaps is used by selecting the bones, or the objects containing the bones, that you want to modify. If objects are selected, then all bones in those objects will be affected. After selecting the appropriate items, launch Assign Bone VMaps. You should see an interface similar to the one here. The About button, as you'd expect, presents information about the plug-ins.

If Adjust Bone Settings is enabled, you'll be able to activate Use Weight Maps Only and then Weight Normalization. The state of these buttons will only be applied to the bones if Adjust Bone Setings is enabled. If all you want to do is assign weight maps to bones, simply leave Adjust Bone Settings in it's disabled state.

After hitting Yes, AssignBoneVMaps will assign each bone in the selection a weight map of the same name, and apply the weight-based bone settings if Adjust Bone Settings is enabled. Clicking Cancel from the interface will return to Layout with no changes performed.

ActivateBones
Deactivate Bones
Toggle Active Bones

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Activate Bones, Deactivate Bones and Toggle Active Bones are related plug-ins for acitavting and deactivating bones. While Lightwave does include mappable commands for this already, those commands only operate on the current item, while these plug-ins will operate on all selected bones, or all bones in the selected objects.

Activate Bones will make th selected bone active, just like the built-in Bone Active command. Deactivate Bones will deactive the selected bones.

Toggle Active Bones will make the active bones inactive, and force currently inactive bones to become active.

Note that none of these affect the bone's rest state; they only modify the bone's active state.

Record Bone Pivots
Rest Bones

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Record Bone Pivots will record the rotations of the selected bones, or the bones of the selected objects, into the bone's pivot point, just like Record Pivot Point, but operating on many bones at the same time.

Rest Bones operates just like the built-in Rest Bone command, but will affect any number of bones at once.

Upon activation, both of these plug-ins will ask you if you really want to perform this possibly dangerous operation. If you click Yes, the bones will be processed. Note that the processing occurs hierarchically, from the root of the parenting chain down to the last children. This ensures that the bones are rested as expected, since resting in a non-hierarchical order can result in unpredictable changes the bone chain.

Bugs? Feature requests? Can't get it to work? Feel free to contact us if you're having any problems or want to request a feature.