by Al Street

© 2002  Al Street. All Rights Reserved.

Overview: You've created a nice envelope in LightWave using the Graph Editor and some modifiers or expressions. You think it would be cool to bring it in to After Effects and use it to control the brightness of a light and the intensity of a flare (yes, I know...). Here's a quick example of bringing keyframes from a single channel (an Envelope, in LightWave terminology) into After Effects.

In LightWave

Step 1: In the Graph Editor, create your envelope and save it as a file.

Step 2: Run transMotionENV and select the file you just saved. Choose "LightWave" as your Input Format and select "Autoscale Data (0-100)". This will prevent the values from going negative or above 100%. Since we're going to use this as a spotlight intensity, we don't want to make a spot that "sucks" light out of the scene (although there may be times that this could be interesting). Also, the flare plugin that we are using does not accept negative values and would clip any negative data at 0. Click "Ok" to convert the file.

Step 3: Open the file in Notepad and copy the keyframes to the clipboard.

In After Effects

Select the track where you want the data. In this case, we used the Light Intensity. Paste the data into the track.