LD Instancer Tools


LightWave ProTools spotlight

The LightWave Digital Pro Tools collection contains a selection of tools to help with instancing. Here are the most of the main ones.

  • Instancers GL Display
    Can change the display type, but also the percentage of items displayed - if you have a vast field of grass, Layout will be more responsive if you only display 10 % of your millions of instances. At render time, all instances are calculated
  • Instancer Presets
    As previously discussed here
  • Inst. to FileInstances
    Allows you to "collapse" large quantities of static instances - this won't work with anything else - to a text file that can be loaded in, evaluated once when loading and is thereafter ignored by Layout, not evaluated every frame. It creates a tremendous speedup when changing frames or playing back a scene.
  • Instance Baker
    This allows you to bake out instance transformation information to actual objects to make transferring Instances to other packages possible.
  • Instance AOV
    In Layout, we have buffers for all sorts of things, but instances all appear as just one colour per instancer. If you need to be able to tell individual instances apart in your compositing package, you can use the Instance AOV tool to do this. Select the object that is being instanced, click this tool and you will have a colour for each instance in this newly-created buffer.
  • Instance Randomizer
    This plugin acts as a setup window for creating large-scale instancing, particularly with multiple source objects. You can add to existing instances or overwrite them, decide how you want them displayed and change scaling offset and rotation all in one simple window.
  • Clones to Instances
    If you have a scene in which you have used the clone tool to repeat objects you can use this to make the clones instances of the original object, saving scene weight. You can, of course, use the clone instance tool (Alt-C) in the first place, but if you have a scene already filled with clones, this is the tool to remedy the problem (Use the Select Clones tool to grab all the clones)