gamedevlists-general

[GD-General] Lightwave Object Loader

[Chris B. <Chr...@ma...>]

I'm building a lightwave object loader. Things are going well generally though I am having some problems. The texture projections are causing some problems for me to understand. Lightwave seems to be able to texture with planar, cubic, spherical and UV texturing. 

I'm not a great artist and don't know the tools very well. I have used editors in the past that allowed me to Move, rotate and scale textures. Based on this I would assume that UV texturing would be the only useful format for me as most of my textures will need to be moved around to align properly to the edges and most polygons are not axis aligned. Is this an incorrect assumption? Have I misunderstood the power of the other methods that only seem useful for axis aligned planes?

If I'm correct and I really do need to use UV texturing, is it true that all Lightwave polygons will need a Named UV surface? All 1000 of them? I've read the documents from the lightwave SDK over and over but I can't see how this will be viable for artists so I must be reading it incorrectly.

Does anyone have experience with this?

Many thanks

Chris

Re: [GD-General] Lightwave Object Loader

[Marin K. <m.k...@in...>]

> I'm not a great artist and don't know the tools very well. I have used
editors in the past that allowed me to Move, rotate and scale textures.
Based on this I would assume that UV texturing would be the only useful
format for me as most of my textures will need to be moved around to align
properly to the edges and most polygons are not axis aligned. Is this an
incorrect assumption? Have I misunderstood the power of the other >methods
that only seem useful for axis aligned planes?

You'll need to convert to UV in order to render the stuff anyway,
so it's sensible to stick to UV only. And you can always
"emulate" other projections with MakeUVs tool.

> If I'm correct and I really do need to use UV texturing, is it true that
all Lightwave polygons will need a Named UV surface? All 1000 of them? I've
read the documents from the lightwave SDK over and over but I can't see >how
this will be viable for artists so I must be reading it incorrectly.

Yes you are. ;-) You should go and try to UVmap a couple of
objects in Modeler to get a grasp of how it's working.

From programming POV each uv map is a set of (vertex index, (u,v) )
pairs. So you just cycle through the list and assign uv coords to
vertices.

> Does anyone have experience with this?

Plenty. BTW, are you writing a LWO2 parser or a plugin?

Re: [GD-General] Lightwave Object Loader

[Niklas H. <ni...@ma...>]

Hi Chris,
Chris Brodie wrote:
> 
> I'm building a lightwave object loader. Things are going well generally though I am having some problems. The texture projections are causing some problems for me to understand. Lightwave seems to be able to texture with planar, cubic, spherical and UV texturing.
> 
> I'm not a great artist and don't know the tools very well. I have used editors in the past that allowed me to Move, rotate and scale textures. Based on this I would assume that UV texturing would be the only useful format for me as most of my textures will need to be moved around to align properly to the edges and most polygons are not axis aligned. Is this an incorrect assumption? Have I misunderstood the power of the other methods that only seem useful for axis aligned planes?
> 

No you haven't. The reason all this stuff are in there is before version
6.0 Lightwave didn't support UV mapping at all. And 6.5 (or might be 6.2
beta I don't remember exactly) Is the first version that supports proper
UV mapping so the same vertex can have different UV's depending on what
surface it is a part of. Once the artists passes the initial gap to UV
there is no going back. And our artists here has never asked for using
those other texture mapping methods again. UV is also essential for fast
games due to the fact that the surface numbers using the planar
texturing to get the same effect got quite insane.

> If I'm correct and I really do need to use UV texturing, is it true that all Lightwave polygons will need a Named UV surface? All 1000 of them? I've read the documents from the lightwave SDK over and over but I can't see how this will be viable for artists so I must be reading it incorrectly.

Yes they must belong to a surface. But they are assigned a Surface at
the same time as they are assigned a texture. so It's not less viable
than that they are all textured. Also the artists have quite good tools
to do these selections so don't worry about it. The easiest way to get
these questions answered is to simply ask the artists.

Oh and the LightWave SDK is a mess. Or well it used to be I have heard
that it's better now but when 6.5 was new ....

/Niklas Hansson

> 
> Does anyone have experience with this?
> 
> Many thanks
> 
> Chris
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Gamedevlists-general mailing list
> Gam...@li...
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/gamedevlists-general

-- 
/Niklas Hansson    
Software Engineer
Massive Entertainment AB