Lightwave users: I need some advice about textures

Blitz3D Forums/Blitz3D Programming/Lightwave users: I need some advice about textures

JustLuke (Posted 2004) [#1]

Hi all, I've got a question for the Lightwave users out there: Let's say that I have a cube and I want each side to use a different texture map. What would be the best way to achieve this? I use lightwave to model all my objects. Usually I create my mesh, create a few surfaces, assign textures to the surfaces, assign the relevent surfaces to the desired polygons and UV map the model. I then run the model through Terabit's LWO -> B3D converter. If I do this then the texture UV's appear messed up. Unwelding all the points on the mesh's UV map fixes this problem, but I suspect that there must be a better way to correctly assign and display multiple textures on a single mesh without unwelding all those vertices! It just seems so unelegant and I can't retain my smoothing groups if I do that either. So can anyone tell me of a better way to do this?

scribbla (Posted 2004) [#2]

try baking it into one texture

Craig H. Nisbet (Posted 2004) [#3]

If your just going to make a cube, just code it. I thinks there's some code for this in the archive.

JustLuke (Posted 2004) [#4]

Thanks, but the cube was just a simple example to explain my problem. Perhaps I didn't explain myself very clearly, sorry! Basically I want to know the best way to texture levels that I create in Lightwave - specifically an ancient chinese-style village that I have modelled and now want to texture, but that would have made my problem more difficult to describe !

Dustin (Posted 2004) [#5]

The baking idea is not bad but LW surface baker is one of the slowest things on the face of the earth. The unwelding trick obviously works but if it's messing up a smooth surface then I guess you can toss this one out as well. My personal method is Gile[s]. I load the LWO object directly and then assign various textures to the surfaces. Sometimes I find the images stretching. Using Terabit's converter and then importing the B3D object into Gile[s] sometimes solves the problems. Also, try exporting the object then muck with the UV points in lightwave to see if you can remove/reduce the stretching. A pain-in-the- trial & error method.