Modelling for Shockwave

[gordonbaty]

I'm about to produce some models for a Shockwave project but I'm not sure on what will make it through the exporter out of the standard modeller features.

Can anyone advise me on what to leave out/in? eg, surfaces, textures, splines, etc.?

[MentalFish]

- Only use un-metanurbed polygons for geometry, as any metanurbed models will be frozen on export anyway.
- Triangulation will happen on export, so no need to triangulate before you export, unless you want to be sure all triangles are done correctly.
- No splines will export
- Camera animation will only export if parented to a null/model that does all the animation on behalf of the camera
- If using transparent textures, split up all transparent polygons into individual models, such as clusters of foilage on a tree. Dont let any transparent models intersect, as it will most likely cause drawing errors (as seen in the other thread by wowens, sorry for not seeing your thread earlier wow :)
- Red coloured surface and 100% illumination results in a red coloured material with a red selfillumination color
- Only the texture in the colour slot exports to W3D
- If model has weightmaps and bones, then all points of the model should be assigned to a weightmap, and all bones assigned to its own weightmap. Weightmaps should either be 0% or 100%, as W3D does not support any fall-off values.
- Textures can be as big as you want them to be, but stick to textures that are made to the power of 2. 64x64, 128, 256, 512, 1024...
- Texture memory usage can be calculated like this:
512 x 512 pixels 16 bit / 8 bits pr byte = 524288 bytes ~ 0.5 MB

Hope that is some useful information

[gordonbaty]

That is *exactly* the type of info I was looking for! Thank you, I really appreciate it

Gordon

[mdoyle]

The only thing I could probably add to this is just watch if you export a character animation and you notice a problem with the weight map and you go back into modeler and try and fix it, and then export again. It sometimes does not re export correctly and you can find yourself trying to fix something that has already been fixed. I don't know if its something to do with the hub or the exporter but I have found that if you close down lightwave altogther and open it again then it will correct this.

I haven't quite worked out why it does this. As it doesn't happen all the time.

[mdoyle]

Sorry just read in another post that petterms had pointed out something similar already so didn't mean to kind of repost.

[MentalFish]

No prob, I forgot to mention that in this thread anyway. Good thing you mentioned it mdoyle :)

[gordonbaty]

Actually I'm kind of glad you mentioned that, I noticed that issue mentioned before but I got the impression it was a problem from exporting an inappropriate mesh. I guess it's actually just a Lightwave anomoly.