Exporting to sw3d

Pakorn1

Pakorn1

New member
Hi all,

I'm trying to export a .lws to sw3d, but Layout crashes every time I try.

I had a test scene in which I had untextured spheres, all separate models, grouped together (kind of like an atom.) The idea was that each of these spheres would have a little house modeled onto it, so when its in Director it will become like this interactive 3D menu. The untextured sphere test renders worked fine.

Now, I have replaced a couple of the spheres with versions that have textures (both image maps and procedurals) and house geometry. For the houses I simply created a bezier spline outline of a drawing, froze it, and extruded it. This makes some very messy geometry; its pretty much two 2000 sided polys with that many polys stretched between them.

This adds up to, as of now, maybe two 5000 poly models plus the other spheres. So probably under 10k polys at this point. I was under the impression that Lightwave could use the sw3d exporter to export any number of polys, but it crashes every time. So my question is, what's crashing me? Is it poly count? Is it maybe dirty geometry? Is it my textures (I have no bump maps but I do have a couple medium res image maps) Can anyone help?

Thanks in advance!
-Rob
 
When you say that the un-textured version works fine, it makes me think that the texture has something to do with it. Procedurals are not supported as far as I know, so taking them off may fix your problem.

If that doesn't solve it, time to trouble shoot. Try some of the below things, one of them may work.

Reduce your map down to 128 x 128 pixels.
Change your image format. (.jpg, .bmp...)
Remove any alpha channel you may have on the texture.

Good luck.
 
Well, the untextured SPHERES without house geometry works fine. Exporting without the textures on WITH the houses doesn't seem to work. I may be doing that wrong though; all I've tried is unchecking the "texture maps" box in the sw3d export dialog.

I will try reducing texture map size (currently pretty big), removing my procedurals (yep, I am using em), and changing image map formats (currently using .png)

Thanks for the info!

-Rob
 
Also, I can't remember if the exporter does it for you, but you may need to manually triple your geometry in Modeler before you export.

Good Luck.
 
Hmm, manually tripling it crashes Modeler. I only have 700 polys on one of the objects. I guess because in essence the "Houses" are like, 400 sided polygons is why it doesn't like it?
 
I also reduced all the textures to 128px, made them .bmp, and removed all procedural textures. It still is crashing on export; would the weird geometry be accoutntable for this?
 
If tripling the geometry in Modeler is causing a crash then you may have some model problems.

Open your statistics window (“w” on keyboard) and see if there is anything funny. For example, 100s or 1000s of 1-point polys would raise a red flag for me. Perhaps you have some floating un-welded points out there. Try hitting “m” to merge points and see if any points get eliminated. If none of this works you may want to take a good look at your model and see if there are ways to reduce the geometry manually.
 
You were right!

I went in and looked for 1 point polys in both sections with houses; it turns out the way I modeled left a spline (a chain of 1 point polygons) that I simply had to select and delete. In one case it deleted one of the faces of my house model but I just cloned and welded back the opposing face and now it's good!

I guess you just need to have no one point or two point polys, which I didn't know. 400 point polygons seem to work though :p

One other thing; any reason why one of my models is rotated off axis in the sw3d file? It seems to be about 20 degrees different than what I had in Layout...
 
OK so I just rotated the model back a bit in layout, so it's off axis in Layout but it's good in Director... hope THAT doesn't come up as a problem down the road!
 
Glad the model is working better for you now.

As far as the offset rotation, that is a problem that I am dealing with right now as well. I have been using both LW 9.3 and LW 8.5, and seem to get better results with the exporter in 8.5. There is a difference with the coordinate space, scale units, and object rotation between LW and Director. The more complex your animations, the more this problem may irritate you.

My recommendation is to start your project small, do lots of tests early on, and keep an eye on what's happening so you can counter it inside of Director with JavaScript/Lingo.

Good luck.
 
Thanks again for your help, man! I was afraid to find this forum dead on arrival (since there was only one other post in here before mine), but you've been extremely helpful this last week or so, and I'm definitely grateful!
 
You are very welcome.

As you noted this is not the most active forum, and sadly you have already nearly exhausted the scope of my knowledge relative to Director and 3D. The Adobe Director forum is useful as well, which you probably already know of.

Best of luck.
 
Glad you got the model working fine. Am back again, so hopefully will be keeping abreast of these forums again and helping where I can. There are alot of posts in this forum that go quite far back that helps with most shockwave/lightwave issues.
 
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