Need some LW surfacing help

Your smoothing problem is caused by seperate objects. The section which is not smoothed is seperate from the section which is. LW sees them as unconnected parts with the same texture name.

Press 'm' in Modeler to merge the points and it will smooth.

In fact, you should always do this when finished modeling so the engine does not have to display points which have no purpose.

<font size="1"><font face="Book Antiqua"><font color="black">"Never before in the history of the world had such a mass of human beings moved and suffered together. This was no disciplined march; it was a stampede-- without order and without a goal, six million people unarmed and unprovisioned, driving headlong. It was the beginning of the rout of Civilisation... of the massacre of Mankind."
--H. G. Wells The War Of The Worlds</font id="black"></font id="Book Antiqua"> </font id="size1">

Excellent, thank you very much! The smoothing problem is solved. Should I use the "automatic" option for merging points?

I think the file request for "" was caused by a map being assigned to a surface without an image specified in the surface editor. I was wondering about that myself, so I went through and checked all the image maps and there it was (or wasn't, as the case may be).

The conversion process goes like this:

• Model in Max then export to 3ds.
• Convert from 3ds to LW6.5 in Deep Exploration.
• Load in LW6.5, tweak, surface, then export a LW5 object.

I convert in Deep Exploration because it changes the rotation to correct LW6.5 orientation. I should just stop being lazy and model in the right orientation to begin with. Next I'll try using IFF textures, but I hear Photoshop doesn't save them correctly for EoC.

I also find that the LW5 object loads very slowly into Modeler compared to the 6.5 version.

Thanks again.

*edit* - Ok Shane, you rock! There was definitely something wrong with the file. I went back and fixed some mapping weirdness in the Max file, adjusted the object rotation, and exported a 3ds. Then I imported the 3ds directly into LW6.5 (no smoothing problems when importing directly), surfaced with the new IFF image maps and tried it out in game. It works perfectly! :D:D And the new IFF textures look much better than the old bitmaps. Thanks again so much. As you can see, I still have a bit to learn about the workflow in Lightwave, but it is getting easier to use. And I'm not even mixing up the commands between LW and Max anymore .

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Should I use the "automatic" option for merging points?

Yes, and uncheck the box labeled "Keep 1-Point Polygons", since the object loader for Flux can't use single point polys when building the model. Single points just eat up speed and memory.

Glad you got it working.

<font size="1"><font face="Book Antiqua"><font color="black">"Never before in the history of the world had such a mass of human beings moved and suffered together. This was no disciplined march; it was a stampede-- without order and without a goal, six million people unarmed and unprovisioned, driving headlong. It was the beginning of the rout of Civilisation... of the massacre of Mankind."
--H. G. Wells The War Of The Worlds</font id="black"></font id="Book Antiqua"> </font id="size1">

Ok, thanks. Now I've got another question. Is it possible to use an alpha channel mask to affect things like specularity and glossiness? The idea is that I'd like to have the windows shiny and the frames dull.

mailto:second_chance@cox.net
The Ultimate Guide To Modding: I-War 2 - Edge Of Chaos (coming 2004)
cartoons.sev.com.au/index.php?catid=4
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Bet it won't work...

i-war2.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=1391






<font size="1"><font face="Book Antiqua"><font color="black">"Never before in the history of the world had such a mass of human beings moved and suffered together. This was no disciplined march; it was a stampede-- without order and without a goal, six million people unarmed and unprovisioned, driving headlong. It was the beginning of the rout of Civilisation... of the massacre of Mankind."
--H. G. Wells The War Of The Worlds</font id="black"></font id="Book Antiqua"> </font id="size1">

I have just been playing with the ingame textures, almost all have something like an alpha channel that affects glossiness. Using a slightly noisy texture as your cockit section does and setting the "reflectiveness" channel quite dark it will look dull, if you set the "reflectiveness" bright on the glass areas then they will be shiney.

I have only just started playing with the textures, I've been making them bigger and trying to add more depth. Some examples.

homepage.ntlworld.com/botworld/shot0008.jpg
homepage.ntlworld.com/botworld/shot0010.jpg

Jumbo

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