Discontinious UV mapping with lightwave

Hello all,

as of late i've been making a lot of player models in the hopes of exporting to a game.. and had seen the b3d export for lightwave. well.. one dosen't download.. and the otherone works.. kinda-sorta.. animations come through great.. however.. the UV that i have on my model is all distorted. espechally around each connecting point of it's limb where i moved it to another section of the texturemap.. the texturing is particularly bad around the hands.. where the 'top' and 'bottom' hand UV are apparent.. at first i thought I was just using too many UV's.. so after reducing it down to one 512x512 PNG file.. i still had a messy model.. i used the serious sam tutorial in skinning the model off of newteks web-site..

the question is... any ideas on how to have discontinious UV's and still retain the bone animation in the b3d file?

Have you tried this:

http://www.terabit.nildram.co.uk/lwconvert.zip

(Just remeber to triangulate your model before converting it, and remember to make enough keyframes)

sure have.. animations are comming through great.. just the UV-textureing which is causing the problems.. such as massive distortion around any verticie which is in a different spot other then right next to it.. this espechally causes a problem around the hands.. where i have a hand-upper and hand-lower portion of the UV map.. you can plainly tell all along the sides of the hands and fingers that the converter is assuming that the UV is seamless.

I must be asking a lot out of freeware.. threr-fore my next question is.... is there a 'commercial' lightwave plugin out there which supports discontinuious UV mapping inside of a b3d file?

http://www.nuclearglory.com/ but its not free but very cheap

terrabits converter works fine for me, the probs i had were down to me.
when creating uv are you using atlas type this is best for weird shapes, ive had weird problems also if i forget to take the skelegons out of the mesh..just a thought

okay,

i purchased the .X exporter from nuclearglory.. wow... that just made the file so much worse then lwconvert did! i did make sure all of the skeletons were out of the model.. as i knew that it wouldn't convert if there was anything except 3 sided polys in it.. even pulled up the statics in modeler and deleted everything except 3 sided polys..

i would do atlas mapping.. except atlas gets messy and has almost zero controll over the UV unless you unweld your model compeltely.. and once you weld it back together.. or do the merge points command.. the points don't nessecarily get merged like they should.. that is how come i did it as described in.. http://www.newtek.com/products/lightwave/tutorials/uvmapping/character_UV/index.html

just to let you know.. i used approach 2 because even though it took more time.. i loved the level of control..

hellcat

I think terrabit has mentioned that his convertor won't handle any mapping type apart from Atlas - I think that's in the helpfile - not sure.

Secondly, I get best results if I unweld all polys before tripling and then reweld those surfaces I want as smooth - otherwise I was getting UV errors.

okay.. i think i got it..

It wasen't the bones which was causing the UV's to deform.. it was some garbage UV's which lightwave 'remembered' from some earlier models causing the and saved all of those remembered UV's into one model, causeing the terrible deformations dispite the fact that none of them were used in the primary model. after clearing out all UV's except for the base-UV.. all is peachy.

ohh yeah.. when i get some web-space, i'll post some screenshots of my player model..

thanks for all the help guys! i can now actually get to work!:)

- Bryon

Ah, so it was a "pilot error" afterall. I suspected something like that because TBs stuff work just fine with my models.

MadJack, Atlas is no different to any other disco-UV mapping method - you have polygon groups and discontinuos seams... Blitz or Convertor doesn't know if these were made with Atlas "plugin" or by hand.