Four days ago I was looking for a game engine to work with to get a working game. I spent the last 2 days looking for lwo exporters that would work and havent found any (that work). So I go and download blender and think everything is ok… Wrong I cant get a thing into the egg format with textures. ive exported every thing lightwave can and no luck. So how long is it going to take for someone to make a egg exporter program that is stand alone. start with one file type and go from there.
I’ve had no issues at all like the ones you’ve mentioned. I recommend searching around this forum to see why you are getting these problems.
true that. the egg exporter works perfectly fine with textures. thought not all sorts of textures are supported. especially not blenders interal textureplugins.
please read the chicken manual and check if you’r using any unsupported forms of texturing.
basically you always need an UV-map and a textureimage.
Hi and welcome to Panda.
I’m a Lightwaver too, so I share your growing pains. But if you’ve been using Lightwave for a while, you are probably well aware of how little active support this program receives in most engines. It’s a shame, too. It’s a pretty cheap 3d rendering program with tons of great features. Unfortunately, it has fallen behind when it comes to support from most communities.
Anyway, enough on regrets; I’ve switched to using Blender, because I really don’t feel like spending a bunch of money on another 3d program. Blender works pretty well and I am happy with it, so I believe you will be able to make that transition, too. But, it’s not the only option.
The Maya exporter, from what I understand, is probably the only other exporter for the Egg format that is actively supported. The other is the Chicken Egg exporter for Blender.
If you’re looking to export existing content into Panda from Lightwave, here are some things I’ve observed along the way:
Collada isn’t supported very well in the Lightwave version that I own (8.x), so I wasn’t able to successfully export objects using that. I did have some success using Deep Exploration’s 3d Explorer, but only for static meshes. Animations wouldn’t work properly.
The most success I had was using DStorm’s DirectX file exporter. With it, I was able to export several of my Lightwave game-rigged meshes and import them into Egg, with animations and weight maps intact. As far as I know, DirectX .X format is the only universal file format besides Collada which supports animation and weight maps.
Personally, I am doing a hybrid system now; I am building my meshes in Lightwave since I most familiar with its UV mapping tools, then importing the LWO directly into Blender so I can continue with animating it. I’m also using Blender to generate normal/self-occullsion maps via baking, since Lightwave 8’s Surface Baker isn’t the most stable plugin. (I’ve played with LW9’s baking camera, and it’s nice!)
Hope this helps!