3DSciFi

export/import try fbx. LW to LW should have a plug available or even a inbuilt tool. Look to see if LW had a native export tool as well. Max used something prior to fbx adoption. Either case I have had hands on fbx exported meshes from lw blender and rino? maya? And exported for daz and lw previously.

Also does not blender have smoothing groups where you can select faces and set them to group 1,2,3,4 etc vs having to have it all 1 group and having to loop or cut edges in all over the place? could swear I had seen a radius setting for smoothing, meaning it has some sort of ID based smoothing grouping. (then again this was ages ago.

LW supports .fbx natively. I exported a mesh to .fbx once for someone.

Quote from: MadKoifish on Jun 30, 2019, 11:34 pmAlso does not blender have smoothing groups where you can select faces and set them to group 1,2,3,4 etc vs having to have it all 1 group and having to loop or cut edges in all over the place? could swear I had seen a radius setting for smoothing, meaning it has some sort of ID based smoothing grouping. (then again this was ages ago.

Oh man, that would be nice. But, not as far as I know. You either get smooth or flat.

Quote from: scifidude79 on Jun 30, 2019, 10:12 pmWell, I was working on a new saucer when the program crashed. So, I'll have to do it again later, because I have to go to work in a little bit.

Sorry man.  LightWave or Blender?

Lightwave. I think I'm going to try MKF's .fbx suggestion when I get home.

I can't wait to see what happens!

Pretty much what I expected to happen. I exported the saucer to see how it did, then I exported the whole ship. The import thing allows me to keep my layers. It imported OK, but instead of meters the ship was kilometers long. But, that was easily fixed. As expected, I need to fix the materials, but it's not bad.

I've played around with the materials some. There's more work to do, but I have to go to work. But, you get the idea.

Nicely, NICELY done!

pretty sweet man. i love it when formats work.

I have been trying to work in .obj as much as i can for small components now. makes the almost assured conversion possible. and of course .dae  for bigger projects

Thanks guys. I knew .fbx would work, I've used it before. I like it over .obj because it at least preserved my colors. I don't know if .obj would have done that.

Yeah OBJ and 3ds are horribly outdated. The worst of it is all the "flavors" of obj and 3ds as each app and version of that app adds their own illegal parameters that generally fuck everything up when your using those formats for the purpose they were made for. Worst though is none of those formats support anything not a tri. I had at one time managed to get a obj to make quads and ngons but again it would only work with 2 programs and you had to dig about to find the right setting.

What is odd though is FBX within the same app should retain a lot more than the color and geo. In max I have managed to even import in bones sliders and some materials from simple blender exports and Lightwave. Oh and cinema 4d as most of Nightfevers models I dl are in fbx.

Yeah, it kept the colors. The materials were just different because LW2018 uses totally different materials than LW10. But, it was mostly as I had it.

I remember having all kinds of pain with .obj back in the day, so I definitely didn't want to use that.

And, finally, the bussard collectors are looking how I imagine them:







I may redo the lights inside, but the point was to get the materials where I want them. I normally don't worry about materials at this stage, but this is a crucial element to any TOS era Starfleet ship.

glowy.

.obj was the first 'common' format ( in its original design ) to support n-gons and strips and nurbs. But the support of that all in the app is dependent on how lazy the app dev was.

.obj is more of a language in its highest forms. HAving hand coded importers and exporters for .obj it is one of my favourite ways to throw tris, quads and n-gons about LW supports most of the higher .obj functionality / my old P3D supports almost all but nurbs and besier surfaces. ( I don't understand the math magic that makes them work at a code level, how 3 curves make a huge surface if needed ?? like how does that work. LOL  )

^^ pure .obj has no poly or sub-object limit. remains human readable ( except you can't just see the mesh in the numbers (lol if you can you are probably a singularity) if you are above 10 or 12 faces ( nice to meet yo uMr Data))

.3ds dies because of the hard poly and vert limit, 65,536 -1.  that is you can't have more than 65,536-1 of anything.  a crack was made at a .e3ds (bigger than 16bit int max indexes) , but meh why it lacks other poly info and is only tris. one advantage is that it has simpler sub-object transforms but was never used ..ever

again .obj is more like a language is in some cases and yeah has soo many flavours, but at its core, the tris or quads will remain easy to use.
the cool think about .obj the purest version tri and quad strips .. can be loaded directly into vert buffers in GL and they just render.
one other curiosity, with OBJ, you can list the verts in reverse and if you use negative indexes you still end up with the same mesh. the biggest issue with .obj is how some app took the lazy way out in their importers and exporters, choosing to skip parts of the Wavefront .obj guide. It has no tris or vert limit. making it handy for point-clouds work. I have crashed modern rigs opening poly meshes that are too big. due to that last thing where you can build a .obj in reverse using negative indexing means you can construct a .obj on the fly by appending the file. A si has found out the hard way you can make and export a mesh that exceeds the ram limit very easy. ( depending on your rig, having access to cutting edge fluid dynamic SIM rigs at work that have more ram in the work terminals connected than I have ever owned in total LOl, yeh they could load my  'bloated' .obj no problems and display it. suppose it a perk of working in a research facility and knowing some of the teh researchers well enough to have them try my crazy ideas. LOL

for big stuff, I prefer .dae (colada) as it like FBX is actually just a container for mesh and scene graph data held within like a big special zip file. i don't like max's because its a bitch to work with programmatically because you have to have the correct version of fbx converter installed and linked. and that's the 2nd piss off for fbx .. max can even convert properly between versions of FBX without having the correct FBX converter installed.

.obj its not your grandpa's format .. well ok yeah it is but it's also not. it was just never used properly .. yet.  again it helps to think of .obj as a language vs just a format. not all to diff from GCode.And yeah apps like Lightwave tried to extend it. but just the original format of  .obj supported so much more than the computer of its day could really handle.

oh just thought for just mesh data and keeping .mtl out of it  ..  just thinking the only thing .obj needs is a bin version and sub-object transforms and pivot supports. too bad .obj never had pivots or the concept of a parent, multi-objects in a file but pure .obj has no parent info, all mesh data sits at the origin.

Didnt read it all but I still wont use OBJ for anything. It is always broken wont open or everything is full fo tris and it is useless for anything because it DOES have so many variations it is impossible to know what will or wont export or import. Hence if I see stuff in it I often just plain avoid it. It either means hours cleaning fucking tris off faces clearly meant to be quads or ngons. Fixing flipped faces doubled faces or holes everywhere.

FBX is not just"max's" it is a format or as said container supported by most large applications hence why it is so much easier to transport content between apps

I have NEVER had obj export across apps without massive issues. NEVER. OBJ is stuck in DOS land with an inability to read any modern file naming so maps if they DO import over are always broke to the point it is faster to re do it all.

Long and short FBX works OBJ does not. I can get my meshes into LW blender and MAYA with FBX obj it always is broken or more work than it is worth to FIX all the fuck ups.