LW to 3DC and back

[philnolan3d]

Someone was asking about how to do this so I thought I'd make up a little quick tutorial.

I started with this simple shape in LightWave Modeler. I made two surfaces, Green and Blue for the sake of simplicity.

Then I UV mapped them. Two maps, one for each surface.

After saving the LWO model I went into 3DC and chose to Import for Per Pixel Painting, using the following settings.

Once inside of 3DC I started with a blank white model and painted it with a material I had made earlier. That's Color, Normal, and Spec.

After I was done painting I was ready to export back out to LightWave. So I hit File > Export Model (obj, lwo), making sure to choose LWO as the file type, and entered these settings:

Now in LightWave Layout I loaded up the model and you can see the nodes and other surface settings are already applied. The only thing I did do was clean up the nodes a little because they come in stack on top of each other. I also reduced the normal map amplitude to 50% because it was a little too strong.

And here's the render:

I hope that was helpful, please feel free to ask any questions.

[mwgrafx]

What was your method of creating the tiles within 3DC?

[philnolan3d]

The tiles weren't created with 3DC I made them a while ago with a photo (of tiles) converted to normal / spec / color with Crazy Bump, in 3DC I just loaded them in as a material.

[mwgrafx]

Cool, thanks for the info.