First off let me introduce myself, I’m Shaun Lee Bishop a long time Lightwave user (since version 4). My work is mostly for the big cruise companies like P&O and Cunnard, also I do a lot of work for ABB. Also have a few credits for TV shows films.
I’ve been asked many times to create real-time walk throughs, so far we’ve managed this by strining together pre-rendered video or Quick time clips. No I feel most computers can handle a very good standard of game 3d, I thought it’s time to look into game engines.
I’ve looked at Torque Unity so far. My first impressions was to go with Torque, but found lots of problems with their Lightwave export. The FBX plug in for Unity has it’s drawbacks too.
I plan on buying Unity pro version in the next few weeks. :0) I’ve got to grips with a few problems- Lightmaps being the worst problem also importing FBX rigs from other software.
You might find this useful but I’ve found if I use Deep Explorer to load FBX files an save them as LWS files I can then keep the rig make changes to the object or motions with in LW. Only problem is the bones are not setup as you’d expect. The rest rotations are pointing the wrong way. Not really a problem as they still do the job. Oddly the FBX that Unity supplies only imports the rig as nulls, so if anyone out there knows how to convert nulls to bones… :0)
Only question I have about Unity is can it handle Sub-division objects for level of detail?
In my hunt for sample FBX rigs models I came across this site:
For lightmaps on static objects, I use Blender in my pipeline. Model, UV and surface in LW and then lightmap in Blender. Blender’s fbx exporter supports multiple UVs. Here’s a decent tut for Blender lightmapping:
^^The tut says use Lightmap Projections fro unwrapping but I usually have better luck with Smart Projections in Blender.
You’ll need to freeze your meshes. Pretty sure sub-d info won’t come through. Can’t help you on the nulls thing, sorry!
If you have the budget I’d highly recommend purelight. They are releasing a unity version very soon. Simply setup you scene in your 3d app, then export all of the objects as .ase or collada files. Import it into purelight and bake your lightmaps. Then save your purelight scene. After than all you have to do is open unity and import your purelight scene. It’s super simple and gives great results. Though it is a bit pricey.
Purelight looks good, reminded me of KRay I bought KRay a few years back. I grab the latest update just found out there’s a new texture baking mode. I stopped using KRay after LW got it’s great GI update. Though I still have been using it for exibition stand renders I have been doing. :0) They are generic type scenes.
Also worked out how to get great lightmaps. Simply create a GI cache, then set all the surfaces to white render. What you get is a nice image with just the colour created by the GI Lights, clean on any texture maps. Really please with the results.
Still require to use Microwave to create normal maps, though I’m sure there’s another cheat out there for that.
Hey Pete, Think you miss understood about my sub-d wish, I was wondering if Untiy could have it’s own sub-d setting. Exporting a cage model from LW is fine, it’s a question in Unity can use that to create Sub-d models level of detail. From what I understand a lot of GPU can do this now fast.