This is driving me nuts. In Lightwave they appear properly UVed with a texture. When they get into Unity, their UVs are gone. All the links I’ve found are for older versions of lightwave – the artist is using 10. Using the same workflow that was successful in the past, I now can’t even get a simple sphere UVed in Unity…
Here’s typical workflow:
-select polygons, go to map>new uv map
-typically select atlas and create
-go into surface editor, click T for the color property of the surface
-select UV projection, select the uv map, click use texture
-export from modeler
Maybe I found a bug in the FBX importer. This was driving me up a wall but I think I figured it out. In lightwave, the image I was using to test the UVs was already in my Unity project. I think this caused Unity’s importer to think “I already have this image, so I won’t import it again” and consequently, it also didn’t import the UV. I randomly used an image on my desktop and now UVs get imported. I just went back to confirm this is the behavior. Holy crap that is ridiculous.
As a general rule of thumb, I would suggest using the FBX exporter in Layout instead of the one in Modeler (which hasn’t been updated since v 9.x I think). Send model to Layout, export from there.
Also if you can, upgrade to LW11, the exporter there can be scripted externally so you get “automagic” conversion of LWS files to FBX inside of Unity.