Meshes from Lightwave to D3 with Normal Maps

Originally written by oDDity on http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/557

You will need:

• Lightwave 7.5 or 8
• Normal map plugins for LW (http://amber.rc.arizona.edu/lw/normalmaps.html)
• Doom 3
• A computer

SO, you have you high and low res versions of your model - the high res version doesn't need a UV map or to be triangles, the low res version certainly does need a UV map, and you can triple the low res mesh before or after the normal map creation in LW, it doesn't matter)

• Put you low res model in layer 1, put your high res model in layer 2 as a background template
• Start the normal map create plugin from the construct/ additional tab
• Make sure the name of the UV map you select is the same you put on you low res object
• The only other things you have to change on the plugin interface is what size you want the image to be and to press the 'tangent' button at the bottom since 'local' is selected by default.
• The surface name you give you object should be the same as the folder you keep your object, so if the model is called 'chair' and goes in '...base/models/mymodels/chair' folder, name the surface of the chair 'models\mymodels\chair\chair'
• It's also best to put your normal map, your diffuse map and you spec map in this folder before opening Lightwave's surface editor so you can browse to this folder for whatever you called the normal map image ('chair_local.tga' would be conventional). Put this in the colour channel with the appropiate UV map.

- Save the Lightwave file directly to this 'models/mymodels/chair' folder Then you write a new shader and put it in the materials folder, call the shader mymodels.mtr with this text inside it:

models/mymodels/chair/chair
{
    noSelfShadow
    
    bumpmap models/mymodels/chair/chair_local.tga
    diffusemap models/mymodels/chair/chair_d.tga
    specularmap models/mymodels/chair/chair_s.tga
}

That's it, you should now be able to browse to it and see it in the entities window of the doom editor. I'm not sure if all of those steps were absolutely necessary, but it works.

Note from Fingernail: "Don't use this plugin. D3 uses a different configuration of normals in the vertical...use D3's own RENDERBUMP and RENDERBUMPFLAT tools. Syntax:

renderbumpflat -size x y mypath/mymodel.lwo

renderbump is more complex, as you need to specify the low poly model. I haven't used this yet."