You should then find (after restarting or reloading the game/editor) that the model in questions has smoothing applied to it universally (with edges based on the UVW map layout) when ever the 'renderbump' parameter appears in a material.ĭesign note: If you had two materials applied to a model, one with and one without 'renderbump', the one with would appeared smoothed in game the one without won't, it'll be faceted. However, adding ' renderbump -size 512 512' does, so it's possible that the rest of the text used in the renderbump command line is not actually required for the purpose of smoothing LWO models. 125 //candle_a_local.tgaĭesign note: There appears to be a ' minimum requirement' for the parameters needed to get smoothing to work because using ' renderbump' on it's own changes nothing on the model. Renderbump -size 512 512 -colorMap -aa 1 -trace. Would need changing to models/characters/donkey/skin_tan Qer_editorimage models/characters/donkey/donkey_d.tgaĭiffusemap models/characters/donkey/donkey_d.tga
So having a basic material like this models/characters/donkey/skin_tan The good thing is that what you add doesn't even need to be specific to models used for actual renderbumping, even if any were used, they can point to anything as the important part is the ' renderbump' parameter itself. In other words, if you want your custom LWO model to have smoothing in game you need to add some ' renderbump' information to the material file. What isn't generally known is why that data is left in the material files, especially when associated with LWO files the engine reads it as an instruction to apply a general smoothing over an entire model based on material assignment. 125 //candle_a_local.tga //candle_a_hi.lwo This bit renderbump -size 512 512 -colorMap -aa 1 -trace. When looking at any of the original material files for a Doom 3 powered game, one thing that's immediately noticeable is the amount of 'junk' left in place most noticeable is the 'renderbump' information which the engine references when processing high poly models for the production of normal maps. As a result the game gets around this problem by using a setting in the material file to apply smoothing. This is caused by the game engine not reading the smoothing angle that can be set on the mesh - as with most things to do with game editing it's either all or nothing. Well not quite true, Lightwave does have smoothing but it doesn't work the same way as it does with other 3D applications, it's an 'angle' limit (a bit like Q3Map2's 'phong' shading) - all faces that are under a certain angle threshold from it's neighbour get included into a 'group' as opposed to the more traditional simple 'polygon grouping' - a selection of faces sharing the same 'group' irrespective of it's angle or orientation to it's neighbour.īecause of this it means when LWO models are brought into Radiant (which ever variety that is) they often appear 'faceted' with visible edges and hard lines appearing all over a model (see image below).Įditor render showing an ASE (right) along side an LWO model (left) This tutorial discusses the measures that need to be implemented for both of these problems to allow Blender 3D to export fully functional LWO custom game models. Doom 3 renderbump material parameter and LWO filesĪlthough there are few issues with the actual export of Lightwave *.lwo formatted models from Blender, their use in idTech does present two general problems (despite their advantage over other formats such as ASE for static in-game assets) īoth of these core issues need a work around solution so that Blender 3D created LWO models render correctly in the Doom 3 engine.