Lightwave Baked "Swiss Cheese" render

Trying to bake textures in lightwave but I'm getting these results:


Swiss Cheese Effect.


I've used Robins AV templates, and the mesh ones from the website and I'm still receiving these holes. Could someone fill me in on whats going on here and provide a solution?

try checking "double sided" in the surfaces panel of the av mesh, if that dosent work, you can bring the mesh into modeler, triple the polys then save and export back out into layout, should be ok then, hope that helps

Here's the good news. What you're seeing has nothing to do with Lightwave itself, or with your render settings. It's actually a very common problem, caused by the sloppy way in which the OBJ's on the SL downloads page were put together. It's called locked normals. Certain polygons have their face normals running parallel to their surfaces instead of perpendicular to them. The result is light is not reflecting off of them, but across them (which is of course impossible in RL). This is why some faces appear totally black, while others appear to grade from gray to black. The light is coming off at very funky angles.

Now here's the bad news. I'm not a Lightwave user, so I don't know the exact commands for unlocking the normals. In Maya, it's simply Normals -> Unlock Normals. I'm sure LW must have an equivalent command somewhere, but I have no idea what it is. I'm sure someone more familar with Lightwave will come along to provide the answer, or you can try looking it up in Help. I tried Google, but didn't find anything.

Sciao's sugestion of increasing the poly count MIGHT do the trick, if LW creates new normals from scratch upon subdividing. If it tries to preserve what's there, though, then it won't make much difference. It might even make it worse.

One thing you might want to do, since you like Robin's templates anyway, is download her OBJ's from her website. The normals on them are already corrected, so you won't have to mess with them. http://www.robinwood.com/Catalog/Technical/SL-Tuts/SLDownloads/Exported_CS3_Avatars.zip

Hi Immortal Crumb!

I used to use LightWave quite a lot; but I've mostly switched to modo, so I never upgraded to LW9.

Today, I can't get LW to open .obj files. It crashes every time I try it. I'd hunt down what is causing that, but I don't really have time, since I no longer use it much.

However, if memory from several years ago servers (and it might or might not) the locked normals that Chosen mentioned are a Maya thing. If the .obj file is made with Lightwave, that particular property is lost.

So, open the model in LW. Then open each material, and assign the TextureUV map to it, so you won't lose the UV Maps. (LW doesn't keep unassigned UV Maps.) You don't need to put any kind of texture in there; just assign the maps.

Save it as an .obj file, with a name that lets you tell this is the new one; like "Avatar_Female_LW.obj"

Open the new .obj file you just made. The normals should be unlocked, and it should just look blocky and horrible, instead of blocky and horrible and full of dark, weird polys.

Tap the "tab" key, to get rid of the blocky and horrible look, so it will shade smoothly.

Or you can just "cheat."

Use a text editor to open the .obj file, find all the lines that start with "vn" and delete them. Save, making sure that it's saving in plain text and keeping the .obj suffix, and when you open it in any program at all, the normals will all be unlocked, and that nasty "swiss cheese" look will be gone.

When you open in LW, Merge the Vertices, so they work smoothly between the materials. Or not. Depending on what you're using it for, it really doesn't matter.

By the way, if anyone who is reading this wants to be able to open these files in something like PS CS3 or 4 extended, the "cheat" with manipulating the file in a text editor will work for you, too.

If you don't have a 3D program, you won't be able to merge the vertices, and you'll be able to see seams in a few places. But for painting purposes, that won't matter.

Hope this helps!