OMFG, finally lol. not easily btw, but definitely found a workaround to get smoothing groups of some kind from LW to BM. it involves using BLENDER. a program i know many use, but for me is so drastically under-designed in the usability department as to be like communicating with an alien species but hey! new things, good times. at least its progress. so here's what to do:
first note: the lightwave 9.6 collada exporter is shite. it strips out a ton of info, namely normal info and smoothing info, im sure a lot more, but i havent had the pleasure of having to need it yet. also, it doesn't have any option for appying rotation or scaling to the model in the export stage - this is just a goddam pain in the ass, as lightwaves native setup is -90 out on the z axis, 90 deg out in the y and 10,000% smaller than the scale BM wants. brilliant.lol
ok so you have an object in LW - its all nicely UV'd doesn't really matter about the textures themselves, the native lightwave export to blender import will shred em all anyways...
scale your model up from normal metres, to 10,000 in scales numeric panel.
im not going to use the collada exporter at this point in LW, as its **** ok..
this method is pretty CHEAP ok - it works on smoothing per surface group, so u cant smooth across surfaces - no big deal (so far)
make sure the diffuse colour of your materials in LW are as you want them, because it does keep this data.
make sure all polys are UV'd, and have a texture linked in, otherwise BM will shaft it later for you. it can be any textures, just make sure one is defined, you can change it later.
Merge up all your points, just for memory's sake, nothing is gained by unwelding.
OK
save as an lwo file, as usual (just tri's and quad's)
open blender and delete everything that it preloads with, something like a cam, light and a goddam cube for some reason!, i think pressing 'a' then delete does it.
import this into blender..have fun getting blender to display it. if you find(took me half an hour) the view settings at the bottom of the screen somewhere, you can set the clipping ranges, just make em 0 and 10,000 rather than .5 and 500 or something...
if you use the num pad keys u can get ortho views of the model, just roller wheel out to see the whole mesh.
ok, now if you want your whole object to be hard faced, solid edged etc no smoothing, just straight away select all 'a' (as blender will assume material sets from LW are separate meshes),
then go to the collada (latest version) export, select minimal output options (all off except tri's or polys if you have quads too)
then hack your way through the DOS style interface to save the damn file to the BM directory (lol) i found copy pasting the tree for explorer into the address field worked best -please if anyone can tell me how to set a directory as a work directory id love that! save the file as a .dae (make sure u add the extension)
then load it into BM item editor and voila 'nothing'
yes thats right, nothing at all lol, except a shadow! this is where a hint from whyroc's forum entry came in very useful - blender sets the alpha of the models to zero!!!, so go into each material in BM and push up the opacity to where it should be - easier doing it in BM for multimaterials than in blender (so far)
so, thats it - then you have to go into each mat and set the textures back up.
if you want SOME smoothing on the model though, then in blender you have to (under link and materials, inediting mode F9) find the group of polys/material that you want smooth (from the little listing just under the edit button, its kinda purple...its called vertex groups, then hit Set Smooth, its a couple of button under the previous! - you can keep doing this for different sets. then export as usual through collada.
ive gotta say, this whole mess proves what a goddam nightmare LW is, and i wish id taken my loyalty elsewhere a long time ago!!! cos im getting a bit older now and its hard work to switch!!!!
Blender - I LOVE the idea of, its truly a fantastic piece of software, truly, its almost as well stacked as very expensive software for most tasks - BUT its been designed by a nutter, im sure, it has to be, along with max's array of sub-plugin interfaces one of the worst bits of software ive used, and ive used most 3d packages at one time or other. and this is not to say LW has it any better, ahh dammit, maybe theyre all bad lol, i dunno, i guess its what you get used to huh. but as an open software, i find it disappointing in its interface.
btw ive quit smoking, so all this may just be misplaced outrage. i love it all really.!!!
