OrbWeaver

Just don't let a modeller hear you say that - it is a very good way to completely wreck a model from the point of view of symmetry, smoothing and UV-mapping (in Blender at least the UV data is erased by using this function).

Successfully imported and again - no UV map. Is something wrong with my Blender setup or do half of these models not have a UV map? EDIT: Just opened the ASE in notepad and yup, there is no UV map for this object, I'll have to create one myself in order to solve this problem.

I have tried importing the candlestick1.lwo and it imports fine, however there do not seem to be any UVs on the object (the material names are ok). Can anyone with LightWave confirm whether there is supposed to be a UV map on this object? If so, then there is a problem with the LWO import script.

You don't require a Python installation to use Blender itself, but it is required by some scripts. I recommend installing ActivePython, and making sure that you can run "python" from a command prompt before using these scripts.

I don't think you should be seeing that message, I certainly don't get it. Can you open up a command prompt and type "python"? Do you have Python installed? I've never touched that field, I didn't even know it existed. I'm pretty sure that if that needs to be set, it should be set to your Python installation not the scripts folder, but in my experience having Python in your Windows path (and possibly setting the PYTHONPATH variable as well) should be sufficient to run these scripts.

I often get python errors, usually cause by having the wrong version of Python, PYTHONPATH set incorrectly or something like that. I know the export script does work but I haven't tried the import script yet. You think that's annoying, wait until you find a thread that asks about your exact problem, followed up by a response from the original poster saying "never mind, sorted it" with NO SOLUTION POSTED AT ALL.

Look at the spiral - there's some quite obvious incorrect Gouraud-shading going on there.

I'll see if I can take a look at it, there is an ASE importer for Blender (which I haven't tried yet, but feedback is positive).

OK, I think that's a problem with the mesh smoothing. This would need to be checked in a modelling app, and vertices unwelded if necessary.

Do you mean you have switched textures to one with low or no specular, and still see the effect? Have you tried disabling specular with r_skipSpecular?

OK, things to watch out for: 1) The Blender LWO import does not support UVs for some reason. There is a LWO script which imports UVs which I cannot currently find on Google, hopefully it is somewhere on my hard drive however. 2) When it comes to export, using ASE is better than LWO from Blender due to limitations on the length of material names (which have to specify the complete name of the Doom 3 material). Provided I can dig up the LWO import script it should be relatively easy to do what you need. EDIT: This seems to be the LWO import script: http://uaraus.altervista.org/index.php?fil...O_importer.html

There seems to be some confusion here between the disk space and the video ram issues. These are not the same. Supplying TGA textures will have a definite impact on disk space, but it will not impact memory because Doom 3 compresses the TGA images dynamically if the requisite cvars are set. I don't see why we couldn't use TGA images in the master development repository, and then perhaps strip them out and go to exclusively DDS versions when the non-hires version of the mod is due for release.

It is the specular, try "r_skipSpecular 1" and watch the strange lighting revert to a simple black mesh. Essentially you are seeing a physically-invalid effect because the diffusemap says "reflects no light" but the midgrey specular map says "reflects quite a lot of light". That's very strange - it implies that the texture for an architectural mesh is a type of "prop".

Could you be a little more specific as to what you are attempting? Blender should be able to process both LWO and ASE but I'd need to know exactly what you are trying to do in order to give any advice.

I wonder if its possible to specify a DDS file directly as part of a map stage in a texture, rather than using a dummy TGA path which is replicated with a DDS in the dds/ folder.

I have to say I am extremely concerned about the use of DDS for original textures. While I understand the reasoning as regards the size of the download, and agree with it in principle, the fact remains that exclusively using DDS textures is just something Doom 3 was not designed to support. I think as we go forward we may find that the amount of hackery required to get the game to work properly, when the original TGA images that Doom 3 expects simply aren't there, becomes more trouble in terms of maintenance than its size advantage justifies.

The reason is that it doesn't have a diffusemap. models/darkmod/props/textures/irongate_d.tga is completely black. As an aside, is it intended for model skin images to be in models/darkmod/props/textures, even if the model itself is in architecture? If so this is pretty confusing.

Looks suspiciously like the compressed normalmap problem.

Since we have a method of changing the additive stage based on the light, why do we need to change the model?

Yes, you would have something like { colored blend add map path/to/additive_texture.tga } This means that the additive texture will be multiplied by the entity colour (i.e. the colour of the light specified by "_color") before being added.

You would certainly see no effect without the "colored" stage, otherwise the material will not know how to respond to the light colour changes.

As a first order guess I would say that combine means "take the first object selected, add all of the keys from the second object (keeping the classname of the first), and delete the second object". It would be interesting to view the result when combining a light with a func_static made from a patch, rather than a model, although in this case it would appear that the desired effect could be achieved merely by adding the aformentioned "colored" stage to the texture of the light's model.

Indeed, very nice. Now there's just the small task of modelling the thing.

I looked on D3W and it seems that you do this simply by selecting the light and a func_static with the texture, and Combine them together in the editor. I could not find any detail on what texture stage code was required to make this work, I suspect it involves multiplying the Add stage by a certain shaderparm. Hopefully it should be possible to find out by looking at the D3 materials. I would also like to know what "Combine" means at the map level because presently DarkRadiant has no option for this.

There is a way you can bind a light and a textured entity together such that the brightness of the light affects the brightness of the texture. This is used in Doom 3 for the "trim" lights that are made from textures but need to switch on and off along with the light source. I have never done this myself but there should be some info on Doom3World.