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edit: TL;DR: I've tweaked the .lwo exporter to preserve autosmooth angle Ahem. When I started writing this post a couple of days ago, it was supposed to be a "please help me, models won't smooth" kind of thing, but as I started taking screenshots and such for a comprehensive view of the problem, the question morphed into a "is there a hack to get .lwo's to export the way .ase's do", then to "how to get the same surface smoothing from Blender as you can get from Lightwave" and eventually to "does anyone around know python and blender enough to fix the export plugin". But then I fixed the addon myself, so it was almost as if there's no point to the thread. However, while googling around for a solution I stumbled upon a whole bunch of incomplete (1,2) or outright wrong (1,2) information, and whenever the question came up the issue was never really resolved completely. That might be because the problem isn't obvious, since a lot of exported models will actually end up correctly smoothed on export, leading one to believe wrong shading in rare cases is due to modeling mistakes / bad shadowmesh / etc. Point is, having the definitive .lwo smoothing post seems useful. Identifying the problem: Here's the mesh. I add an 'edge split' modifier (I use sharp edges while modeling the low poly, so I can uncheck the 'edge angle' option). I can now apply the modifier(s) and export to .ase (triple the mesh either in export options or in modifiers beforehand). The .ase looks alright in-game: Now I'll export it to .lwo using this script. Depending on export options, here are the results: If I also check "remove doubles", I'll lose all of the split (sharp) edges: (recalculating normals on export can be unpredictable as well, so clean up the model beforehand instead) Right about this point I start searching for a solution online, stumble upon this and try the renderbump hack. However, all it seems to do is weld all of the vertices back together at runtime and attempt to smooth the whole surface, similarly to "remove duplicates", but with no upper threshold. (to anyone possibly reading this in the future: don't forget to revert your changes to the materials!) Source of the problem: At this point I still wasn't sure if it's even possible to get .lwo's identical to .ase's, so I installed Lightwave. Naturally, it took some time to eventually stumble upon Surface Editor (F5), and the "smoothing threshold" contained therein. But then I just had to crank it up to 180 and export to "LWO2". That fixes everything in-game: So the issue is trivial, I just have to find a way to somehow pass on a smoothing angle through the exporter. However, the "auto smooth" option on the object data tab doesn't seem to affect anything regardless of angle. Long story short, after some hex-comparison magic, I home in on SMAN block in the exporter script: So what it actually does is set your smoothing angle to either 90°, 86°(??), or 0°, depending on whether you've chosen "idtech compatible", "smoothed", or neither. The solution: Now, I don't know Python and I don't know Blender scripting, so I can't say with full certainty that I didn't break anything. But I did cobble together a version of the script that seems to do the job. Here it is, mirror / do whatever you want with it. If your mesh has autosmooth enabled, and you've checked "idtech" or "smoothed" on export, your chosen autosmooth angle will now transfer to the surface in .lwo: I took the liberty of changing the default export options to what seems to suit TDM the best, you can just open the script in notepad and edit them to your taste. Wrapping up, there are still some mysteries I didn't solve, such as "idtech compatible" models taking up only half the size of models exported otherwise (including from Lightwave itself), there doesn't seem to be any visible difference in-game, at least in TDM. That "1.5 radian" in the code still makes me scratch my head. And I still don't know if the 4-8x size savings over .ase matter for in-game memory at all (but at least I know I won't have to edit the *BITMAPs manually anymore). Even after all this, the .ase still has just slightly better shading, but since the outputs of the exporter and Lightwave itself are now identical, seems safe to say it's as good as it gets.

Does anyone have the latest version of the md5 import / export scripts for Blender, for both importing and exporting md5mesh and md5anim with the latest Blender release? I last attempted to rig a custom character ages ago, the scripts are long unsupported and I couldn't find new ones. Blender is now at version 3.5.1, do we have md5 scripts for that?

This topic is all about discussing anything regarding Blender. As a n00b, it is amazing how a single bad setting can make your cycles renders require extreme levels of sampling to get rid of noise.... and still not look perfect. Today I learned how critically important the "multiple importance sampling" option is if you have an HDRI background with strong sunlight in an area. It reduces the number of necessary samples, and as a result, also reduces your rendering time while producing a MUCH cleaner looking image. Also, the new version that is just about to come out (2.70) will increase cycles rendering speed on the CPU by about 30%. That is pretty awesome.

Hi. I'm a long-time Blender user and was wondering if it's possible, in part or in whole, to use Blender to make levels, mostly the level geometry. I understand that NPC, scripting, partitioning, etc would be something better done in DarkRadiant, but I'd like to use Blender to make the buildings, streets, terrain, etc and to place them.

I've just finished uploading on Youtube a video in five parts in which I show a complete process of creating this normal map: Links: part 1 part 2 part 3 part 4 part 5 I used Blender, Sculptris and GIMP with normalmap plugin. BTW, my PDF tutorial to Blender can be still downloaded here: http://www.fileshost...hp?id=F02584AD1

When exporting from Blender to TDM in .lwo format, it's necessary to set the material names to textures/darkmod/,,,,something. If an object has a lot of textures it's going to be tedious to search the mtr files to get the right name. The same goes for applying textures to imported .lwo objects. I wrote this plugin to make that task much easier. Version 2.8.0 Download: Go to the GitHub page: https://github.com/RSoul82/Blender-TDM-Material-Manager Right click the .py file, then go to Save As and put it in some folder. (Or go to Clone or Download and save it as a zip file to your computer). The old version, for Blender 2.79, is here: https://github.com/RSoul82/Blender-TDM-Material-Manager/tree/Blender-2.79-archive (this is unlikely to be upgraded unless it causes serious problems) It'll be interesting to see how this is in the wild.

Hi, I thought I should document this discussion here, for future reference, as info on this subject has become quite scattered and out of date. I've been wrestling with MD5s for a while now with no success. Importing works but the meshes and armatures are problematic. I decided to start with an animated model from scratch. Followed a few instructions in videos or tutorials (most recently trying out Sotha's solution http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/14970-blender-rig-for-standard-male-npc/?do=findComment&comment=325423 ) but have yet to be able to export successfully. The animation oddly enough is working correctly (on the model viewer, havent gotten into the game yet), but the mesh itself is getting horribly deformed. Im using the io_scene_md5 importer/exporter. Going back to version 2.72 didnt solve it for me. In blender After exporting Any thoughts?

Not so long ago I found what could make a pretty good profile picture and decided to try it out on these new forums. But I couldn't find a button anywhere that would let me change it. I asked on Discord and it seems Spooks also couldn't find anything anywhere. So I logged into an old alternative account and, lo and behold, that account has a button. This is on the first screen I get when I: 1) click on my account name in the top-right of the browser -> 2) click on 'profile'. Compared to my actual account: Are you also missing this button on your account? It'd be very much appreciated if that functionality could be restored to any of the affected accounts.

Hi, I need to know what the code is to use Spoiler Tags. I am using my tablet and I don't have the options to use anything, like spoiler tags, quote tags, text changes etc. Thanks

I've noticed that some .lwo models I import into Blender have their texture mapping split into multiple UV channels. It makes editing hard and re-exporting impossible because only one UV channel will be considered. Here's a simple way to combine all the UV channels: Here's an example of a door, where some faces have visible UV mapping and others appear to be solid colour only: When looking in the Object Data you can see it has 3 UV channels: Selecting the other two channels shows that the plain faces do in fact have mapping: To combine the three of them so you can see and export all of the UV mapping, you have to split the object by the UV channel, delete the unused channels from each object and then give each object's UV channel the same name, before combining the object again. You can leave the first channel alone. Select the second channel, go into Edit mode and also open the UV mapping panel. Click on the button shown here to ensure it's active: In the UV panel, select everything (A to toggle). In the lower left corner (or perhaps somewhere else) you'll see what looks like a single vertex: This is actually all of the vertices belonging to the other UV channels. Use the box ( B ) or circle ( C ) select tools to deselect them (Middle mouse click/drag). That will limit the selection solely to the faces that are mapped in the current UV channel: In the 3D panel, you can now split the selected faces (P) to make a new mesh: If there are more UV channels, select the original mesh, select the next UV channel in the list, and repeat the above process. Continued in the next post due to attachment limit being reached...

You can find here an animation rig in Blender for the male NPC. If one wants to make animations for TDM in Blender this will be very helpfull. EDIT 2014.05.28: I also made a female version of the rig. It's a bit different than male version. See this post for details. EDIT 2014.08.02: I did a small change to male rig. Link has been updated. Also added some new animations.

Hi guys, through the "cheats" topic I got the idea, that it would be quite useful, if there were tags for missions (the post was about removing the killing restriction in some missions to suit the prefered play style). I don't know how easy or difficult this is, but with them, it would be quite convenient to pick missions with playstyles, environment, etc one does want to use. This could also be expanded to other mission properties. I remember a discussion about climbable drains, handles on doors, that cannot be picked and other things the map author chooses for himself. That way these things would be clearer and as I said before, it is easier to choose missions with playstyles that suit oneself. What do think?