LWO Micro Exporter

[Insquall]

To my knowledge the LWO micro exporter can only export what the camera sees, and culls the back faces.

Is there any chance (now or in the future) of it being able to:
Export with back face culling off? (maybe with less polygon detail on the back faces)
Export outside of the camera view? (maybe with less polygon detail outside the camera view)
Export the material properties per vertex/polygon?

Also can it export sequences of frames for animation?

This would be useful if I want to generate the polygons in terragen but use a different renderer.

Sorry if this has been mentioned before

[MooseDog]

true and not true.

you're using the lwo micro exporter which does as you described.

instead go to:  create heightfield operator>heightfield export lwo

very slick little operator imho.  it creates a series of lwo meshes named sequentially, as well as a scene with all the different meshes already lined up perfectly for you!  i believe there's twelve of them.  warning tho! the meshes are HUGE! and heavy and trying to even tumble each one in modeler is an exercise in futility due to lw's ogl weaknesses.  nevertheless in layout it's quite easy at this point to animate your camera.

what will not be exported is any texturing you may have done in tg2, nor will camera motion unless you or someone you know can write a translator for tg2's camera motion file into lw's mdd motion file.

hope that works for you!

[Insquall]

Ok, I mean the LWO micro exporter not the LWO heightfield exporter.

[Oshyan]

For your purposes the Heightfield to LWO operator may be more appropriate as it exports the entire terrain. The disadvantage is it doesn't deal with non-planar displacement of course (since heightfields can only reproduce planar features).

It may be possible to expand the capabilities of the micro exporter in the future as you describe but I'm not aware of specific plans to do so. We do intend to improve export options in general so this may be an implied addition that I'm not directly ware of. If nothing else it might be something to be implemented in a plugin once the SDK is available.

In the meantime I suggest you experiment with Heightfield to LWO (remember that a heightfield generate node can take a shader as input) to see if that will give you what you need.

- Oshyan

[Insquall]

Thanks for both of your replies. 

I understand. I just love the subdivsion method used in Terragen 2, but the LWO micro exporter doesn't look very useful to me at the moment.

[Oshyan]

The micro exporter is intended for use in matching a specific rendered frame's output from TG2 with your modeling app's output. Since the output is view-dependent it works best in this context. If you have more general needs the Heightfield to LWO node is a better route, but it still may not serve your precise needs. Expansion of the micro exporter to include culled geometry might be possible but it would slow down rendering quite a lot and the geometry would be *extremely* dense, so that's something to consider.

- Oshyan

[Matt]

Hi Insquall,

In many cases you can avoid the back-face culling and view-dependent cropping by using a different render node and camera to determine exactly which region of the scene you want to export, but of course you will have to be more careful with the choice of view to get the detail you want. You could also export data from more than one render.

You could also widen the field of view to get data outside your original image.

I think the exporter handles multiple frames if you insert %04d into the filename in the exporter. If not, that is something I need to fix.

What material properties would you want to be in the exported mesh? I imagine UVs would be useful, but for terrain the texture coordinates are often very similar to the 3D worldspace coordinates. What other properties are you interested in... do you mean diffuse colour, specular colour etc.? The shader system doesn't enforce shaders to accumulate those data in a consistent way but in many situations it may be possible.

Matt