layered textures for Shockwave?

[pfash]

Hi All,
I understand there is advantage in performance from keeping texture size as small as possible (and power of 2). Tiling textures is a good solution for covering large areas while still using smaller textures.

Sometimes a large area that includes a tiled texture needs an overlaying texture that provides some unifying image/color. Like my project that needs a 'molding' that runs along the top and bottom of a wall of bricks. (Created in Lightwave6.5, the bricks are displayed by using a 256 X 256 brick texture tiled across the shader and the molding is a 256 X 256 texture and alpha mask that stretches over the whole shader.)

This requires layered textures, however and Shockwave does not support the use of layered textures (layered textures applied in a 3d modeling program, that is).

So as a workaround at first I applied the secondary molding texture (from the above example) in Director after my model was loaded into the world..using lingo. This looked good but on at least one card I got a weird skewing of the walls texture (which was resolved as soon as I took off the secondary 'molding' texture. That texture was a photoshop document with transparency and I heard that some cards don't do well with this.)

So now I am left with what the Lightwave Shockwave Exporter calls a 'solution' to the problem (of Director's inability to show layered textures): "...any surface channels that use layered textures must be flattened and turned into a single texture by using LightWave's surface baker."

I tried this several times and the result is a blurry surface image:
http://www.mentoringnetwork.org/bakedTextures

So I am back to square one I think. Am I missing something? How do others solve this problem?
Thanks much,
Paul

[mdoyle]

Hi pfash

What are you using to bake the textures to your wall? Is it lightwaves baker or a 2rd party one?

M

[mdoyle]

Meant to write 3rd party.............

[pfash]

it is Lightwaves 'surface baker' under the 'shaders' tab of the surface editor (LW6.5b).

[mdoyle]

I have found the default lightwave baker is not the best. I can deform geometry as well as make things more blurred than they should be.

I have used Microwave (http://www.evasion3d.com/mw_intro.html) to bake textures and to be honest the options for baking as well as the results are alot better. U can download the demo, but it is time limited trial as well as only being able to export textures at 512x512, but if it is for shockwave 3d you don't want to use any textures bigger than that, because it creates problems for some graphics cards. If you use shockwave alot and bake textures alot it is worth the money,

Mark

[pfash]

Thanks mdoyle. I will check it out.

[Sam_Horton]

Just make more geometry. Director can sling around polygons like there's no tomorrow, it's the texturing that really slows things down. I have used scenes with over 60k poly count and it ran fine. If you make additional geometry then you can easily add shaders and texture them seperately.

An additional thing you can do is tile your uv maps to get more milage out of them. Just move the UV coords way off the boundaries of the UV map and it will tile. The only requirement is that you set up your textures correctly so that they can actually tile. I find texturing like this to be much easier and more reliable than standard texture mapping.

[pfash]

yep, that's what I ended up doing. (another model/ more polys)
thanks Sam