.lws to .w3d

[ankurpatwa]

i want to convert my lightwave scene (a geographical model with buildings) to shockwave .w3d format to add interactivity to it.
my lightwave crashes everytime i try to export the scene. i just have 1 frame (no animation).
i tried to export each model ony by one but no success. lightwave wont do it. it would go on for 15-20 mins and then crash.

please help

-ankur

[MentalFish]

How many polygons does the scene contain, and how large are the textures?

[ankurpatwa]

its a big scene..a topographic map with about 15 buildings

[MentalFish]

Ok, but how many polygons? and how large textures?

EDIT: without those data, I cannot tell if you are using too much data for the exporter to handle (10.000 - 100.000 should be max). Textures not over 1024 x 1024 pixels and not more than what your graphics card can handle.

[ankurpatwa]

there are more than 50,000 polygons. the 3d map i am using has size in kms^2.
is there a way round this path?

[MentalFish]

It might be a problem there, with the scale that is. There is a scale difference between LightWave and ShockWave by default, so 1 meter in LW is 100 units in SW3D. There are no measurements in SW3D but only units. You could perhaps try to scale everything down to 1% of its original size so what is 1 km in LW becomes 1000 units in SW3D.

As your situation is right now, 1 km in LW = 100.000 units in SW3D. Dont know if that is the problem for the exporter, but it might be.

[ankurpatwa]

how do i size all the objects and still preserve their positions?

[Borys//animatec]

You can apply all objects to nulls before resizing

using small object sizes when exporting to w3D is very important!
You can see this when object has many faces with small distance between them - faces dissolving - it looks bad when objects are moving or rotating - to aviod this change size of the object to few milimeters and resize it back in Director - it works great (I'm using this in my workflow - Realviz SceneWe@ver (it generate huge objects :) ) -> ImageModeler -> LightWave8 -> Director).

By the way - remember to use newest version of w3d exporter - 1.1
50.000 polys is not a problem till you try to use interactive object detection in director :)

sorry for my poor english

regards,
Borys