VS geometry limits

[enlightenment]

I'm in the early stages of writing a Python importer to convert Lightwave objects to xmesh and I have a few questions about VS' rendering capabilities.

VS can cope with xmesh objects that do not have surface normals, correct? Naturally faceting is to be expected.

Is there a way to use more than one texture image in a single xmesh?

There's no bult-in means to 'texture' portions of a mesh with a plain single color without using a UV map and texture?

Are there any polygon geometry pitfalls above and beyond badly nonplanar faces and <3 vertex degenerates? Can VS handle holes in polys?


I realize these are somewhat esoteric questions but LW does things--particularly surface normals and UV texture maps--in a vastly different way from e.g. Wings and I'm looking for shortcuts to make an importer that's just smart enough to work without going overboard.

Thanks.

[scheherazade]

if you look at the xmesh file you can see whats inside
tri/quad are obvious from that. i cant remember if it supports poly.

i donno about the normals bit. but it cant hurt to include them i guess...

1 texture per mesh

multiple textures need to be multiple xmeshes.

also, the xmesh file has material properties in it at the bottom.

and a question, do you plan a max or maya plugin?

-scheherazaede

[enlightenment]

if you look at the xmesh file you can see whats inside tri/quad are obvious from that. i cant remember if it supports poly.

Xmesh has tristrip, which seems to be intended for sides >4 polys but I'm not entirely sure.

i donno about the normals bit. but it cant hurt to include them i guess...

The hurt here is that LW computes poly normals at render-time and doesn't store them in the object files. If VS requires normals then I'll have to write code to generate normals from the geometry. This is more a job for C++ than Python.

and a question, do you plan a max or maya plugin?

'Fraid not. I don't have access to either 3DS or Maya and writing plugins is out of my coding league.

[hellcatv]

well I think VS does fine without normals unless you want a smoothshaded model (i.e. round parts)
you see it generates them as if each face were separate--it doesn't interpolate the normals--
it's best to generate them so stuff where it should be interpolated is interpolated--and stuff where it should not is not

but do what you can...start without them
and then if models need them then we add 'em

to make it true shading you have to use sharedvertex="1" I think

anyhow come up with a rough version and we'll see if it needs fixing