See attached pic. I use Lightwave 9 to created my meshes, but when I bring them into Milkshape as a .3ds or a Lightwave5 file, Milkshape seems to apply some strange smoothing.

Initially I left the model simple with less polys but Milkshape seemed to like trippled polys better so I trippled my model...either way, I'm still getting this smoothing issue.

It appears I might have found a workaround for this issue as well. However, I would like opinions of whether this workaround is appropriate.

To stop the weird smoothing, I hilite all of the vertexes (points) in Lightwave and unweld them. When I import this product into Milkshape, the weird smoothing is gone. However, I would assume the vertex count jumps substantially. Am I correct in assuming this does not streamline the model very well or is this pretty par for the course? If it is a bad idea, I'm back to square one and need advice on how to get rid of the weird smoothing. Thanks

im not experienced with light wave, but the problem is something called normals(the way light casts on geometry)

look for normals, and harden them as much as passable . if its the same as Maya, set them to 00.0


Edit: on second though, 0 might be to low, it will make it look blocky. youl need to find normals in milkshape, fiddle with them till it looks ok. and, why use milk shape? dosnt light wave make .obj files allready?

please forgive me, im much more experienced with maya than modding the sims 2

When I looked at your objects yesterday I noticed it reimported in to SimPE with odd smoothing too. Even if you export it as a 3ds file and import it back without editing you get this issue. I know in the past I have had problems with .obj files in max not retaining their smoothing data and their uv data for that matter. I think max doesn't like lightwave and lightwave dousn't like max.

Now you have solved your positioning issue like woodchuck has said couldn't you import your .obj file directly into SimPE?

Unfortunately, for me...I have not been able to find how to work w/ normals in Lightwave. I am still very new to the software, I'd give anything to have max back, but alas it is far too expensive. As far as SimPE and Lightwave .obj files...I have yet to find a program that likes Lightwave .obj files...everything seems to error out or crash. So, Milkshape is my workaround for that.

So to confirm, breaking the welds is a bad idea then...correct?

Personally anything that ups the vertex or poly count I think is a bad idea.
For the object your working on at the moment it isn't too much of an issue because its a fairly simple mesh.

however while the vertex count will double I guess the poly count is going to stay the same so the game engine might in fact not see any difference. So I suppose there isn't a simple answer.

A lot of people on here use milkshape so you might find something about smoothing or normal editing in one of the tutorials.

For lightwave I guess a concerted poke around the web might yield some answers.