Tutorial created by: Lisa Kester
Index:
I. Getting started with LightWave and BodyPaint3D
A. Getting the model.
B. Setting a UV map
C. Importing plug-ins for LightWave
D. Sending models to BodyPaint3D
E. How to start in Body Paint
F. Tools
G. Exporting back to LightWave
H. Where is my texture saved?
II. Common Problems and some Solutions
I. More than 1 UV Map
J. More than 1 Surface
K. Why am I painting in two places at once?
L. Why doesn’t my texture show up in LightWave?
M. Why does my texture look blurry in LightWave?
I. Getting started with LightWave and BodyPaint3D
A. Getting the model
1. Open LightWave Modeler
2. Go to File-> Load object
3. Load the model you are texturing.
4. Push the “a” button to see your object (if you can’t see it well enough or at all)
5. You can look at different parts of the object in the viewer by holding down these buttons and moving the mouse:
This will move the object left, right, up, down.
This button will rotate the model.
This button lets you zoom in on the model.
IMPORTANT: There can be only 1 UV Map and 1 surface for every model. The Unreal Tournament will have problems if you have more than one of these. I’ll talk about how to fix this in the last section of the tutorial. You should fix these problems BEFORE you texture the model, so you don’t have to do a bunch of extra work.
It will look something like this when you import it, except yours won’t have a texture yet!
Also, I circled the important controls that you’ll be using. Note the that I circled, that has a menu where you can choose to see the texture you made on the model after you have one. You need to pick “texture,” the default is usually “flat shade.”
B. Setting a UV Map
Explanation: A UV Map is what allows you to color your model. It has to contain all the polygons of the model.
1. Go to the Polygons tab at the bottom of the screen or press “Ctrl h”
2. Go to the “T” button on the bottom right. It’s in the middle of the “W” and “M” buttons.
3. Next to the “M” button is a bar that probably says “none” (I circled them, in red, in the picture below).
4. Click on the button that says “none” on the bottom right and see if it has anything in it’s list other than “(none)” or “(new)”. If there is another word/name there, then there is already a UV Map and you should skip to the next section of the tutorial.
5. If you don’t see anything there, then select all the polygons on the model.
6. To select all the polygons, just go into one of the 4 viewers and hold down the right mouse button. Draw a line around the whole object you see on the screen and release the mouse button. If the model is selected then it should look something like in the picture below.
7. Now to make the UV Map, click on the “T” button again and pick “(new)” from the drop down menu you looked at in step 4. A window will pop up. Now pick a name for your UV Map.
8. Now SAVE your model, you don’t want to loose your UV Map after you’ve textured the model in BodyPaint3D.
Note: To deselect click on some grey space outside the viewer.
C. Importing plug-ins for LightWave
Explanation: Before you can use BodyPaint3D, you have to load a plug-in for LightWave, so LightWave knows how to send the model over to BodyPaint3D.
1. Go to Modeler-> Plug-ins-> add Plug-ins. It’s near the upper left hand corner of LightWave; right under the “File” button.
2. Now you have to locate the folder with the plug-ins:
They are located in this folder if you have a PC: C:\Program Files\MAXON\BodyPaint_3D_R2\Exchange Plugins\Lightwave\PC. It could be different if you installed BodyPaint3D in some random folder. Then you’d have to search for the MAXON folder to find all the other folders in the address I gave you.
3. Now select all of the plug-ins in the folder. Press Open. A new window pops up. Now click “done”.
4. If you don’t have a PC, then go one directory up and pick one of the MAC folders and upload all of those plug-ins the same way.
D. Sending models to BodyPaint3D
Explanation: You need to send the model from LightWave to BodyPaint3D to be able to paint the model and send it back to LightWave.
1. Go to and click the Construct tab near the upper left of the screen:
2. Now click on Additional->BodyPaint3D
Note: When BodyPaint3D first starts up, it gives you about 20 error messages, about the plugin.dll, in a row. There’s NOTHING WRONG with the program, just click ok until the error messages stop and the program loads.
E. How to start in Body Paint
1. The first thing you have to do before you can paint on the model is to click on the purple flag on the upper left:
2. A window will pop up like the one in the picture below:
3. For step 1 of the wizard, click on MATERIALS, then click next.
4. For step 2, just click next.
5. For step 3, specify the maximum and minimum height/width. The max and min must be the SAME and it must be a power of 2. I suggest using 512 x 512 for the max and min or 1024 x 1024 if you are texturing something really huge (bigger than a normal character).
6. click Finish, close the wizard and paint away!
7. IMPORTANT: TEST and SAVE the texture BEFORE spending hours texturing. I suggest painting a in few random places on the model. Save in BodyPaint3D and send it back to LightWave (I’ll talk about how to send the model back to LightWave in section G. Exporting Back to LightWave.) After it’s back in LightWave, you should check and make sure that the spots you painted are in the right place. If they are, you’re fine (So SAVE your model in LightWave!) and you can edit your texture in BodyPaint3D without any future problems.
F. Tools:
This is the basic paint brush. You can change the size, pressure, and other attributes under the Active Tool tab on the upper right of the program.
This is the color picker. By default it only picks a color that is on your current layer.
This tool is where the smear tool, clone tool, burn tool, dodge tool, and sponge tool can be selected. It’s located next to the brush tool.
This is the eraser tool. It’s right under the brush tool.
This is the smart selection tool; it selects areas of color. Right click to deselect.
These are the basic tools I found most helpful. You can also use layers just like in Photoshop. Go to Layers-> new layer to create a new layer. Go to Window-> Layer Manager to view the layers. You have to have the material selected to view the layers. You can select a material by clicking on the material tab on the bottom right, then click on the square with the material you want to look at. There are also some filters like in Photoshop. They are under “filters” at the top.
G. Exporting back to LightWave
1. Save your BodyPaint3D file. Go to “Save as” and save the file somewhere you can find it.
2. Go to file-> send scene back and your texture should be right on your model! Of course, you won’t be able to see it until you tell the program you want to view it. If you didn’t read about how to do this earlier, I talked about it in the section A. Getting the Model.
H. Where is my texture saved?
BodyPaint3D saves the textures you created as .tiff files in a folder called IMAGES. On my computer it was found here: C:\LightWave\Images. If you have trouble finding it. Just look up the name of the texture under the “Texture” tab, click on “Textures,” and the name you see is the name of your texture. Just search for it with windows search ability.
NOTE: You need open the .tiff file that you made with BodyPaint3D and save it as a .tga file type, in some program like Photoshop, for it to work in Unreal Tournament.
II. Common Problems and how to fix them
I. More than 1 UV Map Problem
EXPLINATION: We discovered that even if an object looks right in
LightWave it might not look right in unreal tournament
IF there is more than one UV map that was made in
LightWave. Even if the other UV maps are not in use
sometimes unreal tournament uses the wrong one.
SOLUTION: You need to delete unused UV maps in
LightWave.
1. First you need to find out which UV map you are using; to do this, go to the surface editor (press “Ctrl F3” to bring it up) which is in the upper left of the LightWave program.
2. Now you need to delete all the UV maps you are not using. To do this,
just go to the MAP tap, select the UV Map
to delete at the bottom (where you would create it)
and go to "clear map." After you delete all the unused
UV maps, the texture will be loaded correctly!
J. More than 1 Surface Problem
EXPLINATION: A different problem we fixed was for models
with more than one texture(this happened automatically
when sending models to BodyPaint3D because there was more
than one surface in the model).
Overview of Solution: To fix this, we deleted all
but one of the surfaces. To do this, you have to add
all the polygons to one of the existing surfaces.
Save the model and when you reload it, all the
surfaces except the one that you just assigned will be
cleared out by LightWave. Note that if you want to
keep one of the textures used, you just have to pick
the surface that has the main texture to keep. Of
course your texture artist may have to retexture PART
of the model because you will have lost all the
textures in the deleted surfaces (the point was to
only have one texture per model). As long as the UV
texture that was kept covered the whole model, your
texture artist only has to edit the existing texture
to color in the parts of the object that lost their
textures.
Steps
Step 1: Find out which surface you want to keep. I want to keep the “helm” surface.
Step 2: Select all the polygons and press “q”. Now name the surface after the surface you picked in step 1. In my case it was the “helm” surface.
Step 3: Save the model (under a new name is probably a good idea, just to make sure you didn’t mess anything up) and reload it. Check the surface editor. All of the excess surfaces should be gone!
K. Why am I painting in two places at once?
Solution: Just using a smaller brush will usually prevent this from happening. Also be careful when you are painting on a polygon and a big amount of the brush isn’t painting anything visible. That means it is painting somewhere you don’t see, and it might be on another part of the object!
Explanation: BodyPaint3D gives the illusion that you are painting a texture where, for example, the nose is located in the same place as the face and the shoulders are connected to the arms. This is not the case. A the texture that is made for a UV map breaks up the model in strange ways. You can see what the actual texture looks like in BodyPaint3d by going to the “texture” tab in the upper left of the screen. Click on the “texture” tab. Then click on textures and select whatever name is there for the texture. Now go to “UV mesh” and click where it says “show UV mesh.” Below I have shown a UV map with it’s texture like it is shown in BodyPaint3D so you will understand what I am saying. I painted a big pink spot to show you what’s happening when I use a really big brush. Instead of just painting on the side of the column, I am painting on the bottom part of the column as well, but I wouldn’t know that unless I rotated the column around to see the bottom!
L. Why doesn’t my texture show up in LightWave?
You probably didn’t set up the model to show the texture. By default it is on “flat shade” and that just shows the model as a solid color. I circled the button you need to press to show the texture under the “Getting the Model” section of this tutorial.
M. Why does my texture look blurry in LightWave?
By default the “display options” are set to a small resolution, so it shows a blurry version of your texture even though it will look crisp and detailed in Unreal Tournament. You can change the settings by going into the “display options” and changing the resolution to 1024. There’s a button for each of the different resolution settings, just pick the highest number. I believe you can find the “display options” under the “edit” or “modeler” buttons. Wherever it is for your version of LightWave, it’s usually one of the buttons right under the “file” button in the upper left section of the program.
All models in this tutorial were textured by Lisa Kester for the Unreal Tournament Bronze Age mod created by Chico State students!
Questions? Email me at uridicystar @yahoo.com (take out the space before sending).