Doom3world

Does Lightwave 9 do this without the use of third-party plug-ins? I'm not talking about creating normal maps, more about just using existing normal maps (such as those for Doom3 models). I have used Max7 up to this point and Max7 handles normal maps as a variant of 'bump' - a standard feature. It works very well.

I've recently decided to get into Lightwave for a number of work-related reasons and a by-product of that is that I can finally import those lovely .lwo objects from the extracted Doom3 model directories and save them down as .obj files with UV mapping for import to Max7, but I cannot find any reference in any of the LW9 manuals or online tutorials that LW9 actually has any facility to deal with normal mapping natively.

1. Does LW refer to normal mapping as 'displacement' - is this where I'm getting confused?

2. How come some Doom3 models I load into LW9 (from my extracted directories) sometimes show a normal map texture, but I can't find any parameters to actually apply it as a normal map?

Sorry to be such an idiot. Any help would be really gratefully appreciated.

If I remember correctly LightWave can use a normal map as a bump stage, not as displacement map (these would be still black and white).

Ah... this is what I've come to suspect. Seems really odd that NewTek haven't implemented normal mapping as a standard feature of LW9 - especially as Max has had it since v.7. Oh well. Foiled again!

I haven't had a chance to try out LightWave 9 (still stuck with 7.5) so things may have changed.

These links may help you along:
http://www.simplylightwave.com/movie_pa ... tut_id=517
http://www.tutorialized.com/tutorial/Ea ... e-3D./9027
http://www.newtek.com/forums/showthread ... eadid=4116