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UnwrapWorks with any version of LightWave Modeler. |
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| Unwrap creates template images for cylindrical and spherical texture
mapping. The plug-in assumes that the mapping axis passes through (0, 0, 0). You choose
the axis (X, Y or Z) and set the size of the image. The plug-in draws the edges of the
selected polygons in the foreground layer and saves the image as a 1-bit IFF. After
painting on top of this image, you can load it into Layout and use Automatic Size to wrap
it onto your surface. For a more modern implementation of the same idea, see Unwrap II. Because of its age, Unwrap has a few important quirks and limitations. It doesn't support mapping types other than cylindrical or spherical, and it can't unwrap subpatch geometry. It assumes that your model, or the part of it you want to unwrap, is centered on the origin. If that's not the case, you should center the model before unwrapping it. The IFFs created by Unwrap can be loaded into Photoshop, as long as Photoshop's Amiga IFF plug-in is installed. For some versions of Photoshop, this isn't installed by default, so you have to add it by hand. After loading the image, you'll have to change it from a bitmap to something else in order to paint directly on top of it. Depending on your platform, the file dialog opened by Unwrap may be for loading rather than saving. Although disconcerting, this shouldn't make any difference as long as you have a place to type a filename. In early versions of the plug-in API, it wasn't possible for a plug-in to specify which type of file dialog it wanted, so Unwrap gets whatever LightWave supplies.
I'm a programmer rather than a texture artist, so I'm the wrong person to ask for advice about the use of this plug-in. But it's described in a number of LightWave references, including Dan Ablan's books. |
