Using PureLIGHT with Blender 2.49b

[Davaris]

I just thought I'd post some of the issues I had getting my models into preLIGHT. I'm not an artist, so some of this will be obvious to the experienced people. But for those who are like me, I hope it saves you some time.

 

 

I had trouble getting .obj files to import into Blender correctly as they appeared black. I asked over at Blender Underground and got this answer from penix1:

 

Wavefront objects have 2 settings in an mtl file. The first deals with non-UV data. That is where your problem is by the way. The second deals with the image mappings. Some programs don't export the non-UV data properly when a UV is involved. Worse, the program you are importing to doesn't seem to be handling it any better. You will need to adjust by hand the material's Col, Spec, and Mir settings in Blender. Then try re-exporting. Normally, non-UV stuff is overridden by the UV settings. As you can see, that isn't always the case.

 

 

Then I had trouble exporting files from Blender into .dae format. It didn't work well at all, as it didn't export the bump map and the diffuse map had to be added manually in pureLIGHT.

 

From what I read online the .dae exporter for Blender 2.49b is bugged and isn't worth the effort.

 

So then I searched for an .ase exporter and found this for Blender 2.49 to 2.49b:

 

Blender ASE Export Script

by Thomas Pittman · in pureLIGHT · 09/16/2009 (10:36 am) · 1 replies

For those of you using Blender with pureLIGHT, we have a modified ase export script available that is compatible with pureLIGHT.

 

www.purelighttech.com/blender_ase_export/export_ase.zip

 

To install it, simply unzip it and copy it into the .blender\scripts folder of your Blender installation, and it should be available next time you run it.

 

 

Unfortunately the files it produced crashed preLIGHT. However I got this answer from support and the solution worked and now I am able to bake:

 

I see what is happening. For some reason an extra // is being exported in front of the texture name. *BITMAP "//textures\dice_faces_COL.tga"

I've seen this before with Blender. In the material in Blender you'll find that in the path of the texture being used, if you remove that part and export again it'll work fine. I don't know how or why that gets set sometimes.

I've changed preLIGHT to accept such texture paths in the future.

 

So all you have to do is delete the '//' and preLIGHT can use it.

 

In a couple of weeks preLIGHT will be updated and removing the '//' from the file will not be necessary.