More Lightwave and Unity

Nov-9-08, 1:33 pm by Hanford
File under: Misc., Video games, game design, Unity, tech

[see all of my Unity posts] I'm past the point of the Unity trial, and it was simple enough, powerful enough, and (most importantly) fun enough for me to buy it, with the goal of eventually making a commercial game with it. Although, for the time being, I'm just using it as hobby -- that is, using it for fun to learn it, as opposed to diving in and methodically developing a commercial game with it.

Importing models and animations from NewTek Lightwave 3D to Unity

I've been using LightWave 3D version 9.3.1 for all my modeling, and so far it's been going fine -- with one little problem: the models import into Unity rotated so that the object is laying on it's side. It's odd because when the model is dragged into the scene, it appears right side up, but Unity sets the object's rotation to 270,270,0 -- as if Unity knows the object is rotated incorrectly, and fixes it for me (I assume that in a normal situation, an object with rotation set to 0,0,0 should appear right-side-up in the world). It all seems like a minor detail until I went to use something like LookAt to point the object towards a destination, and the object returns to it's un-normal sideways position.

The solution was to create an empty game object that the object is a child of, set the Parent to [0,0,0], and fix the child's rotation [270,270,0]. It means all the scripts get attached to the parent GameObject instead of the model itself, and that meant I had to rewrite all the little scripts I had written to target the child object. No big deal at this point, but I'm glad I discovered this early. I hadn't noticed it earlier since all my scripting tests were done with primitives.

I have yet to see if you can use this same trick for objects (trees) in the Terrain engine. I wonder how much processing overhead there is in adding a GameObject to an object, esp. if it's going to be mass-populated via the Terrain engine. I hope to have some more to report on soon.

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