Anim8or Community

I downloaded and installed the trial version of Lightwave 2015-3. (It's full-featured but expires after 30 days.)
It was able to read the .lwo file and export it as an OBJ. It could not export it as 3DS for two reasons:
1. the model included thousands of polygons which had more than 3 vertices. 3DS only supports triangle polygons.
2. after using Lighwave to convert them to polygons with 3 vertices (triangles), the resulting model contained more than 64K vertices.

I then imported the OBJ model into Anim8or. Although Anim8or didn't load the surface texture images, the materials were properly associated with the various sections of the model. When I specified which wing textures to use, Anim8or showed them properly. (I only did the wings. I didn't want to take the time to specify all of them.) See the first screengrab below.

I then exported the model as a CMOD. Celestia showed the wings properly. See the second screengrab below.

As I wrote previously, I suspect the problem is with the 3DS model created by conversion site that you used.

Well,  this is the Anim8or forum.

I managed to import the LWO into Blender and export it as OBJ. (Format conversion is about all I ever use Blender for, I have to admit. It's way too complex for me.)  No surface texture images were associated with the materials in the model's .mtl file, so they have to be associated manually in Anim8or. The .obj model loaded into Anim8or as a single mesh with no subgroups, which is going to make for more manual work.

I used Anim8or's material menu to associate the wing surface textures with appropriate materials, but the textures were not oriented properly so far as Anim8or was concerned: the wings were drawn solid grey. See the 1st image below.

In "Point Edit" I selected the Right Wing's surfaces and used the UV tool to scale and position the surface texture for the Right Wing. See the 2nd image below.

I then exported the model as a CMOD and created the directories and SSC file that Celestia wants. Although the model was drawn, the wings were transparent. Apparently the PNG images have transparency enabled. As a quick fix, I converted them to JPG images since JPG doesn't support an opacity channel. Now the top of the right wing looks OK. See the 3rd image below.

I'm not sure what problem you were encountering, but certainly managing to get the model into Anim8or with the correct format is a stumbling block.

I have to admit I haven't encountered this particular type of error. A possibility that occurs to me is that the wings are composed of multiple meshes and the surface texture is only being applied to one of them.

Can you provide a zip containing your files so I could inspect them?

Alternatively, can you provide more details about the surface texture image (size, dimensions, format) and the model (size, number of vertices, number of meshes)?

3DS models have quite a few limitations. You might want to consider trying my CMOD export script, which is available at http://www.classe.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/modelling.html#4.1

What graphics hardware do you have?

Some cards can only use surface texture images which have sides which are powers of two. Celestia is supposed to be able to rescale non-conforming surface textures so they're usable, but that's relatively recent code and could be buggy. You might try resizing the surface texture image so that (for example) its dimensions are 1024x1024 pixels.

In principle, different threads can render different sections of the image. For example, if you have 4 cores, it could render 4x as fast.

This was a standard trick used to speed up POV many years ago: run multiple copies of the program at the same time, each rendering a different section of the image.

What's the maximum size of an OBJ mesh that Anim8or can import?

I tried to import a 724MB OBJ mesh (2Kx2K subdivisions: 4 million vertices) which had been created and exported by Blender, but Anim8or crashed. 

A smaller version of the mesh (173MB, 1Kx1K subdivisions: 1 million vertices) imported with no problems.

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I'm trying to create a 3D map for use in Celestia. Here are low resolution screengrabs of the 1K mesh with a couple of different surface textures.

Certainly.

Quite a few people are extremely upset by the spyware built into Windows 10. [stuff deleted by Steve]