Anim8or Community

What type of surface texture image are you using?
Transparency is also provided if you're using a 32 bit PNG image: one which includes an Alpha (opacity) channel. If that's the cause, you can eliminate that effect by converting the 32 bit PNG image either to a 24 bit PNG (which does not include an Alpha channel) or to an image in JPG format, which also does not support transparency.

What version of Anim8or are you using?
There are at least two different .LWO model formats. Anim8or only understands the older version. Recent versions of Anim8or provide a better error message when they try to load a format that they don't recognize.

What circumstances cause the option "Fix Normals" to be unavailable?
How can I persuade it to be available?

I'd like not to have to manually select each of the faces with reversed normals to repair them. Unfortunately, the "Fix Normals" option is greyed-out. See the attached screengrab.

You can use an image manipulation tool to change the DPI specified in the image file to whatever you want without changing the number of pixels in the image file.  I've used Irfanview to do this. I'm sure other programs can do it, too.

You do have to make sure you render the image at a size that you know will include the right number of pixels. e.g. if you want it to be 5" x 8"  on a 300dpi page, render it to be 1500x2400 pixels.

(I assume you're aware that rendering an image at 2x the final image size and then downscaling it usually produces a better quality final result than rendering at the final resolution.)

"Join Solids" coloration/material bug in build 1233+

In the Object Editor, when I did a Join Solid operation, some components changed colors to a previous value. (I didn't notice this immediately.) When Exported to .CMOD format, the exported object had the correct colors.

When I detached some of the mis-colored components (using "select patch" followed by "c", "D" keyboard commands) , the detached components immediately reverted to their correct colors.  A subsequent "Join Solids" changed the colors back to the wrong colors, but then a subsequent Render in Anim8or drew the components which had been temporarily detached with the correct colors and those which had not been temporarily detached with the wrong colors.

Unfortunately, saving the buggy model to solids_color_bug.an8 and then opening that file in Anim8or had everything with the wrong colors set permanently (i.e. detached components had the wrong colors), so I'm not sure how to provide a failing example.

Edited to add: Aha! A render of the object in solids_color_bug.an8 still draws the previously-detached components with the "right" color, i.e. it does not render the object in the colors which are shown while in the Object Editor.

I've attached a zip containing the buggy .an8 file and these notes.

Thanks! It was the "double click on the mesh" part I'd forgotten. I was being distracted by the UV positioning graphics.

Indeed your discovery is the way to do it.

Also, you can use the UV tool to map only a portion of the image onto any facet or collection of facets of the mesh. This can result in more efficient use of hardware resources and somewhat higher performance in the final product, since a single image can provide all of the surface coloration.

When build 1219 starts on my system, it opens a very tiny desktop window which is mostly off-screen at the top left. At first I thought its window wasn't opening at all.

Build 1215 starts fine: its initial window occupies most of the screen.

I'm running Anim8or with the traditional GUI colors.

What additional info can I provide to find the problem?

Here's my basic system info:

Computer: Dell Latitude E6510 laptop
          Core i7 Q720 (1.6GHz), 8GB; Win 7 Pro x64 (SP1), Aero GUI
Disk: PNY CS1111 SSD (480GB)
DVD: Hitachi HL-DT-ST GU10N -- Multi DVD Rewriter, Region 1
Display: 1920x1080 FHD, 60Hz (1080p)
Graphics: Nvidia Quadro NVS 3100M (512MB),  driver v341.44

For those who said it worked OK, how long did you wait? And what type of  hardware do you have?

 It had been using 25% of the CPU on my system(*) for several minutes before I terminated it, but it was only using about 70MB of memory. It didn't even get so far as naming any objects.

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 * -- I'm using build 1215 under Win7 on a 1.6GHz Core i7 laptop with Nvidia NVS 3100 graphics.