[RELEASED] Lightwave Importer for Unity

LightWave Importer is now available on the Unity Asset Store

LightWave users wanting a complete LightWave → Unity solution, you need look no further.

Use your existing LightWave models and scenes directly in Unity, with no need to first convert them to another format (like .fbx). This will drastically improve your workflow. Make changes to your assets in LightWave, save and switch to Unity to instantly see your edits.

LightWave Importer brings together these two great tools into one discounted package:
LWO Importer - for handling LightWave models. Currently rated ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
LWS Importer - for handling LightWave scenes. Just released.

Check out the Trailer to see it in action

​

Here's some screenshots:


LightWave Importer is absolutely feature-packed, but here's a brief rundown of the highlights...

LWO Importer:
• Imports Triangles, Quads and Ngons with multiple holes! So there's no need to triple your polygons in Lightwave.
• Subpatch surface support in the form of Catmull-Clarke surfaces, including various subpatch interpolation texture mapping methods... and it all works with BlendShapes!
• Converts Standard and Principled BSDF Lightwave Materials to equivalent Unity materials - using either Standard or HDR Pipelines.

+ much more. See the LWO Importer page for a complete list.

LWS Importer
• Supports the following scene object types: Camera, Light, Model, Null, Bone.
• Imports all keyframe animation relating to Position, Rotation and Scale of objects.
• Hierarchy and layer names appear just as in Lightwave.
• Bones assigned to meshes with Vertex Weight Maps are imported and converted to Skinned Meshes.

Just as I have with LWO Importer, I'll continue to support, improve and add features to the LightWave Importer suite. Please do let me know if you have any difficulties with any of the tools.

-Chris

 

@escape_artist The first link on your post is broken.

 

thanks for spotting that! Fixed now.

 

Lightwave Importer 1.15 is now live: https://assetstore.unity.com/package...mporter-153113

It has support for the new Universal Rendering Pipeline materials in Unity 2019.
This new version is also able to detect the rendering pipeline of the current Unity project, so you don't need to specify it in the inspector anymore when importing.

Both LWO Importer and LWS Importer have also been updated to reflect these changes.

 

LightWave Importer Version 1.30 is out and it's got some goodies that some of you might find useful.
It features a few more options on the Object Inspector:

Generate Lightmap UVs can be used to automatically create an unwrapped secondary UV map, for use with baked shadows and lighting.

Below that there's another new option:
Generate Scene Hierarchy Data
This is data that is attached to the root GameObject of each imported LightWave object, and is used to correctly recreate any LightWave scenes that the model is part of. It's enabled by default, but if you are importing a model that you know is not going to be part of any scene then it can be disabled.

Hope you like the update!

-Chris

 

wow .... this is awesome..

 

Released a slew of minor updates recently, so I thought I'd summarise what's new. It's mostly bug fixes but there are also a few nice enhancements. These are the latest release notes for Lightwave Importer 1.34...
LWO Importer:
1.74
- Fixed Exception on reading a completely empty ImageBlock
- Fixed reading wrong number of bytes from a IUVI Block
- Improved logging by listing the names of any materials with unsupported texture mapping

1.73
- Added slider to increase distance between uv islands when generating shadow map UVs.
- Reduced minimum Unity version supporting generating light maps from 2019.1 to 2018.4.

1.72
- Fix for mesh corruption occurring during building of high-poly layers.
- When importing a high-poly mesh with Generate Lightmap UVs enabled and Index Format set to 16bit, the mesh will be created with an Index Format of 32bit and a warning will be displayed.
- Generate Lightmap UVs option is now limited to Unity 2019.1 and later.

LWS Importer
1.22
- Corrected the setting of some light properties: range and HD-Light area rectangular size.

1.21
- Fixed Scene importer failing to import scenes with one-line Blocks and non-standard blocks terminated with a ';' character, as found in some 3rd party plugins.

 

The latest update to LightWave Importer (1.36) has just gone live on the Unity Asset Store.
The previous version had a serious issue where Bone Weights were getting lost when importing scenes and meshes with bones and weight maps, causing the skinned mesh not to display at all! Anyway, it should all be fixed now.
I've also adapted the Inspector GUIs to work well when the Unity Editor Theme is set to Professional (Dark) mode and generally polished the GUIs a bit.

Hope you like it. As always, let me know if you find any issues!

-Chris

 

LWS Importer has now been updated to version 1.27. It fixes a pretty significant bug that would affect users living in countries where the decimal separator character is not '.' and hence causes the import to throw a FormatException and completely fail! Argh!

Updates to both LWS Importer and LightWave Importer (which contains LWS Importer) have just been approved by Unity. And I must say turnaround by the asset store was very quick indeed: 1hr25 from submission to approval. Very impressive!