Oolite Bulletins

New person saying hi.
I also have a question. Can I use Lightwave 3D to build models for oolite and if so, how do they need to be save/exported?

The standard intermediate format for 3D files prior to conversion to Oolite’s custom format is OBJ. Since this is Lightwave’s format to start with, it should work.

Hi
I've been using lightwave7.5 to make ships, i haven't tried making a .dat out of them directly out of lightwave, i'll have to give it a go as it'll save a bit of faff.
I'm on a windows xp pc here's the workflow i've been using:-

build and UV the model in lightwave and then when done export it as an .obj

import the .obj into wings 3d, load in and apply the texture map, then re-export it as an .obj (doing this gets you your .obj file and .mtl file needed for the obj2dattex.py .dat converter script)

put the obj2dattex.py script, your .obj and .mtl files in a folder ( i also put in my texture .png files too for good luck) open a command prompt, browse to the folder and type obj2dattex.py 'xxx'.obj where 'xxx' is the file name of your obj and press enter, you should then get a 'xxx'.dat file which oolite will understand.

in the re-exporting from wings step i've been getting better results if i select the entire model and use the 'export selection as .obj' option as sometimes choosing the export as .obj option gets me an empty .obj file for some reason.