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[wallworm]

I'm in the middle of updating some of the features in WWMT and integrating the soon-to-be released Wunderboy SMD Exporter 1.7. At the moment, there are a few things I've done to clean up the flow and alleviate problems that some users have:

One long-time quandry users fall into is using Grouped geometry. WWMT has never handled Grouped geometry because I never got around to including support for it. For some reason, Max handles grouped geometry significantly differently than other collections... and to deal with that you have to make all kinds of extra IF THIS ELSE THAT blocks in your code to accomodate. Except for a rare donation here and there... I don't get paid for this... and I've always ignored that problem--I've documented it and simply don't use Group for models I'm exporting to Source.

But I've troubleshooted enough problems to know that people aren't seeing that in the docs. One thing I plan on doing is revamping the docs soon... but in reality I'm sure that many people will still miss that.

So I started adding Group support this week and learned that the SMD Exporter also doesn't work with Grouped geometry. I haven't heard from Wunderboy about his intention to add it or not. As he also does it all for free... I'm not sure it's going to be worth the effort.

So I've been adding a bunch of checks in the UI... so if you try to add grouped geometry it will alert a message and tell you not to use grouped geometry. Nothing will stop you from grouping after you've added geometry to a WWMT helper... and I am not going to un-optimize the export code by adding more checks. So at some point I have to take a stance on it... and expect the users to actually read the docs from start to finish when learning to use it! I cannot let myself stress about users not being able to figure things out when I have already tried to make things as straightforward as I can and documented a lot of the tools.

A couple of the big changes deal with updates Wunderboy has included in the SMD Exporter 1.7 update:

• All Material Types now supported. This means you can use things like the Shell Material--which can further speed your process when using RTT.
• Any Mapping Channel now available for exporting. Previously, only channel 1 was supported. Now there will be a channel spinner in WWMT that lets you choose what channel to use for exporting your SMD's UVW mapping. This will speed the process of getting your models into Source since you will be able to work in arbitrary mapping channels.

There will be an incomplete addition to the Displacement tool. I've been working on adding UVW controls into the Displacements... but it will be less-than-fully tested by the time that the next WWMT comes out. Hopefully within a month or two you will be able to control the displacement mapping arbitrarily. Unfortunately, I already predict a lot of support emails regarding this because people will expect to be able to use any type of UVW mapping... but Source displacements can only have Planar mapping (Unless there is something I've missed during my time scouring the VMF/Displacement documentation). Still... when I've added that support fully... it will finally make the displacement a WYSIWYG displacement editor.

The other big-ticket item on the top of my TODO list is adding an animated texture exporter. It will be nice to just animate a texture and export it straight into Source as a collection of VTFs and the associated animated VMT. It won't be in this next update, but will be coming soon.

Last, but not least, I want to give a shout-out and warm Thank You to Rick_D from the Polycount forums. He gave a very generous donation to me this last week.... which is greatly appreciated. A few more of those, and I will be able to pay for another year of Autodesk Subscription for another year :)

[wallworm]

A significant update is comming to WWMT this week. A wide range of the tools are being updated. Stay tuned...