Hopefully the moderator will kindly slot this post into a suitable area - I don’t seem to have privelages to place it in other sections.
1, I created some basic landscape shapes in Lightwave using splines that helped me quickly mark out the basic flow and shapes I’d created in a pencil sketch.
2, Each individual component of the created landscape was exported to ZBrush for further tweaking and texture creation using GUV tiles and exported out again for re-assembling in Lighwave’s modeler.
However, I had decided to tweak the LW assembled mesh groups in Zbrush using masking on the imported polygroups but realised that collecting all the uv’s in one group would mess up my original painted textures for each component when exported as a .obj.
I exported the assembled mesh groups out of Lightwave and again re-modelled in ZBrush - once again exporting back to Lightwave.
To assign the original uv’s created in stage 2 back onto the now modified mesh components, I realised that the only way Lightwave seemed to be able to transfer these uv’s back to the modified mesh (that had lost it’s original uv’s) was to use the BG to Morph feature in the Map section of modeller.
I couldn’t seem to copy over the GUV tiles in Lightwave from one mesh to another with the same polys using the normal procedures and was forced to take this route.
In other words I used the BG to Morph feature to re-shape the original mesh component and it’s correct GUV tiles to the modified shape on the background layer.
Doing this also allowed me the opportunity to export each mesh component out to other apps should I wish with the original guv tiles assigned to the modified mesh.
NB:A surface must be assigned to each exorted mesh component with the GUV uv map assigned.
Lightwave v8 does not seem to handle Zbrush’s GUV or AUV tiles correctly during rendering and so my intention was to export to Carrara which has no such issues.
Hope this may be of use to other users struggling to copy over GUV or AUV tiles within Lightwave.
( I realise that Lightwave 8 has magnet and dragnet tools etc for such mesh tweaking tasks but I don’t personally find the control as intuitive or speedy as I do creating alteration with ZBrush - each to their own)
This solution above is useful when you find yourself in a similar situation.
However it is far easier in some ways to create a GUV texture across an imported polygroup, this still allows you to move the mesh components in other Applications - keeping their assigned textures to each component regardless of how you move or scale them.
Obviously a large enough texture must be assigned to allow enough detail over many landscape polygroups.