Setting Unreal Material Bitfields

Unreal Materials are differentiated by UV maps - each UV turns into an unreal Material (with a few exceptions - I'll get to those... ). There are currently 2 ways to do this. One is rather elegant, and tries to seamlessly blend the LW environment into Unreal's. The other is rather quick and dirty.

Quick and Dirty: Using the Surface name

This method mimics that used in the ActorX plugins for Maya and MAX (documentation here). I'll go over that stuff here just to be complete with it. Note that if you use this method, the UV name must fit the pattern of: SKIN[skin order number][parameterchunks]+

You can put spacers between the chunks (I like to use underscores) but you don't have to.

So ... for example: a UV named SKIN02_twosided_envir would be added as Mesh #2 in the .psk, and would have 2-sided, with environment mapping. That's it!

Elegant and Convoluted: Using Lightwave's Surface parameters to define a material

If you don't want to use the name to determine this stuff, you can use the following method. Note that this method doesn't guarantee any sort of Material ordering (yet).

To designate the base set of bitfields for a Material, define a surface in LightWave with the same name as the Material. On that surface's Basic tab, I'm using the checkboxes and envelope buttons to determine which fields you want. You don't need to put anything in the envelope to tweak it, just press the [E] envelope button and then exit the panel that opens.

Additionally, there exist specially named UVmaps that the exporter picks up on. If a poly has any of these UV maps applied, it's material will be copied, and that copy will have the extra bit(s) from these UVs in addition to the base ones. This is how you'd 'tweak' the materals on a per-poly basis without adding whole new UVs. Case is important.