TrueArt LightWave 3D Tutorial IFF Sub-Chunk Limitation Full HD video
This Full HD video is showing famous IFF sub-chunk limitation in LWO file format while using nodes.
How much nodes you can make depends on which nodes you're using. Different nodes, especially 3rd party, might save a lot of local data, depending on context.
To bypass this limitation we have created two plug-ins:
Global Materials
and
TrueGroup
Both available on our website:
http://www.trueart.eu
Global Materials is saving the all data with LWS scene text file, so it's naturally not vulnerable for limitation.
TrueGroup has special option to use external storage text file instead of saving nodes to LWO.
In both cases, additional feature is ability to edit nodes in text files, so you can ask programmer or prepare script changing nodes a bit in the way you want automatically.
In binary LWO that would require rewriting whole IFF loader/saver and learning what each IFF chunk does and their structures.
Beware, if you see message from LightWave that "IFF file writing failed", you CANNOT close Modeler or Layout. You must immediately take action, because file has been already overwritten, and contain trash, that cannot be loaded any way later.