In this post, I’m going to go through how to get a textured model from Lightwave into Papervision3D. It’s really not as easy as I should be because of the lack of a collada exporter in Lightwave. The title should actually be more like: Lightwave -> wavefront obj file -> Blender -> dae file -> Papervision3D.
I use Lightwave for no other reason than I used to use it back in my Amiga days and since I rarely need to do any 3d work, there seems little point in learning another 3d package when I have so much else to learn 
They have a ‘discovery’ (ie free) edition too.
There are many, many pitfalls in this process, but once you’re aware of them, it doesn’t take long to do. I’m going to assume that you know nothing about Blender (as I did 8 hours ago) but do know how to use Lightwave. If you don’t know either, you might be better off either learning Blender straight off (or Maya). Props to Altered Egg for the details on what to do in Blender. He’s got pictures and stuff, if you need them I’m using Lightwave 9 and Blender 2.48
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