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LightWave's config files can be fragile and configuring them can be fraught with difficulties for the inexperienced user but weird things happening, plug-ins going missing or renders turning out strangely can often be caused by configs gone wrong. The solution is to remake them from scratch, not a difficult process but if you have already customised your menus or shortcuts, you will need to keep a track of the changes you have made, or have saved them.

Contents 1 First steps 2 Redirecting configs 2.1 Windows 2.2 Macintosh 3 Updating your configs

First steps

If you have recently upgraded to a new version of LightWave (say 9.0 to 9.3 for example), then it's good to clean up your configs because new things might have been added to the menus or plug-ins with the new version. The first thing to do is make sure you have no LightWave programs running - no Layout, Modeler or Hub. Now, you have to locate your config files. This isn't as easy as perhaps it should be, so we'll use redirection to make sure we know where they are to be found.

Redirecting configs

In order to redirect your configs, here are the steps you have to take on the PC and then the Mac:

Windows

When you installed LightWave it created shortcuts in your Start menu. You can either edit these or go to where LightWave is installed and create some new ones. You need to make a shortcut of Lightwav.exe and also Modeler.exe and place them where you're going to use them...

Now go into the properties for these shortcuts and you'll see a line that says Target. I'm going to use my Target line as an example here, so you get the idea:

C:\NewTek\LightWave8.3\Programs\lightwav.exe

Now, things are made easier for me because I didn't use the standard Program Files dirctory to install LightWave and I also changed the directory name for LightWave itself. Yours is quite likely to look like this:

"C:\Program Files\LightWave 3D [8]\Programs\lightwav.exe"

Notice the quotes. They'll be important later...

What you need to do is make a directory in your LightWave folder called Config.

Now to do the redirection we change the target line to read:

"C:\Program Files\LightWave 3D [8]\Programs\lightwav.exe" -c"C:\Program Files\LightWave 3D [8]\Programs\Config"

If you have spaces in your path, it means that you have to enclose the path in double quotes! What I mean is this. Imagine the phrase:

Big car park

Does it mean a car park for big cars, or a car park that is big? This is easily resolved if you use double quotes to mark individual semantic units, so a "Big car" park is a place to put big cars, and a Big "car park" is obviously a car park that is large. It's the same principle with pathnames.

Now when you launch and shut down LightWave, you'll notice that that Config directory you made has got files in it - your config files...

Macintosh

On the Mac, things are different because you don't have the ability to redirect shortcuts, but we have the CMDline files and unlike Windows, OSX understands spaces in pathnames. What you need to do is just write:

-c<path to LightWave>:Config

Updating your configs

Okay, now we've prepared our ground, let's seed it. To start off with we need to delete our existing configs. WARNING! This will kill any customisations you have made, so it's a good idea to use the editors to save menus and shortcuts.

1. Load the Layout portion of LightWave;
2. Hit Alt F11 and then the Scan Directory button and point it to your LightWave plugins folder. It will scan the plug-ins and give you a message like the following:
3. Hit Alt F10 and change the Presets menu to LightWave 7.5. Return to it and change it back to Default;
4. Hit Alt F9 and change the Presets menu to LightWave 7.5. Return to it and change it back to Default;
5. Now quit LightWave and start Modeler from your new icon;
6. Repeat steps 3 and 4 but be aware that the Preset Menu will only offer LightWave 7.0;
7. Quit Modeler and quit Hub too.