Drag the .lwo straight in
Drop a .lwo on the window and it loads, geometry, UV maps with proper seam handling, and even ngons, triangulated cleanly on import. No exporting to FBX, no plugin, no intermediate files.
LightWave + MechaPaint
LWO3 format (LightWave 2018+ saves). Older LWO2 files: open in LightWave and resave as LWO3.
WHY MECHAPAINT
First-class citizens, not conversion leftovers
No FBX conversion dance, no lost surfaces. MechaPaint reads LightWave LWO3 files natively, surfaces, layers, UVs, and color textures arrive intact, ready to paint. Few painting apps bother supporting LightWave at all. We built an importer for it.
Surfaces and layers survive intact
Every LightWave surface becomes its own paintable submesh with its own layer stack, and every LightWave layer arrives as a separate part, hidden layers even stay hidden. The structure you built in Modeler is the structure you paint.
Textures found automatically
MechaPaint walks each surface's node graph to find its color texture and follows LightWave's Images-folder conventions to locate the files on disk. Your model shows up looking like itself, ready to paint over.
Decades of archives, rescued
That drive full of LightWave work going back to the 90s? Resave as LWO3, open it here, and repaint, and when a map is too cryptic to work with, Rebuild UVs generates a modern layout with your textures remapped onto it.
PIPELINE
Modeler to painted in three steps
01
Save as LWO3
LightWave 2018 and later save LWO3 by default. Older files: load and resave once.
02
Paint
Drag the .lwo onto MechaPaint and paint per surface with layers, patterns, symmetry, and the clone stamp.
03
Export PNGs
Write painted textures per surface and hook them back up in Surface Editor. Originals untouched.
LightWave deserved a modern painter. Here it is.
Download, Windows & Mac Buy while it's half offBuying unlocks watermark-free exports.