Essential LightWave 3D- P4 ppt

4. Center your text again (see step 1). 5. Select Multiply | Extend | Extrude to activate the Extrude tool. 6. With the Extrude tool active, click and drag in a line along the +Z axis on either a Right or Top viewport (basi- cally, anything that isn’t Perspective or where you’re looking at the letters head-on will do). The more you drag, the more the text will be extruded. 7. Press <Return> to accept the effects of the Extrude tool (see Figure 3-66). Save this text you’ve created, as we use it in an upcoming example on using one layer of your object to modify another. Chapter 3 ························ 78 Note Depending on which direction the surface normals of your polys to be extruded are facing, dragging one way will create the new geometry with their normals facing “out” (which is what you want most often) or “in” (which means you’re seeing “through” the outer surface of the object, seeing only the “insides,” which can be cool for faking the effect of volumetric lighting). Figure 3-65: Looking more like a logo. We’re just about there! Figure 3-64 ············· Modeling 1: Foundation Material 79 Extender Plus ex•tend v. 1. To spread or stretch forth. 6a. To cause to be of greater area or vol- ume. (Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary ) What Extrude is to polygons, Extender is to points. Specifically, it expands the geometry around the selected points. Let’s use Extender Plus to make a sim - ple bowl. 1. Activate the Ball tool and drag out a circle in the Top view. The exact size doesn’t really matter. Now, holding the <Ctrl> key (or the middle mouse but - ton), drag in the Back view to create a perfectly round sphere. For this example, I’ve increased the number of sides and segments to provide a very smooth surface. Now hit <F2> to cen- ter the ball. 2. Using your right mouse button, drag out a lasso selection around the top half of the sphere including the band of polys just below the center. 3. Press the <Delete> key to remove these polygons. This leaves us with a nice simple bowl shape. As you can see, however, the bowl has no interior. We’ll use the Extender Plus tool to remedy this. Figure 3-66 Chapter 3 ························ 80 4. Select a couple of points along the open edge of the bowl, then activate the Select Loop tool. With all of the points along the edge selected, go to the Mul - tiply | Extend menu and select Extender Plus. Looking at your geometry, it will appear as if nothing has happened. On the contrary, Extender Plus has actu - ally expanded the edge of the ball. The only problem is that this new edge lies directly on top of the old one. There - fore, in order to see the effect of the Extender Plus tool, we must modify the new geometry by moving, rotating, or sizing it. 5. Select the Modify | Transform | Size tool and scale the selection in slightly. You’ll see the lip of the bowl “magi - cally” appear. Note If your selection does not scale inward evenly, make sure the Modes button at the bottom of the interface is set to Action Cen - ter: Selection. Figure 3-68 Figure 3-67: Deleting the top half of the ball leaves us with a generic bowl shape. ············· Modeling 1: Foundation Material 81 6. With the edge points still selected, click on the Extender Plus tool again. Then activate the Move tool. Holding the <Ctrl> key down (or using the middle mouse button), drag down slightly to form the initial inside edge of the bowl. 7. Click on the Extender Plus tool again, followed by the Move tool. Move the new edge down slightly. Then use the Size tool to shrink the selection so that the points are inside the bowl. Repeat this process again, moving the points and sizing them so that they’re not poking through the outside polys of the bowl. Continue this process several more times until you’ve reached the bottom of the bowl. 8. Finally, click on Extender Plus once more. Click on the Weld Average tool from the Detail | Points menu. This will weld all of the points together at their averaged center. Figure 3-70: The final bowl with a smooth surface. Figure 3-69 Chapter 3 ························ 82 Booleans and Solid Drilling Bool·e·an adj. Of or pertaining to an algebraic combinatorial system treating variables, such as propositions and com - puter logic elements, through the operators AND, OR, NOT, IF, THEN, and EXCEPT. [After George Boole (1815-1864).] (The American Heritage Dictionary) With Booleans and solid drilling, you can use parts of your object to “carve out” spaces in other parts of your object. This is powerful computing, and you’ve got to make sure your prep work for these kinds of operations leaves LightWave with as clean a start as possible. (Non-planar polys are a surefire way to generate errors.) But when you’re thinking ahead and planning your modeling tasks as if you were playing a strategy game or solving a puzzle, these tools can be incredible allies. Hot Key Block Booleans and Solid Drilling <B> Boolean <C> Solid Drill <m> Merge Points In a nutshell, with both Booleans and solid drilling, you’re using an object in a back - ground layer to modify an object in a foreground layer. The following exercises show how to use these tools. Let’s start with the objects shown in Figure 3-71 — a white cube on Layer 3 and an orange sphere on Layer 4. 1. To use the sphere to “carve out” a sec - tion of the cube, we put the sphere into the background layer and leave the cube in the foreground. 2. Construct | Combine | Boolean brings up the Boolean window (Figure 3-73). Since we are going to be subtracting the volume of the object in the background layer, we choose Subtract and click OK (see Figure 3-74). Figure 3-71 Figure 3-72 Figure 3-73 Showing only the foreground layer after the Boolean operation, we see the “bite” taken out of the cube by the volume of the sphere. Notice how the sphere’s orange surface is now the color for the “bitten” polys! With Solid Drill, you don’t “carve out” bits of an object like you do with Booleans. Instead, you use layers to “cut holes in” or “stencil” shapes into other object layers. For the next exercise, I’ve created a sim - ple white plane (a two-dimensional box) and use the text we created in the Extrude exercise to “stencil” the shape of the text onto the plane (see Figure 3-76). Note You should notice that the plane to be sten - ciled in Figure 3-76 has five width segments and three height segments. This is because the text I wish to stencil has 2,876 points on its face polygons. Trying to stencil this would be asking LightWave to try to have many more than its maximum number of points per poly in the resultant white plane that bound the letter shapes. I’ve helped LightWave by breaking this plane up into segments, so the maximum point-per-poly limit won’t be pushed by any one poly. (After the Solid Drill operation, using the information window for all polys, I was told that the largest number of points any poly had was 428.) ············· Modeling 1: Foundation Material 83 Figure 3-74 Note When you do a Boolean operation, the points of the “bitten” polys aren’t “stitched” directly to the points of the original object — this gives a nice, sharp edge when both surfaces have Smoothing active. This can cause a problem if you do a lot of selecting with the Select Connected tool because the two pieces aren’t really connected; they’re only laying exactly on top of each other, which isn’t the same thing. To connect the “bitten” part of a Boolean operation with its original object, you must use Detail | Points | Merge Points. • Automatic “fuses” multiple points into one point only if the points are laying exactly in the same space, with not even a micrometer difference between their exact position. This is what you use to fuse the pieces after a Boolean operation. • Fixed lets you decree “all points that are within ‘X’ mm of each other shall now become one,” and so forth. After you’ve merged points, especially if you’ve just merged with the Fixed option, it’s a good idea to peruse the Point and Polygon Statistics windows. Merging points gets rid of points, not the poly information tacked to those points. You need to check to see if you have any “0 Point” or “2 Point” polygons (or points that don’t belong to any polygons at all) that you don’t specifically want. After merging points, you may have to adjust the smoothing angle of your surfaces so they still give you a nice, sharp edge where they meet. Figure 3-75 Like with Booleans, the object in the back- ground layer is the “cutter,” and the object in the foreground layer is the object to be cut. The “cutter” must pass through the “cuttee.” 1. I want to use the text to stencil a new surface into the white plane, so I choose Solid Drill, which brings up the Solid Drill window and activates the Surface box where I can type in a new surface name or select an existing one from the pop-up menu. Note If you don’t see the effect of the Solid Drill function, make sure that you are viewing the object in one of the wireframe display types (such as Textured Wireframe). If your drilled surface is the same as the object it’s drilled into, it won’t be visible in Smooth Shaded or Textured view types. Note • Core leaves just the polys of the fore - ground layer in the shape of where the two objects intersect. • Tunnel “cuts a hole” in the polys of the foreground layer with the shape of the object in the background. • Stencil cuts the polys of the foreground layer and assigns a new surface to them. • Slice cuts just the polys of the foreground layer, leaving them with their original surfacing. Chapter 3 ························ 84 Figure 3-76 Figure 3-77 2. The Construct | Combine | Solid Drill operation leaves me with the text that was in the background layer “sten- ciled” onto the plane. (Unlike a Boolean operation, all these polys are connected — there is no need to merge points.) Before we move on to beveling and smooth-shifting, there is one more cool thing I want to show you how to do with Booleans. With the Bend tool, we got our text to bend around the Z axis. But if we had also wanted our text to bend around the Y and/or X axes, Bend would have made all our letters non-planar, which Triple may or may not have been able to make sense out of (because a poly in the shape of a letter is so very complex). However, if we want our flying logo to look even cooler than it already does, we can use one of the Boolean operations to add some curve to our text. (Light scatters so much better off a subtle curve than it does off a flat plane. This is part of knowing how to make something look professional.) ············· Modeling 1: Foundation Material 85 Figure 3-78 1. To do this we need a bit more depth in our letters as we work (see Figure 3-79). So, dragging using the right mouse button (<Command>+ mouse-button on a Mac with a one-button mouse) will let you lasso the polys you want selected. Grab the rear polys of your text and move them back a bit to give us some room. 2. Next, as in Figure 3-80, bring up an empty foreground layer, and put your text into the background as a reference as you create a highly tesselated sphere, the surface of which will repre - sent the curve of our text’s new face. Chapter 3 ························ 86 Figure 3-79 Figure 3-80 3. With our text in the foreground layer and the sphere in the background, acti - vate Boolean again, but this time choose Intersect. The end result will create an object that consists of only the area where the two volumes are “inside” one another. The letter faces now catch the light in a much more interesting way than they did when they were all flat, even, and ever so slightly boring. There are exactly no non- planar polygons. (After doing the Boolean, the points of the back of the logo were moved forward to a place where they looked good.) Save what you’ve got here. We’re going to do some cool things with it in future chapters. ············· Modeling 1: Foundation Material 87 Figure 3-81 Figure 3-82: The finished Boolean operation. [...]... reliable single-frame VTRs are thankful that LightWave has not forgotten them The Save Alpha options tell LightWave where you want the alpha Lighting Lighting is, beyond the shadow of a doubt, the most important factor in making anything look good in 3D Because there are exceptional resources on lighting and lighting specifically in LightWave, such as 102 LightWave 3D 8 Lighting by Nicholas Boughen... to Enhanced Extreme that specify how many passes LightWave makes to take the “jaggies” out of a picture (See Figure 4-3.) • Segments tells you how many segments LightWave will need to render an image the size you’ve asked for with the amount of memory allocated under Segment Memory Limit • The Zoom Factor menu allows you to choose how you want to change LightWave s camera’s zoom Zoom Factor, Lens Focal... this, the LightWave manual does a good job of explaining the details of the settings and how to make the most of them Also, be sure to check out the Digital Confusion image filter in the LightWave manual Just as Vector Blur is a way of quickly approximating motion blur, the Digital Confusion plug-in is a way of quickly approximating depth of field Rendering So you know how to “twist the dials” of LightWave s... this window, you tell LightWave the frame range you want to render (which doesn’t have to be the same as what you’ve set in the main Layout window) by entering information into the Render First Frame and Render Last Frame fields (You can tell LightWave to skip n frames as it renders by changing the value for Render Frame Step.) • Range Type allows you to specify which frames LightWave will render In... · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · LightWave s Camera If you were to go out and look at a 35mm motion picture camera or even a professional-level 35mm single-lens reflex, you’d see a whole lot of settings that you can play with LightWave does a lot to pattern its camera’s adjustments after its “real-world” counterpart, so if you come to LightWave knowing how to use a film camera, the transition... is set in the Threshold input box.) LightWave then re-renders · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · Layout 1: Foundation Material only those pixels, letting everything else stay as it is Using Adaptive Sampling, you can get a very good-looking image in a fraction of the time it would take to render and antialias on most other rendering engines Without Adaptive Sampling, LightWave re-renders everything in the... keep these “sub-pixel” textures from “crawling” during an animation the precise effect of your object’s motion that would be too quick for LightWave s “shutter” to “freeze.” Because of the way this motion blur is calculated, factoring in a minutely different point on LightWave s timeline for each antialiasing pass, the more passes, the smoother and more “realistic” the render will be So, the higher the... its entirety, but each pass is also rendered from a slightly different point on LightWave s timeline (Adaptive Sampling is not active when rendering with Motion Blur or Depth of Field, even though the Adaptive Sampling box may remain checked.) The result of this is an image that shows • The Particle Blur check box tells LightWave whether or not you want to blur single-point polys (particles) as well... plug-in called Vector Blur You can find it under Scene | Effects | Image Processing | Add Image Filter You can find out more about this plug-in in the LightWave manual, but in short, it is a way of quickly giving the illusion of motion blur without LightWave having to go through all the steps necessary to create good-looking exact motion blur 97 Chapter 4 · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·... tools that allow you to render your image in true “stereo” vision and recreate the depth-of-field effects you’d see when using a real camera 98 Focal Distance tells LightWave where you want to be “focusing.” The Lens F-Stop setting tells LightWave how much area around your focal distance will be “in focus” (just like a real camera, the higher the F-stop, the larger the area that will be in focus) · . this would be asking LightWave to try to have many more than its maximum number of points per poly in the resultant white plane that bound the letter shapes. I’ve helped LightWave by breaking. lot of settings that you can play with. LightWave does a lot to pattern its camera’s adjustments after its “real-world” counterpart, so if you come to LightWave knowing how to use a film camera,. field. You can access LightWave s Graph Editor through this button to enve- lope this setting to change over time. • Aperture Height changes the size of the “gate” inside LightWave s virtual cam - era.