Essential LightWave 3D- P6 pdf

Lathe The Lathe tool lets you take something you’ve created and “spin” it around to cre - ate an object. It creates geometry from either polygons or curves. (Lathe is some - times called Sweep in other 3D packages.) 1. Create a two-dimensional disc some - where to the left of X=0. Note In addition to using the Numeric window to change the Lathe settings, you can drag the root handle around to move the center of the effect. You can drag the rotation handles to specify where you want the “lathing” to start and stop. Press the <Left Arrow> to reduce the number of segments; press the <Right Arrow> to increase the number of segments. Note Sometimes Lathe creates the new polys with their normals facing the “wrong” way. Be sure to check this every time after lathing and flip the polygons if necessary. (Even if you’re using a double-sided surface on your polys, it’s always a good idea to have your normals facing the “right” way.) Chapter 5 ························ 138 Figure 5-11 2. Select Multiply | Extend | Lathe to activate the Lathe tool. Click in the Back viewport, as shown in Figure 5-12, and drag straight down. (The axis you are creating defines the angle around which your disc will be “lathed.”) ··············· Modeling 2: Additional Tools 139 Figure 5-12: Multiply | Extend | Lathe activates the Lathe tool. Figure 5-13: Lathe also works with splines (curves — also known sometimes as “rails”) to quickly create rather neat-looking chalices and other “turned” objects. (The Sketch tool (Create | Curves | Sketch) was used to quickly draw the curve that was then lathed with the same settings as the disc in Figure 5-11.) Figure 5-14: The Offset field lets you “skew” the lathe operation, letting you create springs and other nifty doodads! (Remember that you can enter a mathematical formula into any of LightWave’s Numeric input fields. So, if, as in this illustration, you didn’t quite know what five complete revolutions would be in degrees, just enter 360*5, and let LightWave come up with 1800.0º for you.) Taper Under the Modify | Transform menu, LightWave offers two kinds of tools that taper your geometry. Taper lets you control the amount of effect on each axis of the taper, depending on how much you move your mouse up and down or left and right. Taper Constrain, on the other hand, affects your geometry in both directions of your taper at once (for instance, if you wanted a Doric column to evenly taper as it rises). With a Taper tool active, click in a Top viewport to taper your selected geometry Note Taper, Twist, and Bend all work best when you have many segments along the effect’s axis of the geometry you are deforming. as it extends along the Y axis. Drag left or right, up or down to taper your object. (Technically, the Taper tool successively scales the selected geometry relative to the distance of the selected geometry’s bottom.) Chapter 5 ························ 140 Figure 5-15: The Taper Constrain tool in action. Pressing <n> opens the Numeric win - dow for Taper and activates a little gizmo (seen on the “Base Object” in Figure 5-15) to give you a visual interpretation of the Taper tool’s effect. Right-clicking and drag - ging the gizmo’s ends will let you exactly position and angle the tool’s effect. Through the Numeric window, you can adjust the falloff of the effect to “sculpt” how Taper affects your selected geometry. • The Falloff pop-up menu lets you choose from several complex ways of let - ting the taper effect dissipate through space. (We use Linear because it is what you will most often use. However, through this pop-up menu, the tool can even refer - ence the settings on a weight map that you’ve created. To find out more about these falloff settings, explore the Light- Wave manual.) • The Shape buttons let you invert the effect (so the bottom tapers instead of the top), have the taper affect both ends at once, or affect just the middle of the selected geometry. • The Presets pop-up menu gives you quick access to four combinations for the sliders below it that shape the curve of the linear falloff. (You can see examples of the effect of changing these sliders in Figure 5-15.) • The Range of the effect defaults to Automatic. However, by right-clicking and manipulating the gizmo, you are telling LightWave that you want to specify a fixed angle and/or position for the effect. Clicking on Automatic releases your specified, fixed settings. Twist The Twist tool is something I don’t use all that often, but when I need it, there’s noth- ing else that can fit the bill like this tool can. Technically, it spreads out rotation through your selected geometry in relation to how far each bit is away from the effect’s root. In layman’s terms, it twists stuff. The Twist tool is accessed through Modify | Rotate | Twist. Twist also obeys the same kind of falloff rules that Taper does. By shifting the falloff sliders, the twist in Figure 5-16 (on the following page) begins gently from the bot - tom, increasing as it reaches the top of our stack of segments. You can move and angle the area of effect for the twist by right-clicking and dragging on the gizmo in the viewports. This sets the Range to Fixed, just like in Taper. Click on Automatic to revert to LW’s automatic settings. Note Twist is a cool tool, but it is notorious for cre - ating many non-planar polys. Check your work for non-planars after using Twist. ··············· Modeling 2: Additional Tools 141 Bend We used Bend when making our flying text logo in Chapter 3. It follows along the same rationale as Taper and Twist. Chapter 5 ························ 142 Figure 5-16: The twist axis is established by clicking in a viewport, “spindling” the effect directly away from you in the viewport in which you clicked. (Think of the axis around which you’d twist a tall stack of napkins, playing cards, or saltine crackers. You establish this axis by looking straight down at the stack.) Figure 5-17: Click and drag in a viewport to bend your selection as if it were a car’s radio antenna and you were looking straight down the antenna at the effect’s axis. Note Unlike Twist, Bend is usu - ally very good about not creating non-planars, if you bend a poly only once. After hitting a selection more than once with Bend, check to see if it’s created any non- planar polys. Smooth Scale/Mov e Plus Smooth Scale pushes your selection out along each individual polygon’s normal by the distance you enter in its input window. (It will pull your selection in if you enter a negative value.) Unfortunately, Smooth Scale has no real-time interface, which makes its use less than intuitive. That’s why the Move Plus tool is such a welcome addition to LightWave 8. Move Plus fea - tures all of the functionality of the traditional Move tool when using the left mouse button. However, when used with the right mouse button, it performs a real-time smooth scale. What if we wanted to make ThinGuy (one of the characters in LightWave 3D 8 Character Animation) into “PlumpGuy”? (Hey, anything can happen in production, right?) I select the polys I want to push out and then select Modify | Translate | More | Move Plus. By right-clicking and dragging up, I can push the polygons out along their normals, essentially puffing it up. Dragging down pulls them back in. I often use the Move Plus tool on a character’s fingers to make them fatter or thinner. Note Due to the way Smooth Scale and Move Plus operate, they can break the symmetry on your object. Be sure to check symmetry after working with one of these tools. ··············· Modeling 2: Additional Tools 143 Figure 5-18: ThinGuy. Figure 5-19 Rail Extrude — Single Rail Rail Extrude is a little like those “Leather - man” tools that are a combination screw- driver, pliers, scissors, awl, penknife, and so on. Rail Extrude is one little tool, but it does a whole lot of things. Let’s start with one of its simple uses and move on from there. Have you ever wanted to create one of those “tunnel fly-throughs”? Follow these steps: 1. Grab the Sketch tool, and draw a rail (curve) you’d like to have your tunnel follow. (You can load mine, if you like. It’s had some points cut from it to help smooth it out: Objects\Chapter05\ RailExtrude_Raw.lwo .) Note Notice the funky little diamond thing at one end of the curve in Figure 5-21. That is the end I started sketching first. This is the start point of the curve, as far as LightWave’s Rail Extrude is concerned. The circle we create in just a moment should be right at this place if we want the extrusion to follow this curve as we intend. You can switch the end LightWave thinks of as its start point by flipping the curve the same way you would flip a polygon (<f>). Chapter 5 ························ 144 Figure 5-20: Using Smooth Scale or Move Plus on an entire object can produce some interesting results. (Remember Dig Dug?) Figure 5-21 2. With the curve in a background layer, create a disc and move it to the curve’s start point. In order to have it orient properly along the curve, you will also need to rotate it so that its normal is like an extension of the curve’s line. (“Spinning” around the Perspective viewport and touching up the rotation where the normal is most out of align - ment is the quickest way to get it aligned well.) Note Carl Meritt’s AlignToRail plug-in, available on the companion CD, will automatically line up your polygon to the start of the back - ground curve, making quick work out of an otherwise time-consuming process. Note If you want the extruded geometry to have its normals facing out, then you want to have the soon-to-be-extruded poly’s normal facing away from the curve. If you want the new geometry to have its normals facing in, then the poly’s normal should be facing toward the curve. ··············· Modeling 2: Additional Tools 145 Figure 5-22 3. Once you’ve got the polygon aligned, Multiply | Extend | Rail Extrude opens the Rail Extrude: Single window. It has the following options: • Automatic segmentation will let LightWave make its best judgment as far as how many “slices” to make and where they should be so the extrusion most closely follows the curve. • Uniform Lengths lets LightWave distribute its specified number of seg - ments so they are all equidistant along the curve’s length. • Uniform Knots tells LightWave to distribute its specified number of segments with relation to the place - ment and number of knots (points) on the curve. • Oriented tells LightWave to rotate the poly, aligning it to the curve as it is extruded. 4. Accept the default settings shown in Figure 5-22. The disc is extruded along the curve (looking a little like the ductwork from Brazil). 5. Save your object. (Mine is Objects\ Chapter05\RailExtrude_1.lwo.) 6. With the layer that has the curve in it in the foreground, select File | Export | Path to Motion. Save the motion somewhere where you’ll have intuitive access to it (Motions\Chapter5\ TunnelFly-Through.mot is what I used). You will need to add “.mot” (with - out the quotes) to the end of the file for Layout to see it; Modeler doesn’t do this automatically when you use Path to Motion. 7. Now, use Send Object to Layout so we can make a movie of our quick example here. 8. While in Layout, use <[> and <]>to adjust the grid size so your extruded object fills the screen nicely. Chapter 5 ························ 146 Figure 5-23 ··············· Modeling 2: Additional Tools 147 9. Select the camera and use File | Load | Load Motion File. Choose the motion file you created in Step 6 of this exercise. 10. Change the end frame of the Frame Slider to 160, and “scrub” the Frame Slider along the timeline. You will see your camera move along the tube (even though it won’t be “looking where it’s going” yet). 11. Under Display Options, give yourself a Viewport Layout of 2 Left, 1 Right. Set the Top Left viewport to Camera View and the Right viewport to Top View and have it Center Current Item. (You can set the Bottom Left viewport to whatever you’d like.) 12. With the camera still selected, press <m> to bring up the Motion Options window for the camera. (See Figure 5-24.) 13. Under the Controllers and Limits tab of the Motion Options window, set both Heading Controller and Pitch Control - ler to Align to Path. You can then go back to the IK and Modifiers tab and adjust how much your camera “antici - pates” its motion by setting the Align to Path Look-ahead field. (It’s easiest to use the slider button to the field’s right and “scrub” through your scene, making little adjustments so the cam - era gives you what you want.) If your polygon normals are facing in, your Camera viewport should be showing you what it’s like to be looking down that tun - nel. (If they aren’t, just switch back to Modeler, flip them, and return to Layout; if you’re working with the Hub active, when you get back to Layout, the polys will be flipped!) Figure 5-24 [...]... take on the fly-through Rail Extrude — Multiple Rails Now how about “lofting”? Can LightWave do lofting? Absolutely Note Lofting is a term from CAD/CAM programs that work almost exclusively in splines and NURBs (non-uniform, rational B-splines) In short, lofting is using splines to guide the creation of a NURB surface LightWave will let you guide the extrusion along multiple background curves You can... must be a lot more careful when creating the curves you will be “lofting” along LightWave will try to distribute segments and orient them knot for knot If your object’s silhouette must meet an exact shape, have all your curves made with the same number of knots, and know that from the first knot to the last on all curves, LightWave will use them to determine exact placement and angle of the extruded... which represents the exact extents of the texture map Note You can load any size image as the texture map (square or rectangular), and LightWave will interpolate it to fit within this 5x5 grid Any points that go off the edges of this 5x5 grid aren’t “lost” to the texture LightWave tiles the image (repeats it infinitely) when it reaches the edge of this grid Once you have created your UV texture, you can... Tile tell LightWave how to tile the image when it reaches the edge of its 5x5 grid It can be repeated or mirrored, have its edge pixels continue on indefinitely, or reset to the surface’s base attribute (what it would be without the map applied) 166 Figure 5-65 · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · M o d e l i n g 2 : A d d i t i o n a l To o l s detail in your texture than can fit in a single pixel of LightWave s... of this cube so each one is easily accessible • Relative Gap Size tells LightWave how much space you want between the groupings on the atlas UV map Figure 5-66: Point(s) selected on the model will also show up as selected in the UV Texture viewport Moving a point in the UV Texture viewport will not alter its position on the model; LightWave will use its position on the image map to “warp” the image map’s... you have access to the controls that actually take your selected geometry and make a UV map from it Choose Planar as the Map Type, select the Z axis onto which we will “spindle” our 2D image, and let LightWave use its automatic settings to size the UV map it generates This gives us the map shown in the UV Texture viewport The UV texture map in Figure 5-63 looks just like the sphere when seen (orthogonally)... with some bump to it so you can see some “nurnage” (that’s the industry’s technical term for “neat-bumpy-detail”) as you’re flying down the shaft (I wasn’t happy with any of the presets that came with LightWave, so if you want to use one of mine, load in Surfaces\ GrungyCement.srf.) Figure 5-25: Just a quick F9 of the tunnel we just made Spend some time lighting and surfacing your tunnel scene Render... image to be seen in the backdrop of your UV Texture window (Notice how the original dimensions of the image are now “squished” to fit the 5x5 UV Texture grid.) If the image “overpowers” the light colors LightWave uses for its points and polys, you can use the Display Options | Backdrop tab to adjust the brightness, contrast, and image resolution (see Figure 5-64) Figure 5-63: In its simplest form, UV... too slowly, you may have to change the end frame of your movie and enter the Scene Editor to scale your keys Figure 5-26: You can scale the keyframes for objects in your scene using the Dope Sheet in LightWave 8’s Scene Editor Click on the first keyframe for your camera (denoted by a green bar), then, holding the key, click on the last keyframe You can drag the yellow bars on either side of... most cases; higher levels can cause the texture to look blurry) Pixel Blending and Texture Antialiasing are the same for all image mapping types Note Remember, to see the texture (UV or otherwise) in LightWave s viewports, you’ve got to set the Viewport Display Type to Texture or Textured Wireframe! All this is interesting, but when most people in “the industry” think of UV mapping, they’re thinking . into any of LightWave s Numeric input fields. So, if, as in this illustration, you didn’t quite know what five complete revolutions would be in degrees, just enter 360*5, and let LightWave come. LightWave s Rail Extrude is concerned. The circle we create in just a moment should be right at this place if we want the extrusion to follow this curve as we intend. You can switch the end LightWave. segmentation will let LightWave make its best judgment as far as how many “slices” to make and where they should be so the extrusion most closely follows the curve. • Uniform Lengths lets LightWave distribute