Essential LightWave 3D- P4 ppt

Save this text you’ve created, as we use it in an upcoming example on using one layer of your object to modify another.. With the edge points still selected,click on the Extender Plus to

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

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

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-example, I’ve increased the number ofsides and segments to provide a very

smooth surface Now hit <F2> to

cen-ter the ball

2 Using your right mouse button, dragout a lasso selection around the top half

of the sphere including the band ofpolys just below the center

3 Press the <Delete> key to remove

these polygons This leaves us with anice simple bowl shape As you cansee, however, the bowl has no interior.We’ll use the Extender Plus tool to

Figure 3-66

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.

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 pointsand sizing them so that they’re notpoking through the outside polys of thebowl Continue this process severalmore times until you’ve reached thebottom 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 attheir averaged center

Figure 3-70: The final bowl with a smooth surface.

Figure 3-69

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

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

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

You should notice that the plane to be 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

sten-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.)

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.

•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

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.

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 allour letters non-planar, which Triple may ormay 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 tolook even cooler than it already does, wecan use one of the Boolean operations toadd some curve to our text (Light scatters

so much better off a subtle curve than itdoes off a flat plane This is part of knowinghow to make something look professional.)

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 anempty foreground layer, and put yourtext into the background as a reference

as you create a highly tesselatedsphere, the surface of which will repre-sent the curve of our text’s new face

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 weremoved forward to a place where theylooked good.)

Save what you’ve got here We’re going

to do some cool things with it in futurechapters

Figure 3-81

Figure 3-82: The finished Boolean operation.

Bevel and Smooth Shift

Bevel and Smooth Shift are two of the most

frequently used modeling tools They do

almost the same thing, except Bevel affects

every polygon individually, while Smooth

Shift treats all contiguous selections as a

single unit.

Hot Key Block

Bevel and Smooth Shift

and dragging left

makes the polyssmaller

Note

Figure 3-83

If you wanted to have all the letters the same thickness and not get thicker toward the center of the logo, as is the case in Figure 3-82, you could jump back to where things were at Figure 3-81 Instead

of doing a Boolean, do a Solid Drill | Core, then Extrude the

results, and resurface the sides of the letters to their original surface You’d then have something like Figure 3-83.

Figure 3-84

With four of the sphere’s polys selected,

Multiply | Extend | Smooth Shift

pushes and/or pulls the polys, but Smooth

Shift treats them as a single unit Drag left

Edge Bevel and Super Shift

The last two modeling tools we’ll look at

are Edge Bevel and Super Shift As you

might have guessed, these are variations of

the Bevel and Smooth Shift tools

men-tioned above

Edge Bevel is useful anytime you need

to create geometry between two or more

adjacent polygons When we talk aboutedges in this case, we’re referring to morethan just the geometry along the perimeter

of your object Edges occur at the aries of every single polygon

bound-Figure 3-85

to “suck them into” their originating

vol-ume; drag right to “push” them out, away

from their original volume

By edge beveling the top of this box, we

create the same basic effect as if we had

used the traditional Bevel tool However, if

we select the edge around the center of the

box, we can “open” it to create an additional

band of polygons Dragging to the right

Super Shift is a handy alternative to the

tra-ditional Smooth Shift tool While Smooth

Shift allows you to push and scale groups of

polygons, it does not give you independent

control over either process Super Shift,

however, does, thus enabling you to

per-form a “group bevel” on your polygons In

addition, Super Shift automatically

gener-ates polygons with zero offset and a

Maximum Smoothing Angle of zero simply

by activating the tool (While the benefits of

that may not make sense now, they will

later when we talk about sub-patch

modeling.) For now, let’s take a quick look

at the differences between Smooth Shiftand Super Shift

When pushing these polys out of the ballusing Smooth Shift, Modeler looks at eachindividual polygon’s normal to determinehow it should move and scale the entiregroup Super Shift, on the other hand, aver-ages the group’s normals What that means

in practice is that Super Shift won’t “puffup” the polys on a curved surface as itpushes them out

Figure 3-87

makes the bevel larger, while dragging tothe left makes it smaller Edge Bevel isparticularly helpful when working on char-acters, where beveled edges can be used tocreate wrinkles in the character’s skin

· · ·

That concludes our discussion of a

respect-able number of modeling tools A modeler

could almost go his entire career and never

use more than these, but in later chapters

on modeling, we add to this repertoire of

yours so you’ll be able to handle just about

anything a client cares to put into your

capable hands Remember, even all the

tools explored in the more advanced

chapters are still only just scratching the

surface

You will reach your fullest potential bypushing, peeking, and playing If you view3D as a puzzle, game, or toy through whichall things are possible with the “right” pat-tern of patience, exploration, observation,and retention, there will be no limits as towhat you can do

Figure 3-89

To this end, I’d like to take a moment to point

you toward one of the programs available on

the companion CD Sherlock is a game that

trains your mind to see even the most

seem-ingly complex tasks as simply a process of

elimination.

“ When you have eliminated the

impossi-ble, whatever remains, however improbaimpossi-ble,

must be the truth ” — Sherlock Holmes

Sherlock (PC only) by Everett Kaser

(http://www.kaser.com) is a “game” where,

like LightWave, you are given all the clues

you need to do what you need to do In this

case, it is to find the locations for each icon

within a grid from 3x3 to 8x8, with as much

(or as little) help and as many (or as few) hints as you need.

I hesitate to call Sherlock a game, even though it is a fun and rewarding way to pass the time Part of this is that often in computer games, from the moment you click “Go,” the computer will do everything in its power to keep you from reaching your goal, whatever

it happens to be — and I, for one, find this to

be a waste of my time Sherlock, on the other

hand, gives you all the resources you need to solve the puzzle — and

unlike solitaire, your winning is not

dependent upon chance Your cess, or lack thereof, rides entirely upon your shoulders (think about it) Success in Sherlock, as in Light-

suc-Wave, feels like an achievement, not

a fight.

The other reason I hesitate to call Sherlock a game is that it is much

more than just an enjoyable way to

pass the time It is training for your

mind (“Use it or lose it.”) Exploring this kind of training, you begin to become accustomed to seeing the whole picture as patterns of interre- lated subsets and steps When temporarily stumped in either LightWave or Sherlock (or life), you become able to take a

step back and see the next step toward the

solution, sometimes just sitting there in plain sight, patiently waiting for you to take notice

of it.

Figure 3-90: Sherlock