LightWave 3D 8 Texturing phần 6 doc

When I start my new Photoshop file, I create all the layer sets I am going to need, for example, color layers, bump layers, reflection layers, etc.. The Image EditorIntroduction to the I

eyelids appear wet, to make a cut in his forehead appear to be oozing freshblood, and to coat his lips with spittle issued forth from his war lust.

The reason you can’t create wet areas with a specular map and an all Glossiness value in the Surface Editor alone is because in order to makethings look wet, you need to have similar values (usually with approximately10% to 5% difference) of the two surface attributes, generally at rather highpercentages, such as 80% Glossiness and 100% Specularity However, oncethe gloss values begin to exceed the specular values, even when thespecularity is from a texture, the entire surface begins to look wet So if Iwere to apply my specular map and then simply push the Glossiness value

over-up, the entire surface would begin to look wet Instead, I create a gloss mapwith very light areas in the areas that I want to appear wet, while leavingthe rest of the map on a suitable overall value for the rest of the surface.Make sense?

Remember, the function of Glossiness is essentially to “tighten” thespecular highlights High values of both Specularity and Glossiness produce

a plastic look with small, tight highlights, while lower levels of Glossiness

produce broader, softer highlights So the function of the glossiness map is simply to tighten certain areas of shininess created by the specular map,

instead of tightening the highlights of the entire surface equally

So let’s first take a look at the specular map for the orc’s head As youcan see in Figure 11-69, there are many variations on this particular map,especially since not only is he sweating, but he also has some war paint onhis face that has a different specular quality than the skin I also used thesame guidelines I would use for painting a specular map for a human head,making areas like the forehead, nose, and the area directly beneath his eyesshinier than the other parts of his face

Note that I have made the areas that I want to have wet looking verybright in the specular map, since it requires a high value of both specularityand glossiness to create an ideal wet look

Now let’s take a look at the glossiness map as shown in Figure 11-70 I

basically copied all the layers from the specular map into my glossiness

layer set and played around with all their values, deleting some of the layers

that I didn’t need

Notice how I’ve increased the gloss values on all the areas where I want

tighter highlights The forehead has higher values so that it will appear

slightly sweaty Notice the lines running down the forehead to create

rivu-lets of sweat Also note how areas like the cut and his lips have very high

values to create that very wet look You’ll also see that the area of war paint

has a very low level of glossiness because I wanted the paint to remain fairly

dry looking I have also created very bright spots at all the “exit” points of

his facial piercings to create that icky, seeping liquid look around them The

bright areas beneath his nose create a look on his skin as if his nose has

been dripping down onto his upper lip

Figure 11-71 shows how the head

would look if this map was not applied to it,

and a simple Glossiness value was

assigned to it in the Surface Editor Not

very nice at all

This very clearly demonstrates how

the glossiness map “tightened” up the

specularity of the surface, because without

it the shiny areas created by the specular

map simply become blown out and white

Making a Reflection Map

Reflection maps are one of my favorite types of maps to paint Using them

carefully can actually help to create far more realistic highlights on your

sur-face when placed in nice environments (especially HDR image-based

environments that project a lot of color onto your models, particularly when

used in conjunction with radiosity) with good lighting rather than using

reg-ular specreg-ular maps

When creating reflection maps for things like skin or wood, I often find

that a really quick way of making them is simply to take your specular maps

and darken them a lot, and use those as reflection textures This is because

substances like these are not mirror-like by any stretch of the imagination,

so they require very low levels of reflection

But for the purposes of this example we are looking at something that

is very reflective: metal We all know that metal can be highly reflective

The key to making realistic metal lies in creating good reflection maps for it

and placing the objects into environments that give the metal a lot to reflect

in its surface The trick is to avoid overdoing it — when we all started

learn-ing 3D, we loved maklearn-ing perfectly reflective chrome objects, didn’t we?

Figure 11-71

Objects that have too much reflection are one of the telltale signs of a ner artist We need to learn to control those urges to make everythingchromey, and begin to concentrate on more realistic looks for our metal.

begin-Of course, there are some occasionswhen you can get away with reallyover-the-top chrome-looking metal, espe-cially for fantasy swords and armor orreally slick cars Figure 11-72 shows apiece of armor that I created for an elfcharacter last year

Okay, so I made it really chrome-likeand probably far too reflective to be realis-tic, but hey that’s fantasy for you (well,that’s the excuse I use)

But what happens when this metal begins to rust or it has beenexposed to extreme weather conditions for a few years? This is when a goodreflective map becomes very important, since unrusted metal has very dif-ferent reflective properties than rusted metal, which is very dull andgenerally very dry looking

So I start off my reflection map with a fairly light shade of gray, and addsome noise to it simply so that the reflections in the reflection bits will havesome noise in them I use Photoshop’s noise filter for this, since it’s the eas-iest and quickest way of adding noise

I then create a new layer on top of this layer, and with a low opacitybrush I paint darker, scratchy areas where the armor has been damaged

Now I add a new layer with additional darker areas in it for where thelittle leather straps that hold the rings in place are (the little rings that con-nect each piece of armor) I figure that all the rubbing from that leather overthe years would probably wear those areas quite a lot This area is alsolikely to build up some dirt from the leather, which would also lessen thereflectivity in those areas

Figure 11-72

Figure 11-73 Figure 11-74

The next layer is one that I often makewhen creating metal textures — a brusheddetail Many metals have brush marks inthem from machining, resulting in what isusually called a brushed steel look Ofcourse I am using artistic license here,because a piece of ancient armor would nothave been machined, so for this particularpiece of armor I will put the brushed layer

on a very low opacity

Creating the brushed look is simple

All you do is create a new gray layer, thenadd some monochrome noise with a fairlyhigh contrast Once you have a contrastedblack and white noise, simply add somehorizontal motion blur to it using a fairlylong distance Easy! You’ll get somethingthat looks like Figure 11-76

So I make a layer like this, and thentake the layer’s opacity down a lot Why do

I bother doing it when it’s barely visible inthe texture? Because it makes me feelbetter and it does actually make a bit of adifference

Now it’s time to add the rust to the reflection map Obviously, rust is

matte and powdery, so we don’t want it to reflect at all in the render I have

already created my color textures for this particular model, and because I

am very careful always to keep everything on its own layer, I have all the

different rust details on their own layers So all I have to do is copy these

layers into my reflection layer set, desaturate them, and darken them to

black

Figure 11-75

Figure 11-76

Figure 11-77 Figure 11-78

Everything seems to be as it should Iapply the texture to my model as a reflec-tion map, and render it in a scene with anHDR image in Image World to create anenvironment for it to reflect I now have theimage shown in Figure 11-79.

The rusty areas look nice and dry andpowdery, while the non-rusty areas remainrelatively shiny and reflective Perfect!

Making a Transparency Map

First of all, I think it is worth mentioning that transparency maps are not for

making objects vanish out of your scene Transparency is not the same asinvisibility Are glass objects in the real world invisible? No, they aren’t.They are transparent So there is no point in using transparency maps if youare trying to fade objects in and out of your scene or anything like that Ifyou need to do that, use a Clip Map in your Object Properties panel inLayout

Transparency is for transparent surfaces, of course, such as glass, tic, and liquids As we have seen previously in this book, setting uptransparency usually requires the use of gradients or Fresnel shaders forrealism, so why map it with a texture? You would use a transparency texturewhen you are making a glass or plastic object dirty or adding a decal to atransparent object (without actually modeling that decal and applying a sepa-rate surface to it, of course)

plas-NOTE: Liquids wouldn’t ordinarily require that textures be applied

to them since they move around, which makes image-based textures a little tricky and cumbersome If you need to add murkiness or any other kind of transparency variation to liquid, try using procedural textures instead.

Remember the dirty window from the luminosity texture example? Let’s goback to that and have a look at making some transparency textures for theglass

Making the transparency map for the glass will be very easy because Ialready created those nice textures for it in the luminosity section All Ineed to do is alter them a little for the

transparency texture Figure 11-80shows the color map for the glass,which is simply a copy of the luminos-ity texture that I then saturated withcolor

Figure 11-79

Figure 11-80

This is pretty much the same kind of thing that I need to create the

transparency map, because the streaks will have lower transparency than

the clean glass, which needs to be 100% transparent

So all I do is take the dirty, streaky layers and simply alter their

blend-ing so that I have some nice variations of gray This is because I don’t want

the glass to just be 100% transparent

where it is clean and 0% transparent

(opaque) where there is dirt I want

variations so that there are different

levels of transparency because it is

more interesting to have variations

Looking at this texture we can

see that the clean areas will be

per-fectly transparent, while the streaky

bits and the grime along the bottom of

the panes will create different levels

of transparency

When I apply this to the model

and render, I get the image in Figure

11-82

You’ll notice that I don’t have

refraction on in these renders Sorry

about that, but it was simply taking far

too long to render them with

refraction!

And that’s it for transparency maps

Making a Translucency Map

Moving onto translucency now, we find yet another of those surface

proper-ties that doesn’t always necessarily require mapping Generally, you only

really need to create translucency maps for organic surfaces, as substances

like fabric or translucent liquids can get away with a simple shading value of

the attribute

For this example we are looking at a heart model I want to make a

translucency texture with veins in it, so that when I place a light inside the

heart and switch off all other lighting in the scene, I get a cool-looking effect

with all the veins showing

I create a square texture in Photoshop, and apply a base layer of light

gray This will provide a fairly high initial translucency value for the flesh of

the heart model

Figure 11-81

Figure 11-82

On top of this I create a new layer anddraw some fairly bold, thick veins in darkgray.

These darker veins now decrease thetranslucency of the model, so that light willnot pass through them as much as it passesthrough the light areas However, simplyhaving thick bold veins on a plain gray base

is boring, so I take my Dodge tool and, with

a soft edge, I build up nice light patchesaround the veins These brighter areas willnow appear even more translucent whenapplied to the model

Now to add some more veins ously, I want a nice variety of veins for myheart, so I create another layer and paint abunch of medium thickness veins in aslightly lighter gray than the thick veins Icreated previously

Obvi-And now for the final bunch of veins —nice little thin ones running along the sur-face I create two different layers, eachcontaining small veins of different thick-ness The really thin ones I make a ratherlight shade of gray, so that they will be a lotmore translucent than the thicker veins

Now it’s time to apply the texture to the model I go into Layout, loadthe model, and apply the texture to the heart I then create a point lightinside the model so that we get the translucent effect correctly

Next, I select the default light in the scene and open its Propertiespanel I switch off Affect Diffuse but leave the Affect Specular option on.This is so that this light will not actually affect the surface in the normal way

Figure 11-83

Figure 11-84

Figure 11-85 Figure 11-86

of affecting its diffuse properties, but will

allow specularity to show on the surface

So basically it won’t actually light the

sur-face as such, but instead will create some

specular highlights on the surface

Figure 11-87 shows the rendered

heart Note that the only textures applied

to this model are the translucency map and

the bump map There is no color map

applied at all — all the vein details come

purely from the translucency map, where

the light is able to pass through the lighter

areas and the darker veins block it to

vary-ing degrees

Pretty cool, huh? I’ve used this same

technique on things like dinosaur and

dragon wings in the past, so that when they

fly in front of the sun (or any other light

source for that matter), you can see all the

veins

Creating a translucency map for a

char-acter’s head where the ears are a light

shade of gray is another popular use of

translucency mapping, because it creates

that glowing ear look when your character

is lit from behind, as seen in Figure 11-88

Making a Bump Map

Finally we get to bump maps Bump maps are probably one of the first types

of textures that most people make when they begin to experiment with

tex-turing their models, and a lot of people actually like to start off their entire

texturing process by creating them

Oddly enough, though, many people struggle with them The first law

of bump mapping (as mentioned at the end of Chapter 4) is that a bump map

should never be used to compensate for a lack of geometry It should only be

used for minor topographical details such as scratches, small dents, minor

irregularities, cellular grain, machining, light wrinkles, blemishes (on skin),

and anything else that can be successfully cheated as an illusion on the

surface

Figure 11-87

Figure 11-88

Let’s look at a bump map for a face.

The bump map in Figure 11-89 is that

of a character who was middle aged andtherefore had a lot of lines in his face

Let’s look at each of the elements inthis bump map, beginning with the basicfacial features — the mouth and eyes Istart off by taking the base color layer that Icreated (the same way that I created thatinitial color base layer in the color mapexample at the beginning of this chapter)

Desaturating that layer gives me a base forthe bump map that has some minor details in it, so it is not a plain graylayer You can even add a little bit of noise into it to make it slightly rough.Now on to the mouth Take a look at your lips and you’ll notice that theyare pretty bumpy and have little sharp lines in them Your bump map needs

to include these lines What sometimes works quite well is to take a photo

of your lips and use that as a guideline for painting them You can actuallyincorporate it into your texture (if you can get the lighting in the photo suit-able enough) or simply use it as a guideline to paint over Not only do yourlips have these delicate little grooves, but

they also have a larger unevenness tothem So first you would paint the little finelines, and then paint a slightly blotchy layer

to give them a bit of lumpiness

Moving to the eyes now, I paint somebasic crow’s-feet wrinkles coming out fromthe outer corners of each eye Most peopleover the age of 15 have begun to developthese fine wrinkles

The trick with bump mapping is ing sure that your details are fine enough

mak-This means that bump maps should ideally be created in large files sion wise), so that a one-pixel brush creates a very fine line This is to avoidhaving big ugly thick wrinkles where there should be fine wrinkles, forexample

(dimen-The other trick to bump mapping lies in the way that each layer youcreate blends with the layers beneath it While you may initially paint yourwrinkles as plain thin lines, leaving them like that will create an effect like acut, such as you would get if you were to etch in wet clay with a fine piece ofwire Figure 11-91 shows some wrinkles that look fine, shape-wise, but willmake the skin look hard if applied as they are

Figure 11-89

Figure 11-90

The trick is to go in and gradually work around these wrinkles so that

the skin dips into the wrinkles and rises between them to create a fleshier

look, as shown in Figure 11-92

As always, it is absolutely essential that you use soft-edged brushes so

that the effect isn’t blotchy It also helps to keep the brush on a relatively

low intensity so that you can gradually build up these tonal changes As I

have said before, it is about subtlety and delicacy Approaching your painting

in this manner is crucial to intuitively building up lovely textures

As you can see in Figure 11-93, I did the forehead wrinkles in this

man-ner so that they would appear softer on the skin

Next up I continue working wrinkles into the face These wrinkles are

really roughly painted initially — I create rough crisscrossing lines and then

go into the area and work the area around the wrinkles as I showed above

The veins are next I create these with a low opacity white brush, and

then once I have painted the actual shapes, I use a soft-edged eraser and

erase the starting and ending points of the veins so they gradually fade in

and out of the rest of the map

Bump maps are very intuitive to create because they are easy to

visual-ize Unlike specular or reflection maps, you can look at a bump map and

instantly visualize exactly what effect it is going to have on the surface With

Figure 11-91 Figure 11-92

Figure 11-93 Figure 11-94

textures for specularity, reflection, translucency, etc., you often find thatonce you apply it, it was brighter than you thought it would be and has cre-ated an effect that is too strong, or even the opposite, that the effect is tooweak So you have to lighten or darken or increase the contrast of those tex-tures to tweak them However, with bump mapping, it is much moreintuitive since you are interactively raising or lowering the terrain of yourmodel’s surface with a touch of a brush Looking at a bump map you caninstantly get a feel for how it will affect the model, with all the lighter areasraised and all the darker areas indented into the surface.

You’ll notice that I have also added bright spots onto the bump map —these are for facial blemishes that were in the color map, which I createdfirst Remember, it is very important to ensure that your different surfacetextures match each other and share details that affect each surface prop-erty independently, and in different ways It is no good creating abrasions orother details in your bump map that are not going to show up in the colormap in any way For this reason, a lot of people like to take their bump mapdetails and blend them with their color maps on low opacity Of course, Iwork the other way around generally, like in this example, so I simply copythe blemish layer from my color map into my bump map and desaturate andblend it accordingly

I now do the same with the layer of stubble I created for this character Isimply copy the layer into my bump map,

and increase its brightness until it is white

This will create a nice roughness on thebeard area of his skin when rendered

Finally (and this is the most fun part), Isimply go mad with my Dodge and Burntools

As you can see, I have painted evenmore wrinkles into the skin, very bold thistime I’ve taken my Dodge tool and worked

in between the grooves and wrinkles tosoften it and give it a fleshier look

Figure 11-96 shows this without all theother layers, so that you can more clearlysee what I have done

It looks oddly like Albert Einstein

This process of building up all the wrinklesand grooves in the skin is just great fun,and only took a few minutes Because I wasusing the Dodge and Burn tools, I wasworking directly on the initial base layerthat I created But whenever I do that, Ialways copy the layer so that if I make a

Figure 11-95

Figure 11-96

mistake or mess it up really badly, I can always delete it and I’ll still have a

copy of the original unedited one to start with again

Always play it safe like this Texturing often involves a lot of trial and

error, so be sure to keep your important layers safe because believe me, you

will make a massive mess of your textures at some stage

Good File Habits

This section is about files More specifically, the Photoshop files (or

what-ever paint program you are using) and the files that you save your textures

to

There have been many occasions in the past few years when I have had

to fix the texturing on other people’s models and have found myself wanting

to pull my hair out because their files were so disorganized It is extremely

important, especially when working in a studio environment where a lot of

artists are assigned to work on various aspects of the same models, to adopt

a logical file naming structure and a clear way of organizing your texture

files

First, let me show you how I arrange my Photoshop files Whenever I

start working on a new texture, I create layer sets Layer sets in Photoshop

are folders of layers contained within an image As I have mentioned many

times before, it is really important to keep your different details within your

textures on separate layers This is not only to keep things safe (because

carefully erasing a bunch of wrinkles painted directly onto your base skin

layer that didn’t turn out too well is going to take a lot longer than simply

trashing the wrinkle layer and creating a new one), but also because you can

then easily copy those different layers into each of your new texture layers

for the other surface attributes

This means that you generally end up

with a lot of layers in your file, and this can

make navigating the file a bit cumbersome So

I arrange my layers into layer sets When I

start my new Photoshop file, I create all the

layer sets I am going to need, for example,

color layers, bump layers, reflection layers,

etc Input layers such as the imported UV map

and any matte layers on top of the layer sets

The useful thing about layer sets is that

you can switch off all the layers within each by

simply clicking on the eye icon next to the

layer set’s name, instead of having to switch

off the visibility of each layer, which is a pain

Figure 11-97

The other important thing with your main texture creation files is ing your layers appropriately The tiny preview next to each layer name isuseless if the details painted on that layer are so small or faint that you can-not see them in the preview So naming your layer appropriately, such as

nam-“wrinkles” or “pimples” or “dragon scales” not only helps to improve yourown efficiency when navigating between layers, but it also helps anyoneelse who may have to use your files

Once you have created all your different textures, save them using cal names It is really frustrating when you are working in a studio and thereare hundreds of models in the project, and someone is using stupid nameslike “color head” when there are 13 characters in the scene Whose head isthe texture for? It would be more appropriate to name it “Franky headcolor” so that anyone looking in the directory would instantly know whichmodel the texture was for I tend to shorten the texture terms to simplethings like “col,” “spec,” “ref,” etc For example, the color texture for aTyrannosaurus rex I am working on is saved as “T-Rex_head_col” and itsspecular map is saved as “T-Rex_head_spec.” This makes things simpler foreveryone, and also makes your workflow more efficient since it saves you(and everyone else) the time of having to constantly search for items thatyou have forgotten the names of because you gave them stupid, non-specificnames

logi-3D Paint Solutions

Of course paint applications like Adobe Photoshop and PAINT are not the only available tools for painting your textures There arealso a couple of 3D painting applications available on the market these days,two of which are Deep Paint 3D (by Right Hemisphere) and BodyPaint 3D(by Maxon, the makers of Cinema 4D) These programs allow you to paintdirectly onto your model in a real-time 3D viewport For people who strug-gle with the sometimes frustrating concept of UV maps (especially whenyou have quite a few of them applied to your model, making it rather com-plex to match up different maps to each other), and also simply for the sheercomfort of it, these 3D painting solutions can make great additions to yourworking toolset

CorelPHOTO-I personally use a combination of 2D and 3D paint programs when ating textures, although I still do the majority of it in 2D (simply because I

cre-am so used to it) But as the quality of 3D painting applications has reallyimproved over the last few years, I’ll probably be using these 3D programs alot more in my workflow

So I thought it worth mentioning two particular applications, Deep Paint3D and BodyPaint 3D, both of which have working demos available fordownload from the developers’ sites

I have chosen to mention these two specific programs because both

support LightWave natively This makes it very simple to take your models

into them for painting since you don’t need to export them to another

for-mat, which can sometimes be a bit of an inconvenience as well as an

annoying interruption of your workflow

To give proper coverage and examples of these programs would require

an entire book on its own, so for the purposes of this book we’ll just take a

quick look at each program, and you can make up your own mind as to

whether or not you would like to check them out further

Exactly the same texturing theory principles apply to creating textures

in 2D and 3D environments It is just the workflow that differs Many people

find it more intuitive to paint in 3D simply because it feels more natural than

painting on a flat image that will then wrap around the model

Right Hemisphere’s Deep Paint 3D®

Deep Paint 3D is a program developed by Right Hemisphere for painting

directly onto your models in real-time 3D Basically, you just load your

LightWave models into it, and paint directly on them using a variety of

brushes

The really cool thing about Deep Paint 3D is that it lets you paint onto

your different surface channels independently (color, bump, shine, glow,

opacity), or together, allowing you to set up the appropriate values for each

Figure 11-98: Deep Paint 3D interface

beforehand Because of the nature of this painting process, you do not need

to worry too much about seams, because not only are you painting directlyonto all your applied UV maps; you also have a brilliant tool called ProjectionPaint that specifically lets you paint directly onto the seams

NOTE: Right Hemisphere released a stripped-down version of Deep Paint 3D specifically for LightWave users This LightWave edition can be ordered from Right Hemisphere’s web site at

www.righthemisphere.com.

The program is intuitive and relatively easy to use, giving you a variety oftextures or natural media that can be brushed directly or projected onto 3Dmodels and scenes loaded into the program

Program Overview

The environment supports an integrated workflow with 3ds max, Maya,Softimage, and, of course, LightWave, and comes complete with abidirectional interface to Photoshop and supports Wacom tablets (ManyDeep Paint 3D tools respond to changes in pen pressure, angle, direction, orspeed of movement Extra features are provided for Wacom tablets and theIntuos Airbrush and 4D-Mouse)

The program can be used standalone or inconjunction with Deep UV, an application alsodeveloped and released by Right Hemisphere forcreating and editing UV maps

Brush cursors display the true brush shape

in 2D and 3D modes, while the brush stroke view window in the Presets panel displays anexample stroke of the current preset

pre-Deep Paint 3D works with layers, similar tothose found in paint programs like AdobePhotoshop Layers are stacked on top of oneanother, and can be reordered and arranged asdesired

Each layer has its own Opacity slider for controlling itsvisibility, as well as a choice

of a number of differentblending modes for blending

it with underlying layers

Figure 11-99

Figure 11-100 Figure 11-101

Presets are combinations of brush and paint settings that can be quickly

changed, created, or edited, and saved for later use

Texture Paint, a preset category, lets you paint with images as brush

tips, much like using custom brushes in Adobe Photoshop

One of the only drawbacks to Deep Paint 3D is that it does not support

LightWave’s subdivision surfaces, so the model appears in the viewport as it

does when your object is in polygon model within Modeler

For more information about Deep Paint 3D, visit Right Hemisphere’s

site at www.righthemisphere.com

Maxon’s BodyPaint 3D

A slightly newer addition to the 3D painting market, Maxon’s BodyPaint 3D

feels very much like a 3D version of Photoshop, since its toolset is very

similar For artists who are familiar with Photoshop, learning BodyPaint will

be a relatively easy task

BodyPaint also has built-in UV tools, which can help to extend your UV

mapping toolset as it offers some tools that LightWave does not, such as a

Relax function

Another handy thing about it is that unlike Deep Paint 3D, it supports

subdivision surfaces so your model appears smooth in the BodyPaint

viewport

Figure 11-102: BodyPaint 3D interface

In terms of its features, it offers a very similar package of tools to thatwhich Deep Paint 3D offers Let’s take a brief look at these features.

Program Overview

BodyPaint is powered by a technology called RayBrush, a very powerfulreal-time rendering engine that gives you a superb raytrace quality view ofyour model while painting This means that you can see your specularity,transparency, and reflection maps in real time, which is really convenientsince you don’t have to keep going back and forth between LightWave andBodyPaint to see how these surface attributes look

The Multibrush function allows you to paint directly onto a maximum of

10 textures simultaneously Like Deep Paint 3D, BodyPaint now also has aProjection Paint feature for covering up seams between UV maps and paint-ing distortion-free textures

The program also supports third-party Adobe Photoshop filters forthose of you who like to use them

One of my favorite things about BodyPaint, as mentioned before, it itssimilarity to Photoshop The layers work in the same way, and it even hasDodge, Burn, and Sponge tools just like Photoshop Additionally, if you havebeen working on your textures in Photoshop beforehand, you can importyour entire PSD file into BodyPaint, with all the layers and blending modesintact, and continue working on that file while it is applied to your model inreal time

The brush tools are intuitive to set

up (see Figure 11-103) with lots ofcontrols for defining their appearanceand effect, and the program itself isvery fast and handles large images wellwithout slowing up too much

And if you want to switch to 2Dpainting mode, all you have to do is go

to the Texture tab at the top of theviewport to switch to a 2D imagepainting mode

Figure 11-103

The program’s interface is also totally customizable, with docking

win-dows that you can rearrange as you wish

Of course there are loads of other features, but going into them now

will make me sound like an advert for Maxon! I highly recommend checking

this program out, especially if you are comfortable with Photoshop’s

workflow

For more information about BodyPaint 3D, visit Maxon’s site at

www.maxon.net

Figure 11-104

The Image Editor

Introduction to the Image Editor

Loading Images

The first and foremost use of the Image Editor, in both Modeler and Layout,

is to load images that you wish to use on your model and within your scene

To load the Image Editor, press Ctrl+F4 or click on the Image Editorbutton, which is found a little way down from your File menu (the top corner

of your toolbar)

NOTE: You can also quickly access the Image Editor by pressing

the Edit Image button displayed below the image thumbnail in the ture Editor when working on surfaces.

Tex-Figure 12-1

To load an image, simply

press the Load button, which

will open the Load Images…

window where you locate and

select the images that you

wish to load

LightWave can load a

variety of different image and

animation formats, including

the most popular formats

such as JPEG, TGA, TIFF,

AVI, MOV, etc See Appendix B for a complete list and description of all

for-mats supported by LightWave

There are some image formats, such as PIC (a format used for some

radiance files), that you will not see automatically in the Load Images…

window To make sure that you can see all the images located in a folder, be

sure that you select All Files in

the Files of type box This will

ensure that all files of any type

will show up in the window

Once an image is loaded into the

Image Editor, a little bit of information

about the image and preview of it are

dis-played at the top right of the window

The Type specifies whether the file is

a still image, part of a sequence, or an

ani-mation file Depth indicates what bit depth the image is Most images that

we use are 16- or 24-bit, while images that contain alpha channels are 32-bit

Size simply specifies the actual dimensions of the image in pixels, while

Mem shows the amount of physical memory that the image uses when it is

loaded The amount of memory that your images use in your scene is quite

important, so keep an eye on it Remember that the more memory they use,

the longer your render times will be, so make sure that you do not use up

too much memory on images that may be unnecessarily large or even

totally unnecessary

Below the preview window is a slider that you can use to preview the

file if it is an animation or an image sequence

Once you have loaded your images into your scene or into Modeler, you

can select them from drop-down lists within the Texture Editor and from

any other dialog that has a drop-down list for selecting images, such as your

Compositing and Backdrop options in Layout

Figure 12-2

Figure 12-3

Figure 12-4

NOTE: To delete an image from the scene or from Modeler, simply select the image and press Delete You can also right-click on the image and select Delete Keep in mind that if an image is no longer used within a scene or on a model, it will no longer load the next time you open the scene or model.

Replacing Images

Once you have images loaded into your scene or on your object, you sionally need to replace them Why would you need to replace them? Well,when I am working, I am often making changes to the textures at the sametime as I am working on a scene in Layout If I make a change to a texture(in Photoshop) and that texture is currently being used in my scene, then Ineed to reload it into my scene because LightWave does not automaticallydetect that the original image file has been edited when I save the new ver-sion in Photoshop This is an example of when I would use the ReplaceImage option

occa-You can replace your current image with an entirely new one, whichwill then take the place of

the previous one, ever it was used, or youcan use the command toupdate your current imagewith a new version of it

wher-You replace images byselecting them from thelist in the Image Editor andthen clicking the Replacebutton, which opens theReplace Image… windowfrom which to choose the image you want

To replace your image with an entirely different image, simply select itfrom the list on the left-hand side in the Image Editor, press Replace, andthen select a new image to replace the current one

If you wish to simply update your image to a newer version of it(assuming you have saved the newer version by simply overwriting theoriginal), you can simply press Replace and then press Open in the ReplaceImage… window, since the image should automatically be selected herealready

Figure 12-5

Cloning Images

Should you wish to make copies of an image sequence within your scene

without actually loading a separate version of the sequence, you can make a

copy of it

You do this with the Clone option When you

press the Clone button, you are presented with two

choices: Instance and Duplicate

Choosing the Instance option creates a copy of

the image that will reflect any changes you make to

the original of the image in the scene

For example, if you make an instance of an image and you then make

any adjustments to that original image, such as a Hue adjustment or a

Brightness adjustment in the Editing tab, those adjustments will also affect

the instance However, you can make adjustments to the instance itself

without affecting the original You can make as many instances of an image

as you like within your scene

A duplicate is a copy that is entirely independent of the original You can

make any changes you wish to both the original and the duplicate without

affecting the other in any way The Duplicate option, however, is only

avail-able for image sequences, not still images or animation files You can make

as many duplicates of a sequence as you like within your scene

The great thing about cloning images and sequences is that it saves on

memory, since you are not loading in entire extra files

CAUTION: Deleting an image, animation, or sequence from the

Image Editor will remove any clones of it from the scene as well.

Preview Display Options

The preview window of the Image Editor

has a few different options that you can

choose from

The Auto, Real, and Man buttons

determine how the preview window is

updated

The default is Real, short for

Realtime Using this option ensures that the preview window will update

while you make any changes to the image within the editor This means that

while you are making any adjustments using sliders, you will see this

pre-view update as you make the adjustment, without having to actually release

your mouse button

Auto (Automatic) makes the preview update only when you release the

mouse button after making any adjustments to the image

Figure 12-6

Figure 12-7

When set to Man (Manual), you will have to click on the preview dow itself to see any changes you have made This can save on memory ifyou are using a slower computer, in which case you sometimes have to wait

win-a while for the imwin-age to updwin-ate, especiwin-ally when working in very complexscenes that have lots of images And since it isn’t always absolutely neces-sary to see changes you have made to the image, you can use your memorymore efficiently by setting the display to Manual

The Use Layout Time check box can be activated to use the time slider

in Layout to preview an image sequence or animation file as it is used in thescene, instead of the slider below the preview window itself

This can be useful for checking when an animation starts to play withinthe scene, and how and when it loops

The Source Tab

The Source tab is the first tab weencounter on the Image Editor It con-tains information about the image, aswell as settings you can adjust for anima-tion files and image sequences

Image Type

The first thing that is displayed in theSource tab is the information regardingthe type of image that you have loadedand selected

This can be a still image, an imagesequence, an animation file, or a reference

To load an image sequence, simply load an image as you ordinarilywould by clicking on Load and selecting an image within the sequence Youcan select any image from the sequence that you wish; it doesn’t necessarily

Figure 12-8: The Source tab

have to be the first image in the sequence.

This will load the image into the Image Editor

as if it were a still To ensure that the entire

sequence is loaded, select the image from the

list on the left, go to the Image Type

drop-down list, and select Sequence

This will automatically load up the other images that LightWave can

detect are in the sequence

NOTE: To ensure that your image sequences load without too

many hassles, it is a good practice to keep sequences in their own

folders Also ensure that your sequences are named and numbered

correctly, ideally with a filename followed directly by a digit, such as

“character_animated.0001.tga.”

If there are any gaps in the sequence, then the previous image in the

sequence holds until the next one is encountered For example, if there are

frames numbered from 0001 to 0004 and then there are some frames

miss-ing until 0007, then the frame numbered 0004 will hold until frame number

0007 loads

Animation

To load an animation file into the Image Editor, simply click Load and select

the file you want Common animation file formats include AVI (Windows

Media files) and MOV (QuickTime) files LightWave does not support

MPEG animation files

Reference

If you make an instance of an image or sequence as discussed earlier, then

the Image Type of that file when selected will be Reference You cannot

change this setting

Alpha Channel

If the image or image sequence consists of 32-bit images with an alpha

chan-nel, you can choose to enable or disable that channel by selecting the

appropriate option from the Alpha Channel

drop-down list By default, alpha channels

are enabled Using the Alpha Only option

discards all the color information from the

image, and instead treats the image as a

black and white mask from the alpha

chan-nel This is useful if you wish to use the

image as a mask in the Texture Editor

Figure 12-9

Figure 12-10

Notice that the Alpha Channel options are only available in images thatcontain alpha information With any other image, this option is grayed out.Working with alpha channels can be a bit confusing though, so be care-ful when using them When you load images into the Image Editor, always

be sure to check whether there is an alpha channel or not, if you are notaccustomed to using them

Because OpenGL does not take alpha channels into account, it cansometimes cause a lot of confusion If an image you are using as a texturehas an alpha channel, which then masks out part of the texture when yourender it, you may wonder why on earth parts of the texture are not show-ing when they were there in your viewport while you were working!

So if you load up an image and you notice that it has an unneeded alphachannel, just disable it by selecting Disabled from the Alpha Channeldrop-down list

on which applies to the clip

This ensures that the clip is interlaced correctly, and will therefore playback correctly

NOTE: Refer to the LightWave manual for more information on fields and field rendering.

Sequence Digits

You use this setting to specify the number

of digits used in the numbering sequencewhen using image sequences

Although LightWave does attempt to discern this information whenloading image sequences into the Image Editor, it can occasionally havetrouble, especially if there are any peculiarities in the numbering systemused If this is the case, you can manually enter the number of digits thatLightWave should be looking for in the filename to ensure that the sequenceloads correctly

When loading an image sequence, LightWave examines the filenamesused and attempts to discern which part of the filename is the number of theframe For instance, if the files in a sequence are named animation-

sequence.0001 through animationsequence.0100, LightWave will know that

Figure 12-11

Figure 12-12