EnigmA Amiga Run 1997 July/EnigmA AMIGA RUN 20 (1997)(G.R. Edizioni)(IT)[!][issue 1997-07 & 08][EAR-CD IV].iso/lightwave/lwmlist/93.lightwave-00/000205_bobl_Mon, 1 Mar 93 13:02:18 EST.msg

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Date: Mon, 1 Mar 93 13:02:18 EST
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From: [e-mail] (Bob Lindabury, SysAdmin)
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Subject: Lightwave 3.0 Preview

For those of you who don't subscribe to Video Toaster User, there is an
article in the latest issue (FEB/MAR) discussing the advances in the
upcoming version of Lightwave.  The article is entitled Lightwave 3D:
The Next Generation by John Gross, who I believe is currently working on
Sea Quest.

This article mentions many new improvements in the software as well
information on new features and changes in the look/operation of
Lightwave.  All in all the new Lightwave looks to be a very competitive
piece of software for just about any platform out there.  Let me see if
I can summarize the new features and such for you.

Lightwave:

Layout now is the only screen for Lightwave.  All the buttons that were
previously on the first screen in Lightwave are now lined up along the
top of the Layout screen.  Althought the pictures included in the
article are horribly dark, I can just make out the buttons and such.
None of the actual Layout screen is even visible in the poorly printed
image.  The caption under the image states that the image shows visible
motion paths (hope they are mouse editable in layout) and spotlight cone
angles display (a BIG plus).

John says that items in the layout screen moved strangely when you were
viewing them from other than the straight ahead (down the Z axis) and
trying to move them.  Now they move more intuitivly.

There is now the option to view the scene from a light.  The previously
mentioned intuitive movement will be a big plus here.  Lighting will be
much easier since you will not have to move a light, aim it and then
render a test image, move it a bit more, aim it and render another test
image.  You will still have to do the above but at least we will be much
closer to the ballpark when setting up initial lighting and cone angles.
Of course these cone angles are only usable on spotlights.

Seems we will have the ability to clone and name lights. (I wonder if
there is any chance of making an object a light...it might be nice to
add some sort of flourescent tube lighting)

A big addition which we have all seen (if you've seen the 20th Annual
American Music Awards or Babylon 5) is the Lens Flare option.  The
article says you click on the Lens Flare option for a light, make sure
the light is visible in the camera view, adjust the intensity, flare
pattern and whether or not lens reflections should be generated and
Lightwave will produce perfect lens flares automatically.  This option
even supports the blocking of the light/flare when an object passes in
front of it (between the camera and light).  Sounds good.

Another MAJOR feature is Shadow Mapping.  This functions only from
spotlights and gives you shadows without the need for ray tracing the
shadows.  We all know how long it took to trace shadows!  These shadows
are generated quickly and you can adjust the fuzziness of the shadows.
I think this will be a big plus.  In most cases I NEVER traced shadows
for my Animations because the overhead was too much to deal with under
my budgets and time-frames.  With this new option, shadows will probably
be possible in MANY cases where they were not even a possibility before.

There are a couple of restrictions on this shadow mapping.  A semi
transparent object will cast a solid shadow when shadow mapped but the
same object will cast a semi-transparent shadow when traced.

A few new features in the Objects panel include the ability to clone
muliple copies of an object and two new types of object mapping.


Displacement mapping!  For those of you who don't know it, Displacement
mapping lets you actually deform an object by applying an image map to
the object.  This is different than bump mapping in that bump mapping
just changes the shading of an object to give you the appearance of a
deformed surface whereas displacement mapping actually changes the
surfaces shape.  This can be animated over time.

Clip Mapping.  Clip mapping carves away parts of an object based on the
image map.  A prime example is a globe I had constructed out of two
spheres.  With a color map of the world and a transparency map of the
same image of the world and a bump map of the same image I created a
world with continents on it.  The continents were colored by the color
map, raised by the bump map (not displaced) and then the transparency
map allowd the sphere underneath (the water) to show through where ever
the continents weren't.  I bump mapped the water to make it more
realistic.  The biggest problem I had with this is that I wanted the
continents to be a shiny gold.  Well, a transparency map doesn't "cut"
out the water completely and the reflection map for gold shows through
partially in the water.  With clip mapping, this will not happen because
the invisible part of the object is completly gone and doesn't reflect
any light at all.  A main advantage to clip mapping is that it works
with shadow mapping, and affects all of an objects surfaces with a
single map.

There is a replace object button.  You can now replace an object in your
scene with say a primative object such as a box or a rectangle and do
all your animation setup with that object which result in much faster
screen updates and previews and then swap the real object back into the
scene for final rendering.  An additional plus to this is that instead
of having to unload an object you might want to change in modeler from
the scene and then reloading it, you can just replace it with the new
object you changed in modeler.

We will finally be able to morph surfaces in the new Lightwave!
Morphing envelopes are suppose to be intuitive and mouse adjustable.  We
will also be able to offset envelopes or scale frames to change the
length of an animation without having to delete old key frames and
create all new keyframes.  Sounds much like "ripple" which is used in
computerized editing.  Hopefully it will work much the same where you
can lengthen a portion of your animation in say the beginning of a scene
(for a change in speed) and all the keyframes and envelopes will adjust
accordingly along the rest of the animation.

There is mention of a couple of new image mapping features.  One is
called cubic mapping.  Says you can take a single image and map it
around all six sides of a cube instead of making six separate surface
names and then mapping images to each of the surfaces.

Another is called Front Projection mapping.  The example talks about
taking an image of a lake as a background image and then mapping this
same image onto a flat plane.  When you render the image you will have a
seemless image of a lake even though the backgound is vertical and the
water plane is horizontal.  You can then have something like a sea
monster poke its head up through the plane and it will look like it's
poking its head up from the water in the lake.  Front projection mapping
will project an image straight onto an object no matter what angle that
object or the camera is at.

No limit to points/polygons except for that imposed by the memory you
have available on you workstation.

New rendering options.

Motion Blur
Particle Blur
Depth of Field

A new antialiasing features with adjustible settings.  Says we can use
medium-res (video res) with a low antialiasing setting and we will get
better looking images than we would using print resolution in our
current versions of Lightwave.

The backdrop panel has been named Effects (makes sense to me).  A solid
backdrop button with a separate color requestor instead of using the
Zenith only button and alpha image composition.

An alpha image will allow you to control foreground image transparency.
Good for traveling mattes for keying logos and object onto.

The article says there are several interface changes that make using
Lightwave even easier.  Certain buttons are ghosted until other buttons
are activated.  Clicking on a ghosted button will result in Lightwave
informing you you need another button activated first.  The example is
if you have a 0% specularity setting the glossiness button will be
ghosted because you need some amount of specularity for glossiness to
take effect.  If you click on glossiness when it was ghosted, it would
tell you you need to increase specularity to allow glossness settings to
take effect in your rendering.

There are also context sensitive help screen accessible by pressing the
Help key (what else!).  All data entry fields in which you can cycle
through a list of choices now has mouse activated pop-up list requestors
so that it makes it easy to pick from a long list of choices.  I hope
that there is some sort of memory in those choices so that requestors
remember the last picked choice and automaticly return there.

According to the article we will have free-form deformation available in
the Layout without having to setup multiple morphs!!!!  Using a new
method of "skeletal deformation" (Bones I guess) we will be able to
bend, twist, squash and stretch objects between keys to our hearts
content!  Drool, slobber, spittle..choke.



Ok..that's all it says about Lightwave..now on to Modeler.


When you click on the Modeler button the Lightwave screen slides away
revealing the Modeler screen (ta-dah! a bit of flash I guess).

Modeler now suports Arexx!  Of course we can do all sorts of fantastic
things with ARexx in modeler!!  Things that had to be done with
Videoscapes old model creation tools can now be done with Modeler (I
would assume).  Mathematically defined models, creation of models from
data, spelling out words reading in fonts from font directories and
bunches of heavily used options can be attached to an ARexx script and
hopefully executed from user-defined macro keys much like Toasterpaint!

Let's all take some time and bow our heads to Stuart Ferguson in a
minute of silence....

Ok..on to the features...

Adobe Type 1 Postscript fonts are supported directly by Modeler.

Jitter - Roughens up an object making it "used" looking
Smooth - The opposite..smooths a rough object.
Quantize - Transforms and object into cubic blocks..hmm...

Well, here's the next BIG feature...sick of polygons?  Now we will be
able to model objects out of splines!  What kind of splines it doesn't
say.  What type are they Stuart?

Ok...for those of you who don't know it, we can now create such
complicated items as an S shape out of 3-4 points and some spline curves
between the points instead of the multitudes of points previously
required to get smooth curved edges.  Connecting three or four splines
together will create a spline patch.  Gee, I guess this is going to
royally screw with Pixel 3D Pro and Interchange Plus..eh John??

What kind of patches are these and are they going to be rendered as
patches or as polys...hmm...interesting.

Next up in our update hit list is Boolean operators!  Gag, hack...I'm
dyin' here..please, somebody ....help!  Sorry, all these new features
are getting the better of me.  I can hardly contain myself.  If I don't
get this update soon I am probably going to turn into that character
that Michael Douglas is playing in that new movie...

Anyway, Boolean operators allow you to do such amazing things as Drill,
Core, Add, Subtract among others (what others?)

What this means is you can take an object (say a flat plane) and then
make another object (say the outline of a dog) and then you can use the
dog outline to cut a hole in the flat plane to create a dog hole..just
like making cookies.  (I know, that's a terribly overused example).  So
you can drill, core, add and subtract objects to create other objects.
Something that has been around in Imagine (with a few bugs) for a while
now but I'm sure these operations will be a bit better implemented.

Rail Extrusion.  Oh boy!  I suppose you could call this path extrusion
as well.  Example..take a flat disk and extrude it along a spline curve
and get a corkscrew or spring type object.  Gee, now we can make those
NYC style pretzels we've all been wanting to create...

Oh...or take a couple of rails to stretch and deform the object as it is
extruded along our path..er..rail.  Like Imagine I imagine..heh.  Should
be able to create some pretty organic looking shapes and such with this.
A big plus...Now I can sell off Imagine since I will have no need of it
anymore....I hope.

Bevel...Oh gee...flying logo time!  Take those letters and bevel the
fronts, or, bevel the backs, or bevel the fronts AND the backs, or bevel
just a single letter out of the word..or..or..bevel Mark Thompson's nose
if you have his head model available....<grin>  There are adjustible
bevel values of course.

Subdivide.  Ok, we should all know what this does...if you don't, it
lets you divide selected polys into smaller polys.  You can do faceted
and smooth subdivisions.  That SGI animation with the Fish and the Bird
in some sort of computer love used subdivide to create the glass sphere
the whole animation took place inside.  That's what made that nice
octagonal design around the outside of the glass sphere.

Smooth subdivision offsets the polys a bit to make the outside edge
smoother.  Good if you have an object you like that looks too faceted
and you want to smooth it out without actually manually adding points
and polys.

The article says there have bene numerous other interface changes that
will make the Modeler much easier and more intuitive to use.

Both Lightwave and Modeler have been optimized for use on 040 processors
and the majority of the entire system has been made easier and more
productive to use.


Looks good.  A couple of items I DIDN'T see mentioned was some work on
the preview modes and such.

I am particularly interested in seeing hidden line removal in the Layout
as well as some sort of shaded mode for previews.  I also was interested
in being able to create full-frame previews for direct output to tape in
real time..as in 16 shades of grey or dithered color so that I can run
simple motion tests directly out of the layout to tape and then to a
client for initial approval..of course these previews would have to
support some sort of way of showing dissolves, transparent objects, and
minimal maps such as clip maps.

All in all I am *very* excited about this new version of Lightwave and
Modeler and I am getting my bread ready now.


 Bob Lindabury

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