EnigmA Amiga Run 1997 July/EnigmA AMIGA RUN 20 (1997)(G.R. Edizioni)(IT)[!][issue 1997-07 & 08][EAR-CD IV].iso/lightwave/tips/lwtt2/lwtips&tutorials_v2

Text File | 1978-08-22 | 81KB | 1,902 lines

Note:
I have put dotted lines dividing the sections of this book.  I have left
it in ASCI format for ease of use.  Before you print this out, you may
have to do a little editing by adding spaces or re-adjusting your margins.
I apologize for any inconveniences.  - Enjoy!

Thomas

--- LW TIPS & TUTORIALS GUIDE V. 2.0 - CUT HERE & PRINT --


























             LIGHTWAVE 3D TIPS & TUTORIALS REFERENCE GUIDE


                       Compiled by Thomas Healy
                        [e-mail]

                             VERSION 2.0
                           SEPTEMBER 1995























--------------------------------------------------------------------








































LIGHTWAVE 3D TIPS & TUTORIALS REFERENCE
Information gathered from the LightWave Internet Mailing list archives and
the LightWave UserGroup. Including the part of the Amiga Guide help file put
together by Sergio Rosas.

Compiled by Thomas Healy ([e-mail])


LIGHTWAVE, VIDEO TOASTER ARE COPYRIGHTS OF NEWTEK
ADPRO IS A COPYRIGHT OF ELASTIC REALITY
DPAINT IS A COPYRIGHT OF ELECTRONIC ARTS

ALL OTHER COPYRIGHTS APPLY
No Infringement Intended - Please Don't Sue! :)

PLESE NOTE:
IF YOU WISH TO INCLUDE  THIS GUIDE ON DISK OR OTHER FORMAT, PLEASE
WRITE ME FOR MY PERMISSION FIRST.  PLEASE LEAVE THIS GUIDE WHOLE
AN UNALTERED.




--------------------------------------------------------------------

                  LIGHTWAVE 3D TIPS & TUTORIALS REFERENCE


TABLE OF CONTENTS:

(A) INTRODUCTION
 1. What this thing is

(B) SURFACE TIPS, LAYOUT TIPS, MODELER TIPS
 1. Surfaces Help
 2. Layout Help
 3. Modeler Help

(C) QUICK TIPS:
 1. Resize Lights / Camera
 2. Object Hierarchies
 3. Adaptive Sampling
 4. Inserting Frames
 5. Smoothing Tips
 6. Show Objects
 7. Align to Path tips
 8. Disappearing Clipped Mapped Objects
 9. Shadows Without Seeing the Object
 10. Precise Rotation of Objects
 11. Making Rounded Corners
 12. Animated Displacement Maps
 13. Lens Flare Color
 14. Fractal Noise
 15. Ripples / Underwater Texture
 16. Surfacing Pewter
 17. Motion Paths
 18. Heat Waves

(D) TUTORIALS:
 1. Custom Logos
 2. Positioning Logos
 3. Laser Etchings / Writing Text
 4. Creating Smoke, Fire or Plasma Effects
 5. Gleaming Objects / Metalic Effects
 6. Lighting Effects / Light Beams
 7. Explosions
 8. Glowing Gases
 9. Complex Image Mapping
 10. Making a Compact Disc
 11. Glass Surfaces
 12. Morphing a Spring
 13. Making Flowing Curtains
 14. Using Goals
 15. Lightning W/ Marble Texture
 16. Liquid Pour
 17. Pools / Water
 18. Shock Waves
 19. Spiral Stairs
 20. Stencil in Modeler
 21. Text Shadows

(E) CONTACT INFORMATION:
 1. Standard mail
 2. Internet








-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
INTRODUCTION:


 This file was compiled by editing sections of the LightWave mailing list
and the UseNet group.  I originally started this document as a visual
reference to help myself in various aspects of Lightwave.  I do not claim
to have written anything in this document, if you read something that you
think you wrote...you probably did!  I was going to make this an Amiga
Guide Document but then I thought I'd like to have this in a book form
that I can print out & scratch notes on.  I also wanted it to be of use
to all the people running LightWave on Non-Amiga Platforms. I have
included some of the text from the Amiga Guide Document that Sergio Rosa
put together a while ago.

 I have divided the sections in three: Quip Tips, General Tips and
Tutorials.  The first section is for some quick reference material.
The second section is a little more detailed tips.  The Third section is
specific tutorials.  I tried to include some of the most asked items.
Mainly things like Creating Fire, Realistic Metals, Explosions and other
items that tend to pop up a lot on the Internet.

I wish to personally thank all the people on the LW List & UseNet group
who have answered many of my question when I needed them.  It is one of
the best sources of information when you need a quick answer to a question.
I especially want to thank:

Daniel J. McCoy -
For running the Mailing lists & getting the Usenet started.
Good luck in your Future projects!

John Gross -
For LW Pro, For all his GREAT tips & for personally helping me out
more times than I can count. Thanks John!

David Warner -
For taking over the Mailing Lists (Good luck!).  For your advice & ideas,
I swear you seem to respond to at least 20 messages a day!

And thanks to everyone out there who have helped me in the past & the future.
I got a lot of positive feedback from the first help file, I hope you all
enjoy this one as much!

 Anyway, Enough of my rambling.  I hope you enjoy this guide.  I welcome
any suggestions that you may make and if you find this document useful or
if you have any comments feel free to drop me a note at:
[e-mail]

Take care & enjoy!

Thomas Healy



LightWave Help file V2.0 completed SEPTEMBER 1995

















--------------------------------------------------------------------
                SURFACE TIPS, LAYOUT TIPS, MODELER TIPS


QUICK SURFACE TIPS:

Surface Color:
 The Color of the object itself
Diffuse:
 Amount of light that is scattered by the surface
 0% = dull 100%=Shiny
Luminosity:
 How much a surface glows on it's own
 0% = dull 100%=Big glow
Specular:
 Highlights that occur on smooth or shiny surfaces
 0% = no highlights 100%=many highlights
Glossiness: (Size of the "Hot Spot")
 High = Small / Medium = Medium / Low = Large
Reflection:
 how much a surface reflects it's surroundings
 0%=brick wall 100%=Mirror
Transparency:
 how much you can see through an object
 0%=brick wall 100%=glass ball
Color highlights:
 allows objects surface color to show up in the specular highlights,
 tinting the highlight itself
Color filter:
 allows the color of a transparent object to tint the objects seen through  it.
 I.E. a red glass ball would tint objects that are seen behind it, red.
Edge threshold:
 Determines the amount of blending between the surface color & the
 transparent edge of a transparent object.


Good settings for Metals:
 High Specular, Low Diffuse, Color HighLights, Low Glossiness

Fractal Noise:
 Frequency: The Higher the #, the more detail there is
 Contrast: The Higher the #, the more sharpness there is
 Note:
 Use about 1/4 - 1/5 of total texture size for good starting point

UnderWater Texture:
 Wave length: The distance between the waves.
 Note:
 use about 1/10 of total texture size for good starting point
 Band Sharpness: The higher the #, the more detailed waves will be
 Wave speed: Speed waves move per frame
 Note:
 Good formula for wave speed:
 WL/# of Frames = Wave Speed
 Wave Length Divided by the # of frames you want it to loop = Wave speed


QUICK LAYOUT TIPS:
 Spline Controls:
  Tension:
   +1 at Start key frame, it makes the object accelerate
   +1 at End  key frame, it makes the object slow down
  Continuity:
   -1 Gives a bounced effect
  Bias:
   +1 all of curve is after the Key Frame
   -1 all of curve is before the Key Frame

Good Gradient Backdrops:
 Make Sky & Ground Color the same values for clean gradients

Good Solid Polygon Edges:
Edge color (NOT BLACK - OR DARK)
BKDRP: 0,0,0
SURFACE COLOR: 0,0,0
DIFFUSE: 0
SPECULAR: 0
OUTLINE ONLY MODE: ON
(this gives a cool solid polygon-outline look)

Quick Layout Keyboard Shortcuts:
 RETURN = Create Key Frame
 [ or ] = Change the Gride Size (In Meters)
 , or . = Zoom in or out
 F = Frame #


QUICK MODELER TIPS:

Rule of Spheres:
 # of Segments / 2 + 1 = # of Rings
 The Number of Segments Divided by Two Plus One = The number of Rings.
 This Allows for good even cuts in half for spheres.
Tesselation:
 0,1,2,3,4 (Each # DOUBLES the detail of the sphere)

To Make a:
Octagon: Create a Disc w/ 8 segments
Triangle: Create a Disc w/ 3 segments
Piramid: Create a Cone w/ 4 segments

Quick Modeler Keyboard Shortcuts:
 W = Stats
 I = Information
 X = Cut
 C = Copy
 V = Paste
 RETURN = Make








----------------------------------------------------------------------
                                QUICK TIPS


1. RESIZE LIGHTS / CAMERA

Resize Lights:
"Can anyone tells me how to resize the light source, either spotlight
or distant light in Layout?  I can't find it in the manual.  The 'light'
presentation is usually too big for me to make a real spotlight."

It's not clear to me exactly what you're asking for. There're a number
of possibilities:
1) Spotlight cone angle: You want to tighten the angle of the
spotlight. Easily setable in the lights menu.
2) Spotlight intensity. See intensity, fall off and fog.
3) Size of light "object" in layout relative to other objects.
Use the grid size keys [ and ] to allow precise movement of the
light relative to the objects.

Pressing '[' and ']' (square parenthesis) changes the grid size in layout,
and also affects the absoulte size of the camera, lights and null objects.
Enlarge the grid size for smaller lights. To resize the light, just change
the grid size ([ ] keys) The actual light is not that thing you see but the
exact center of it. when it is represented larger or smaller, it does not
release more or less light...


2. OBJECT HIERARCHIES

Hierarchies:
"I just got Lightwave 3.5. Upon looking through the manual, there seems
to be no provision for creating hierachies. Have I missed something?"

Select the object you wish to parent to another, then choose the Parent
button and select the parent. It's rather easy actually, just make sure
that you parent objects first and then move them otherwise your children
objects will snap to the parents when first parented.

"Is there a way to save and then later load a hierarchical sequence
of objects for later use, without having to load every object separately?
and reset everything? I'm guessing that "Load From Scene" would
be a halfway point between those two extremes, I just wanted to find out
if I'm missing something. (I guess cutting and pasting the actual scene
file is also an option...)"

Load From Scene is your answer. I just created a running man, for
example. After he was complete, I parented the father object to a null
object and saved the Scene. FOr a '100m dash' sequence I just loaded from
this scene four times for four guys and moved the null parents in the
proper paths.  Playing Cut & Paste with scene files in an option too, but
you must be  aware of the following:  The parenting in the scene is
described by the line  'ParentObject n' in the scene file, where n is the
number of the object  in the objects list. If you cut and paste, you change
the object list and some objects may be parented to the wrong fathers. LW
parenting is done in Layout, not in Modeler.  There is a handy Arexx script
in the commercial package Power Macros which allows you to assign a pivot
point from within Modeler.  This makes parenting in Layout much easier,
since  it can be difficult to line things in Layout (compared to Modeler).


3. ADAPTIVE SAMPLING

Adaptive Sampling:
Adaptive Sampling (in sense, I'm sure it's called something else) can be
turned on in 3.5 for both Motion Blur and Depth of Field. the speed-up in
general is not immense. However, the  higher the AA the more than savings,
obviously. What more, the frames with Adaptive and without Adpative are
practically identical. It takes very, very, fine toggling between the two
images to notice even the most minute difference. Also, the Adaptive
Sampling Rate is at it's max. It could certainly be lowered if any problems
did arise.

(EDIT NOTE: An easy way to use Adaptive Sampling is to find a section of
your Anim that is real jagged, render AS at a high # (40-60), if it's still
jaggy looking, lower it & try again until you find a good medium.)


4. INSERTING FRAMES

Insert Frames:
"Can you insert frames? Say you've set up this Scene, but now you want
something to happen before everything."

Use Shift All Keys to move everything later in time.  The only tricky part
is dealing with the keys at frame zero, but you can copy them with the
above procedure if needed.

Copy Keyframes:
"Is there any way to "copy" a keyframe?  Every once in a while I'm setting
up a scene and I want to move an object's keyframe to a different key,
but there might be several other keys in between.  I guess it would be
possible to edit the actual Scene file by hand, but that seems too hard."

It's very easy to copy keyframes.  Go to that frame in layout (the item
whose key you want to copy should be the selected item), and hit the Create
Key button (or press return).  In the requester that pops up, enter the
number of the frame that you want the key copied to and press return.
That's it!  You can optionally delete the key at the old frame number if
you want it moved instead of duplicated.


5. SMOOTHING TIPS

Making Smoothing Work On Objects With Corners:
Objects that are fairly rounded to begin with smooth out nicely using the
default smoothing value of 89.5 degrees in the Layout Surfaces requestor.
If your object has square corners that you wish to smooth off, set the
Smoothing function to 91 degrees. Bear in mind that this function just
uses shading to "hide" those corners that face the viewer.  Sharp angles
seen in profile will not be "rounded off" with any amount of trick shading.


6. SHOW OBJECTS

Show Object:
ShowObject in the 3.5 scene files pertains to the way an object is
represented in Layout. It can be selected by toggling the icon next to each
object in Layout's Scene Menu Scene Overview. In a scene file each
representation has a specific number value:
0 = no wireframe representation
1 = bounding box representation
2 = geometry points representation
3 = partial polygon representation
4 = full polygon representation


7. ALIGN TO PATH TIPS

Align To Path:
"Maybe Allen can once again lend his expertise with some problems I'm
having with Path Extrude. It appears that Path Extrude does not like
extruding along paths which have been generated using Align to Path. Is
this correct, am I doing something wrong ?"

Align to Path has no effect on a saved motion.  It simply causes LightWave
to orient an object, bone, light, or camera to point at some other position
along the motion path, ignoring whatever heading and pitch angles are stored
in the motion.  But when you bring a motion path into Modeler for extruding,
the original heading and pitch values defined by the motion are used.  I
would suggest extruding along a Modeler spline instead (use Single Rail
Extrude with the Oriented option turned on).
- AH


8. DISAPPEARING CLIPPED MAPPED OBJECTS

Disappearing Clip Mapped Objects:
A number of Lightwave users have reported that objects using
images as clip maps disappear from some frames of the scene.  In
these cases either the object or the camera was in motion.
Changing the movements of either the camera or the object had the
disconcerting result of simply changing which frames the object
disappears in.  The solution is that when selecting an image as a
clip map in the clip map texture requestor, you must also turn
off antialiasing in the clip map requestor.  Antialiasing is on
by default in this requestor, so the user must ALWAYS REMEMBER TO
TURN ANTIALIAING OFF WHEN USING AN IMAGE AS A CLIP MAP.


9. SHADOWS WITHOUT SEEING THE OBJECT

Shadow Object:
"I have needed to use this (hopefully future) feature to do special
effects where I wanted to cast a shadow, but not have the object
visible. This was to create a "shadow" character that moved through
the scene. The only way around this, was doing it in two layers"

If you are using Shadowmapped lights you can make your object 100%
transparent. Shadowmap lights cannot detect transparencies and will
render a shadow. If the object that is to cast shadows is a single
plane, you will not see it if it only has polygon(s) pointing away
from the camera.


10. PRECISE ROTATION OF OBJECTS

Precise Rotation Of Objects:
"I assume LW can do spline paths for objects, but can it also smoothly
rotate/spline the object around certain axis  as it's moving? Hmm, maybe
thats not clear. Say for example, you have a craft  flying through space
in a spline path. Can it also be told to  tilt left/right as it's
going along?"

You can do it one of two ways:
1) Use the Align to path and Lookahead function on the Motion Path menu.
The ship will automatically be aligned to the spline path. For more
precision, however, I prefer to do this:
2) Transfer your motion path to a Null Object instead and parent your
ship to the Null Object. This effectively separates the position and
orientation variables, and you will be able to tweak and keyframe the
ship's orientation directly on the ship itself without affecting its
path (which is controlled by adjusting the Null Object path)


11. MAKING ROUNDED CORNERS

Rounded Corners:
"I am new to LW as is obvious by my question, but how can I get a box
to have rounded corners?"

That's a good question.  One way is to make a SPHERE (!)  with a odd
number of rings and divisions.  With an odd number you always have a
flat section where you can stretch it into rectangular solid with
curved corners.
That's really easy now thanks to Metaform.  Before making the box,
go into the numeric box options requester and change the number of
segments for each axis to 3 instead of 1.  Then just apply Metaform
once or twice. The sharpness (radius) of the edges can be controlled
by moving the interior lines of the box (the ones created due to changing
the number of segments to 3) toward or away from the edges of the box.
This is a good way to start making dice, for example.


12. ANIMATED DISPLACEMENT MAPS

Animated Displacement Maps:
When using a displacement map on an object, the Polygon Size envelope
will control animating the displacement map. Nice trick, Huh?


13. LENS FLARE COLOR

Lens Flare Color:
"Is there a way to change the central color of a lens flare,
it's always white?"

The color of the light itself determines the color of the flare,
although the flare will tend towards white in the center..


14. FRACTAL NOISE

Fractal Noise:
"Or how about a function for adding 'noise' to a light glow?  I saw
a demo of Alias power animator this summer and they were demoing
this particular feature."

Noise mapped luminosity or transparency on an additive surface, combined
with lens flares does this quit effectively.

Noisy Surfaces
Another feature unique to LightWave is the fractal noise texture and
it is perhaps one of my favorite.  It can produce a pseudo-random
modulation of color, diffuse lighting, specular lighting, transparency,
reflection mapping, and bump mapping.  The manual mentions using it for
things like rust, dirt, or natural looking simulated terrain, but these
are just the tip of the iceberg.  Some of the things I have used it for
include flames, smoke, clouds, patchy fog, and comet trails as well as
simpler surfaces like carpeting, stucco, or stone.  What really makes
fractal noise so much more powerful than an image map however is the
ability to give it a 3D velocity vector that will not repeat on itself.
You could for example apply an image map to a surface that when given a
velocity, looked like a flickering flame.  However, the flicker pattern
will repeat as soon as the image map has moved a distance equal to its
size (depending on the velocity), creating a monotonous and mechanical
look.  Fractal noise on the other hand is a procedural texture and will
not repeat. One example of animated fractal noise is some dark sooty smoke
I did for an industrial cityscape.  To create the object, I stretched and
manipulated a sphere until it looked like a somewhat fat and irregular
upside down tear drop.  It was then given fractal noise color and
transparency as well as clear Edge Opacity.  The colors assigned were two
dark shades of gray and a Y velocity of a few feet/second made the smoke
appear to rise.  Smaller X and Z velocities were added (about 1/10th
that of Y) to give it a little variation.  Similar, but not identical,
velocities were assigned to the transparency which ranged in value from
about 0% to 75%.  These settings produced a very convincing smoke effect
Combining a luminous orange fractal noise tear drop with with the glow
effects mentioned above makes a nice candle flame.

(EDIT NOTE: a good start for using Fractal noise it to:
Use planar Image map - hit auto size, switch back to Fractal noise &
reduce the texture size by about 1/4 or 1/5 or the total size.)


15. RIPPLES / UNDERWATER TEXTURE

Underwater Texture:
"I've been messing around with the underwater texture lately and am not
getting the kinds of patterns I've seen in animations like those
starring Fred Floaty. What I've been getting is basicaly 'rings'.  Like
the rings in a log.  I have been using the default setting of 3 wave
sources, expecting to get a parretn more complex than what I've been
getting.  Higher settings seem to make no difference here. What might I
be doing wrong?"

Probably your texture size is too small.  The textures that use wave
sources -- underwater and ripples -- are somewhat odd in how they
define texture size.  It defines a box around which the wave sources
will be distributed, so if the box is too small to encompass your
whole object, the waves will all radiate from a central point and
you'll get rings.  Wavelength determines what we would normally think
of as texture size.

What I often do is I go into the texture requestor with planar projection
selected and hit "auto size". Then change to ripples / underwater. As a
general rule, if your texture size is as big as your object, the ripples
come out looking pretty reasonable. What you want to do is use the
underwater texture to modulate the diffuse lighting of the objects that
are underwater. This gives the shadow cast appearance you are looking
for without the brute force you were attempting. Note that what you did
should work with raytraced shadows, but will definitely fail with shadow
maps unless you use clip mapping rather than transparency. But that
method is very slow to render.

Ripples:
"Maybe Allen can provide some insight on the inner workings of the Ripples
bump map; I've tried everything I could think of to try and separate out
the individual effects of the various parameters, with little success.
Specifically, what does the Texture Size parameter define for Ripples,
and how is it related to the Wavelength and Amplitude parameters? In
addition, how are multiple wave sources placed (it seems they are all
centered at the same spot). Is this placement affected by other parameters?
If so, how ?  I'm trying to setup a scene which simulates the ripples in
a swimming pool  resulting from multiple wave sources interfering, and
I've gotten some excellent results by a combination of accident and some
rules of thumb from the manual and other users, but I'm not sure why
those settings work."

The texture sizes define the dimensions of the ellipsoid containing the
wave sources.  The center of the ellipsoid is defined by the texture center.
The wave sources are randomly distributed within the ellipsoid (unless you
have only one, in which case it's at the center).  As always, the texture
size and center parameters are measured in distance units (usually thought
of as meters).  Wavelength is also in units, and wave speed is in units
per frame.  Amplitude controls how strongly the surface normals are
perturbed. I had hoped this would all be in the manual... - AH

16. SURFACING PEWTER

"What do you guys think would be the optimal settings to get something
that looks like a dull pewter, the diffused metallic greyish that you
see on 1950s SF rockets?"

Its a metal, so use color highlight. Its a porous metal, so use very small
fractal noise bumps and a little larger fractal noise specularity map.
Specularity maps go a long way to making good natural looking materials...
especially metalics.

I have just the thing for you, which I discovered almost by accident
whilst noodling about with my surface settings. The key is the fractal
noise specular map, which you have to adjust for the size of your object
to get that sort of crystaline speculararity where the light hits the
surface. Try this:

Surface colour: 200, 200, 205
Luminosity: 0
Diffuse: 33%
Specular: 90% (with fractal noise size of 0.01 for x,y&z, texture value
of 50%, freq=3, contrast 3.)
Gloss: Low
Reflect: 0
etc. everything else except Smoothing off.

Voila! Pewter. As I say dick about with the fractal noise until it shows
up as big flakes and you're there.

Metal surfaces which don't reflect everything are more lifelike. Not
everything made of metal is mirror chrome, y'know. :?)

17. MOTION PATH TIPS
"Hello! I was wondering if someone knew of where I could obtain
pre-plotted motion paths for objects. I.E. basic circle/oval type paths
and the such."

Well , it's quite simple to make it yourself .

make 3 NullObjects . Parent your camera to nullobject3 . Move your NO3
as far from the middel trough the z-axis as you want the radius to be of
your circle path . Parent NO3 to NO2 . Now rotate NO2 to make a circular
path with heading .

Voila ! You got a circular motion of your camera .

If you want to make it an oval path , just parent NO2 to NO1 and
strech NO1 any way you want to make the path oval .

18. HEAT WAVES

 "He wants waves of heat moving in the  foreground over the rest of
the amination. Ive done some experiments with a subdivided plane in
front of the camera.I am using the image map sequence from my fire
(made for the fonts) as a displacement map and then making the plane
transparent (refractive index 1.2). I turn trace refraction on and the
resulting effect is ok but not convinceing. I was also treated to 14
minutes a frame rendering time. does anyone Know another way to do this?"

Try rendering your animation without the heat waves first, so that you
have an image sequence on disk....then map this image sequence to a flat
plane that will fill the screen...use 100% luminosity and 0% diffusity to
avoid any color changes.  Put another flat plane directly in front of the
first(offset by a small amount)...make this plane totally transparent
with a decent amount of refraction and then use a moving Fractal Noise
texture as a bump map to give the rippling effect.  You'll need to play
around with the Fractal Noise settings to get the desired effect, but this
will definitely work and it will cut your render times way down without
screwing up the rest of the animation when you turn on Trace Refraction.


-------------------------------------------------------------------
                       LIGHTWAVE TUTORIALS:


1. CUSTOM LOGOS

Custom Logos:
I used to spend (waste, really) hours using pixel pro to convert
bitmaps. One day I deceided to give Modeler a try. I loaded the
image that I had scanned into LightWave's Layout, then went into
modeler and under the  TOOLS menu I hit the BG IMAGE button  and
called up the bitmap image that I wanted to convert. Using sketch
and placing points  which I would then make into curves worked
perfectly! When you use sketch, and hit return, it gives you a
spline curve that you can use drag to drag points around to make
a perfect fit to the bitmap.  If the curve needs more definition,
then just add points to it. When done,  weld the ends of the curves
that need to be joined, smooth them over, then hit the freeze
button, or hit CNTRL D (I think). This will give you a perfect
polygonal curve face, that you can then extrude to your hearts
content. I know it sounds like a lot more work than pixel pro, but
it really saved time! It also has the ability to zoom into the
background image to see the curves close up. Very helpful!

Pushed Out Effect:
"What I am attempting to do is make some text seem to push up
from inside of a box like object."

Sounds to me like your thinking to hard.  If I understand what you
want the answer can be fairly simple.  Boolean the text into to
side of the object, then bevel just the text out.  This will be a
 morph target.  Now tocreate the original flat object, select a
point on the base and note the value of the axis you want the
extrusion to take place on.  I'm guessing it will be the Z axis.
Now select all the points that make up the front faces of the font.
Using setVal command under Tools set their Z axis value equal to
the one you just jotted down.  This will make the base perfectly
flat again and now you have your morphing object and target.  If
you want the edges to be smooth like the Chocolate Chip just work
with smoothing angles.


2. POSITIONING LOGOS

Precisely Position An Image:
"If I want to put a logo on the tail of a plane but only want it to
be a small one down in the corner of the tail. All I can seem to do
now is project the whole image on to the whole tail."

There are several ways you could do it. One would be to slice the
area on the tailfin where the logo should go (using Modeler's
template drill) and make the polygons in that area a different surface,
then just autosize the texture to that surface. Another way would be to
map the image to the entire tail, but add a fin-colored border around it
to make it only appear in the corner (the border could be created with
ADPro's compositing features). Otherwise the image will "tile" over the
whole tail. I'm adding options to turn off image map tiling (or use
mirroring instead) to the next version of LightWave.


3. LASER ETCHINGS / WRITING TEXT

Laser Etching:
"Anyway, I'm trying to do a project where it appears that a laser is
etching (I guess that's what I'd call it), a word onto the top of a
computer chip.  The problem comes in, is there an easy way to animate
the drawing of the letters?  And secondly is there a quick way to create
what would appear to be sparks coming off of this chip as the laser
cuts into it?"

Here's how I'd do it:
1st, go into dpaint and create the word using the font you want.
(Hires, b/w letters. Now make an anim of the length you wish the burning
to occur for, and starting from the last frame working forwards, erase bits
of the text so that when you play the anim forwards, it appears to be
writing itself on screen. OK. This image sequence will be used as your
bump map /displacement map for the chip...more later. Save this anim as
a sequence of images. Go into LW, and load the sequence of images (images
 menu, load image sequence) Under options, select image for layout
background. Under effects, select the image sequence as the background
image. What this does is it correlates each frame of the sequence to a
frame of the anim, and places that image in the background. now, here's
the trick. Load your chip object. use a top down view so that you see
the top of the chip and the image behind it. Now zoom the view until the
lettering lines up with where you want it on the chip. (you probably have
to go to the frame that corresponds to the last frame of the sequence to
see the full text) Add a null object to the scene. Position this null at
the leading edge of the text as it writes on...if you've made your anim
sequence well (using the move requestor to get linear motion etc) you won't
have to key every frame, but you might, if you have complicated lettering.
(hint, choose a font with lots of lines and few curves) When you preview
the anim, you should see the null object writing the text onto the chip.
Good. Now for the laser beam. You can parent the beam object to the null
object, but this will make the beam origin wander all over the place, and
you probably don't want This. So, what I'd do is add two bones to the beam
object, one at each end. Use the one at the origin as an anchor. Load the
null object motion path in for the other bone (this is because you can't
parent bones to null objects yet) Now with some tweaking, you'll have your
laser etching out the pattern of the letters. use either a bump-map, a
displacement map or both for the chip lettering, and just use planar image
map with the image sequence that you created. Now if you want sparks to fall
off of this, I suggest you use the package "SPARKS" by Metrografx. It can
take in a motion-path (you would go into the motion requestor for the null
object and save it's motion) and use it as a generator for sparks...exactly
the effect that you are looking for. Anyhow, there are other things you
might want to try to make the anim look even better, such as using a shaded
(grey) lettering anim and then doing a combination specular/diffuse map to
make your etching glow. have fun experimenting!

Well, I just finished an animation of a laser etching words into a block
of ice, which is very similar. To get the letters to map on I created a
black and white anim in dpaint of my lettering painting onto the screen.
I applied the resulting image sequence as a displacement map, and a
diffusion map so the letters would get etched into the ice. It takes alot
of poly's to make this work correctly due to the displacement map. Also
you'll want to be careful in your font selection. To make flying Ice
chips I used one point polys which I morph from a compressed state to
a particle cloud (hope that makes sence). As I don't have sparks or Power
Macros I didn't make a polygon explosion which would probably look better
(ie real poly's as opposed to just one point poly's).

Signing Text:
"I was wondering how to have a logo that is in some sort of script style
lettering write itself in an animation."

Render out a single image o the entire logo you wish to have written on.
Save it as an alpha channel image.  Load it in to ADPRO make it a 2 color
image.  Load the image into Dpaint and creat animation frames for it. When
you have the logo writing on the way you like it in a 2D animation, save
off all the frames as an image sequence. Go back to lightwave load the
image sequence.  Then load your logo object. Goto the object menu and use
your sequence as a clip map for that object. You'll have to play with
the image map sizing till ya get it scaled right, and wala you now have
writing text without morphing.


4. CREATING SMOKE, FIRE OR PLASMA EFFECTS

Rocket Flames:
"How do you make a rocket's flames."

A possibly less obvious use for transparency mapping is for varying
an object's apparent density.  For example, a simulated rocket blast
might be fully opaque at the end of the exhaust but gradually become
totally transparent at the bottom of the blast.  There are several
ways to achieve this including an image map and using Texture Falloff.
This effect works well when viewed from the proper angle but when the
view shifts toward the fully transparent end, the object will appear to
disappear if it is made up of 1 sided polygons.  Back face culling will
remove the more opaque polygons from the other side of the blast leaving
only the transparent ones at the bottom, which of course are invisible so
the object disappears.  The obvious solution is to use 2 sided polygons
which is generally a good idea for most transparent objects. This will
not be necessary in the next release because a two-sided polygon toggle
flag has been added in LightWave which will both reduce memory consumed
by two-sided polygons and remove this burden from the modeler.


Making Realistic Flames:
I'd start by creating several cones or teardrop objects of varied size
and height.  The cones are good if you have to worry about the number
of polygons in your scene, but they don't smooth off as nice as a
hemisphere pulled into a teardrop.  Take the cones/teardrops [pointy-ends
up, of course] into Layout.  Under Surfaces, set the color to an orange
[or whatever you want] and turn on Luminous. I've used it both ways, and
I like Luminous On best.  Very Important: Set Diffuse to 100% and
Specularity to 0%.  If you don't set Specularity to 0, then you can't
Feather out the end. Set Gloss to Low.  Then go to Transparency. Set
Transparency to 100% and select Texture. Here's where you have to play
around to get the "Flame" you want. Select Fractal Noise and begin varying
the parameters. Texture Size: This varies how big each fractal will be.
I'd start with the long axis at 40% of object length and the other two at
10%. Texture Center: If you created the flames at the 0,0,0 point in Modeler
and then moved the flames where they were needed, you shouldn't have to
change this. Otherwise put the center at the center base of your teardrops.
Falloff: This is how you feather out the ends of the flames. For a 10 meter
cone, drop the falloff 1% along the long axis. Varying this will let the
cone/teardrop tips appear or end at different parts of the cone. Velocity
moves the bright spots of the flames along each axis and gives the impression
the flame is moving. Frequencies: The more frequencies, the longer the
rendering time. Contrast: The higher the contrast the more pronounced the
differences between light and dark. Pick Use Texture and get back to the
Surface requestor. Set Smoothing on and set Double Sided on. It all comes
down to a matter of playing with the parameters. I've used Fractal noise to
produce high-pressure spray, mist, rocket exhaust, and clouds over a globe
of the earth. It's a pretty powerful tool. As I said I would a flame.lwob
and readme can now be found at wuarchive in pub/amiga/boing/incoming/gfx.
(Note: This flame is BIG, you may [will] need to resize it.)

I would add a couple comments. Luminous objects like flames should always
have 0% specular AND diffuse. You don't want a light source in your scene
to affect the rendered brightness of your flames. Minor note, glossiness
has no effect on 0% specular surfaces. And a few LW3 additions for your
flame..... The lens flare Central Glow feature can be used for very nice
effect, and use an intensity enevelope for the flicker. And to better model
the flicker, use animated displacement mapping to make the flames twitch.

The problem probably isn't in the shape of your object, but your settings.
Try these surface settings:
   Surface Color: med grey
   Surface Color Texture: Fractal Noise dark grey(or dark white)
   Luminosity: 20%
   Diffuse: 20%
   Transparency: 100%
   Transparency Texture: Fractal Noise
   Texture Size: should be about 1/4 the size of the obj
   (get this by going to planar image map, hitting Auto Size,
   and returning to FNoise). Now reduce to 1/4(or so).
   Texture Center: Make the Y value the bottom of your Obj
   (Find this in modeler by looking at the bottom-most point and
   Taking its Y-value)
   Text Falloff: Depends on the size of your object.
   (If it is 1 unit tall, try 100%. If 2 units tall try 50%
   and so on...)
   Velocity: Again, depends on scale. Usually .02 on the Y is good.
   Experiment.
   T Value: 0%
   Frequency: Try 2, but play with it.
   Contrast: 1 may do, if you need more definition go high
   (Lower than one makes the noise run together.)
   Make sure edges are transparent.
This is how I make fire, but it should work for smoke too.

I noticed a couple of days ago that there was someone asking about smoke
(from a teepee).  Well, just for fun, I created a campfire scene to try out
various settings - and I came up with a great effect (not original, I am sure,
but looked very good. First, I created a coupla logs with "burned" ends
facing toward the center of the fire.  Next, I create a "smoke" cone,
which started at 0,0,0 and went up to about 1.75 meters, and had a top
radius of roughly 1 meter (X & Z).  I made this out of 10 sections, 16 points
on the circumference.  I then deleted the bottom point of the cone, and
moved the cone down to 0,0,0, to add some width to the bottom.  Next, I
created a "fire" object, which I lathed to look sorta like a cup. Here's
a bad text drawing of the out line against the Y axis.
                                  +Y
                                   |
                                   |  .
                                   |   .
                                   |    .
                                   |    .
                                   |   .
                                   |---
                                  -Y
And it is roughly 1 meter high. I deformed the shape of the smoke cone a tad
using magnet on various portions of the cone.  When I loaded it into layout,
I added two bones - One half way up the smoke cone, the other parented to
the first and to the top.

Over 180 frames, I tilted them both a tiny bit every 20 frames, to make
the smoke cone "wiggle".  Now here are my settings:
SMOKE:
   color: 200, 200, 200:
   Fractal Noise Color: 100,100,100
   sz: .2, .3, .2
   luminosity: 40% Additive Mode
   Transparency 100%
   Texture: Fractal Noise : Value: 40%
   Falloff: 0,60%,0
   Size: .2, .3, .2
   Contrast: 3
   Velocity: 0, 0.02, 0
   Transparent Edges, Trans. Threshold: 40
   Smoothing on.
FIRE:
   color: 255, 130, 80
   Fractal Noise Color: 230, 225, 150
   sz: .2, .3, .1
   contrast: 3
   luminosity: 40%
   transparency 100%
   Texture: Fractal Noise: Value: 0%
   sz: .1, .5, .25
   Contrast: 3
   Falloff: 110%
   Velocity: 0, 0.1, 0
   transparent edges, Threshold: 0.75
   Smoothing & Double Sided On.
The final touch was lighting:  I wanted it dark, so I had it on black -
0% ambient, and two lights.  #1 is a point, centered in the fire: Orange
color, point light, set at the center of the fire.  The intensity is an
envelope that stutters often (every 3-4 frames) between 70% & 120%.  100%
intensity falloff. Lens flare: only central glow, and the intensity
envelope is a copy (saved, then loaded here) of the light intensity envelope.
Then scale all keys X 0.5.  #2 is a spot, at the top of the fire object,
pointing down.  Spot, Same orange color, 30% cone, 30% soft edge.  The
intensity is a duplicate envelope from the fire light. The results were
GREAT! I rendered to my PAR and was pleased immediately. The only thing
I had to tweak were those transparent edge thresholds.


5. GLEAMING OBJECTS / METALIC EFFECTS

Gleaming Objects:
"Could someone give me an example of some of the gleaming, sparkeling,
or flashing silver effects you've created?"

A great trick for gleaming logos is to parent all objects and the camera
to a null object, and then to rotate that null object in heading.  Assuming
you're logo is reflection mapping, you'll see nice highlights flashing
across it.  I'm planning a feature to do this without having to rotate
everything in 4.0 (it Would be an envelopable reflection map angle). - AH

Gleams Running Accross Object:
Create an image to run over the object(s) as a Specular map. A horizontal
gradient - light - dark - light etc... will work well.  Animate the Texture
Center value - start it at the left edge and move it right, across the logo.
Animate it by creating two Logo objects with different surfaces and morph
(surface morph) them.  No problemo! At the same time, have two (or more)
spotlights pan across the Logo.

Gleams:
"I'm having a bit of a quandry...I've had no trouble creating 3d flying
logo's with brilliant silver, however, on this particular project the text
is flat, and facing the camara.  For some reason I cannot get the text to
look silver...instead I get a gray to white gradiant that is bland with
no sharp silver highlights."

I used the The problem is that the text probably has a flat face and the
silver is acting like a mirrored surface. I had the same trouble with
using gold and copper. Add some surface texture to the letters. It
doesn't have to be as radical as the Rippling Chrome surface, just enough
to allow the light to reflect off of the letters at less than 180 degrees.
The problem you are having with your silver objects is quite common when
reflection images are used in place of traced reflections. As you may or
may not know a reflection image is basically an image mapped to the
interior of a sphere. This sphere surrounds the object(s) and is used to
determine which portions of the image will be seen on the reflective
surface. The problem is that flat surfaces usually only "see" a very small
portion of the reflection image, so there appears to be very little
reflection occuring on that surface. A quick way to achieve more interesting
reflections on a flat surface is to apply a bump map to it. This will cause
LW to calculate varying surface normal angles across the surface allowing it
to "see" more of the reflection image. Experiment with different amplitude
values to achieve the effect you desire.


6. LIGHTING EFFECTS / LIGHT BEAMS

Light Effects:
"The second is a car headlight with rain particles showing through the Light.
I've heard the term "white noise filter" used in conjunction with this type
of effect, but I'm not entirely sure what this means."

Fractal noise is used with beam objects to create the illusion of smoke or
fog in the beam. You could shrink the texture size way down and make it
look more like rain. But I would use animated particles instead, which you
will probably need for your rain simulation anyway.

Light Beams:
"What I need to happen is to have the rays of light show up from behind
the object, similar to seeing sun beams show through clouds.  This is kind
of hard to explain.  I tried using fog to no  avail, and now I'm stuck.
Any help is appreciated!"

You'll need to model the streaks of light as a separate object, then make
them slightly transparent, and to give it some texture, use a little bit
of fractal noise with a low contrast. You can use glow behind lens flares
to approximate this effect. Another option is to model your backlight
glow as a physical object with beams or a textured polygon (depending on
what is appropriate for your application). Also, if you chose to do this
only Through lighting, do not put the light directly behind the object but
somewhat off-center so that the camera can see its effect.

Tunnel Effects:
"I have a long tunnel in front of the camera view, and the light placed at
the same position, looking down the tunnel. I want the immediate area in
front of the camera to be lit,  but then fade to black a short distance
down the tunnel. I've tried various combinations of; surface colour,
diffusion, ambient light colour, ambient intensity, light colour,
light intensty"

Try using:
1) Light Intensity Falloff, or
2) Black Fog.
Try adding some fog with all the colour sliders set at 0 (black), lower
the max fog amount to around 50-60%. You could also try moving the
lightsource ahead of the camera, and giving it a low Intensity Falloff
(1.8%) worked for me. Ive just used a combination of the two and achieved
some very pleasing results.


7. EXPLOSIONS

Explosions:
Create a particle object containing the same number of points as the
object you want to explode. by copying your object in Modeler and reducing
it to a group of one point polygons and then really distorting  it and
moving the one point polygons around. Next, load in both objects into
Layout and set up your original object to morph into the particle object.
Experiment with the spline controls so that it has the right attack and
sustain (in musical terms). Also set an envelope for the polygon size,
shrink them as the explosion istaking place. When you have the object breaking
up correctly, set a light in the in the middle of the object and put an
envelope on the lens flare intensity, this should almost match the envelope
for the object morph. And turn it way up to around 200% at the very
beginning. It should have an immediate attack and a slow burn decay. Use the
same envelope on the Light intensity. The result is a fairly realistic
looking explosion, and you don't have to animate any particles, they just
seem to fly out in all directions.

I've found a few things that worked in my own animations.
1- Lens flares, usually with just Central Glow, Red Outer Glow, Glow Behind
Objects, Random Streaks will look good. Adding Anamorphic Squeeze and
Anamorphic Streaks will make it look even better. For a more chaotic blast,
have a couple of lens flares that flare up and die away.
2- Add particles, that is, a cloud of one-point polygons. The Random Surface
Points macro is handy for this, as are some other macros whose names
temporarily escape me. In the course of the scene, make the cloud of
particles appear, scale it up as it fades away quickly. You might want to
morph from one version of the cloud to a distorted/expanded version, to
make the particles fly around in a disorderly way.
3- Take the object you're blowing up into Modeler. Slice off chunks with
the Boolean tools. Dirty them up as far as surface and clip maps go, and
put them in the animation, parented to the doomed object. When it blows,
under cover of the lens flare dissolve the parent object away and bring
up the burnt pieces, sending them flying and tumbling out of the center of
the blast. This makes explosions look much more realistic -- after all, in
real life when something blows up it doesn't atomize and vanish, it usually
sends debris and shrapnel out of the explosion.
4- I haven't used this in Lightwave, but a sphere with edge transparency
and a colormap of an image sequence of fire and/or plasma might do well too.


8. GLOWING GASES

Glowing Gas:
"I'm trying to make a glowing gas effect, such as one might see with a
light beam shining through a turbulent gas/particle mixture.  I can get
something resembling a gas effect by turning up the transparency and
adding a fractal noise to the object.  I can also get illuminated
non-transparent objects.  But I can't seem to get both.  If I have
transparency set to about where I want it (usually between 80% and 98%),
then the illumination control doesn't seem to have any effect that I can
see even if I crank it up to 100%. The result from all this just doesn't
look very convincing - it mostly resembles a colored filter placed over
part of the image, instead of a true gas.  Is there something obvious
I'm missing?"

Instead of applying fractal noise as a surface color texture (you can do
it if you want, actually) use a fractal noise transparency texture.  This
makes some parts transparent, and some not.  Should get you the effect
you want.


9. COMPLEX IMAGE MAPPING

Complex Image Mapping:
There is a solution for specific cases in LightWave, which is to use the
"morphing trick." This involves getting a morphed version of your distorted
object which has been "undistorted" so that one of the provided mappings
works correctly. For example, if you had a blobby sphere, like an asteroid,
you could create a morphed version that was exactly a sphere with the
"spherize"  ARexx script in Modeller. Now you can load the sphere into
LightWave and map it with a spherical image map. Then, to get the object you
really want, load the blobby asteroid and make it the morph target for the
sphere. Just set the morph to 100% and the sphere has become the asteroid with
the same mapping as the sphere. The map will distort to match the new contours
of the distorted geometry, which is what you want. This depends on manually
generating the "undistorted" form for an object, which in the case of the
asteroid is easy. The undistorted form of a dinosaur is a bit less obvious.


10. MAKING A COMPACT DISC

Making A Compact Disc:
I am in the final stages of an animation that has a CD and jewel
box. I modeled both, and heres what I am doing: I built the CD in three
parts, a main shell (semi transparent) the "outer ring/inner ring" and the
inner data ring. Using two reflection maps that I made, I got the likeness of
the color beams. The maps are:
one image of a generic gold with some blurred texture and another that is
the prism like colors going into the center of the picture. (I used AdPro and
I think the collapse to get this effect).  All in all it looks good. As far
as words, I just placed 3d text objects on the "surface" of the main shell.
I have not tried, but want to get an image on the actual CD. Kinda like the
way new ones have.


11. GLASS SURFACES

Glass:
surfaces with specular reflection, transparency, color filtering,
opaque edge, and a touch of reflection mapping make great beer or
wine bottles without even requiring ray tracing.  The rigorous method of
modeling refractive objects I used for the shot glass - explicitly specifying
the new refractive index for each material crossing - should be reserved for
those times when a high degree of photorealism is required.  Longer
rendering times are to be expected when ray tracing that many layers of
transparency.  Also be aware that the physical phenomenon of total internal
reflection is taken into account by LightWave, so transparent surfaces will
act like mirrors in certain circumstances.  This is why the very bottom of
the shot glass appears gray - it's reflecting the gray backdrop
(which is not directly visible in the image because of the wood tabletop).

How Allen Hastings made a Wiskey Glass:
I've just called up the shot glass object that I used in the Kiki
2.0 image in case you want to duplicate my settings exactly.  The
glass was modeled after one in my wife's collection, and has the
proper wall thickness and rounded lip. Also, the upper surface of the
scotch curls up a bit where it meets the glass, simulating surface tension.
The not-so-obvious secret of the object is that each polygon is included
twice, with the two copies facing in opposite directions and given
different surfaces.  Naturally all of the Trace options on the Camera panel
were turned on for the rendering. The glass polygons with normals that face
out from the glass toward the air have this surface, which I called
"ShotGlassExterior":  Diffuse 0%, Specular 80%, Reflection Map 10%,
Transparency 90%, Refractive Index 1.6, Smoothing on.  All other attributes
are left with their default values.  Note that the surface color doesn't
matter at all, since there is no diffuse reflection and Color Highlights and
Color Filter are both off.  Also note that the Reflection Map level is really
controlling the amount of ray-traced reflected light, since the Reflected
Image is set to "(none)" and the Trace Reflection option is on. Those polygons
that are encountered upon leaving the glass or scotch and re-entering the air
use the surface "ShotGlassInterior": Diffuse 0%, Specular 75%, Transparency
95%, Smoothing on.  All other attributes for this surface keep their default
values (including a refractive index of 1.0).  And finally, those polygons
that are encountered upon entering the scotch have the surface "Liquor":
Surface Color 240 180 80, Diffuse 0%, Specular 80%, High Glossiness,
Transparency 90%, Color Filter on (very important), Refractive Index 1.4.
Once again, any items I didn't mention retain their default settings. Don't
think that this is the only way to model glass - in many cases a simpler
technique would be fine.  For example, light green surfaces with specular
reflection, transparency, color filtering, opaque edge, and a touch of
reflection mapping make great beer or wine bottles without even requiring
ray tracing.  The rigorous method of modeling refractive objects I used for
the shot glass - explicitly specifying the new refractive index for each
material crossing - should be reserved for those times when a high degree of
photorealism is required.  Longer rendering times are to be expected when
ray tracing that many layers of transparency.  Also be aware that the
physical phenomenon of total internal reflection is taken into account by
LightWave, so transparent surfaces will act like mirrors in certain
circumstances.  This is why the very bottom of the shot glass appears gray
it's reflecting the gray backdrop (which is not directly visible in the image
because of the wood tabletop).


12. MORPHING A SPRING

Spring Morph:
For simulating an antenna or similiar springy object being plucked and
vibrating, then slowly stopping, make 3 morph targets; Antenna1 being the
antenna in it's original position, Antenna2 and Antenna3 being the antenna
at the apex of both ends of the vibrating motion. In Layout, Antenna1's
target object will be Antenna2, and Antenna2's target object will be
Antenna3. To set up the vibration, simply create a repeating spline curve
for Antenna2's morph envelope (so that it will repeat between Antenna2 and
Antenna3), the duration of the vibration depending on your animation. Now
all you have to do is set up a morph envelope for Antenna1 to where it stays
0% morphed until it is plucked, then a quick ramp up to 100%, hold and slow
curve back down to 0%..  Looks real!


13. MAKING FLOWING CURTAINS

Making Curtians:
"I'm working on a scene which will include curtains flowing in the breeze.
I thought this might be a simple task but I have run into trouble not only
making them move naturally but also figuring out the best way to make the model
for them."

Use Tripled, sub divided planes and apply the Ripples displacement map to them.
Position this map so that the texture center is in the bottom edge of the
curtain (check in Modeler to obtain that info) and assign a falloff so the
texture disappears completely at the top edge. For example, if your curtain
is 2m tall, the falloff should be 50% for Y. Experiment to perfect. Enjoy!

Not for nothing but this is one of the simplist things to re-create.
First, using sketch, make a snake like line in the top view. Next extrude it
for stage curtains or extrude on a path for other. Next subdivide the curtains
and make triangles. Now you can export to the scene and  use bones but I
personally stay in Modeler and create morph targets of my curtain moving.
If you want fancy curtains, make a spline cage of the shape. Save the spline
cage and move the spline the way you want the curtain to move saving each
new position as a morph target. Next patch all the spline cages you saved
one at a time and re-save them as the real mprph targets. Splines are much
easier to move for organic or something like curtains. I only wish that LW
would autopatch the splines. OHH don't forget to remove the spline cage from
your model. In the polygon select mode, hit the "W" key. Select all curves
by clicking on the "+" key with your left mouse button. This wil hightlight
the splines and now just cut them away.

OK, here goes.
Make a 1m by 1m plane, subdived and tripled to about 1000 polys, move it down
so that the top of the plane is at 0,0,0, and is facing into the +z axis in
modeler and load into layout as your curtain object. Using fractal bumps in
the displacement menu, give it texture size something like .75, .75, .75;
center it to y -1;assign an arbitrary velocity for the texture (perhaps z -.01)
Texture size and velocity are 2 of the 3 components of your "wind". The 3rd
is amplitude. Try an amplitude of .175 to start. Turn on world coordinates.
Now, here is one of the tricks: you need to set a texture falloff so that the
wind does not blow the top of the curtain. Set falloff to y 1. This means,
since we set texture center to Y-1, that it will displace the most at the
bottom of the curtain, with no displacement at the top of the curtain. Now
do a preview out in layout, you should see somthing that looks like a blowing
curtain. You will now have to play around with the variables to get
the exact wind you are looking for. Also, you might want to bone it to get
more gross action out of the curtain, and by using the new envelope button
for amplitude, you can have a still curtain get caught by a gust of wind, and
the neat part is... by having world coordinates on, as you move the curtain
with a bone back "thru" the "wind", sometimes the displacement make the
bottom of the curtain flip up, which looks very natural. Good Luck.


14. USING GOALS IN LW 4.0 PRE-RELEASE

Using Goals:
Whenever you have an object or bone selected in Layout, the Target button
reads "Goals". By selecting a goal object in this pop-up menu, you can tell
an object (or bone) to always "reach" for the goal.  Any objects/bones that
are parented in a chain will react as the last item in the chain reaches
for the goal.  In other words, you could pull a robots finger, and the arm
would follow (as far as it can, of course)
How Goals Work:
1.  In Modeler, creat a rectangualr box that has the aprox. dimensions of an
arm and make sure the pivot point/center is located at the end of the arm.
Export it to layout as "ARM".
2. Clone it 3x, so you have 4 arms.
3. Parent arm 2 to 1, 3 to 2 and 4 to 3.
4. Select arm 1, then create a key for Selected Item & Desendants
5. Add a Null Object and Save (rename) it as "GOAL NULL"
6. Select Arm 4 and set it's Goal to the Goal Null.
7. Select the Goal Null and move it aroud and see how the others
   follow.
8. This may not give us exactly what we want since the pivot point
   is what is reaching for the goal.  In order to get the end of the
   arm to point to the goal, we need to add a null object and parent
   it to arm 4, then romve to Goal from arm 4 and assign it
   to the new Null.
Tips:
You can limit movement of joints by turning off they're rotations (H, P, B)
to make the chain easier to work with. In order to use Goals with Bones, you
need to set up a similar arrangement where a bunch of bonaes are parented to
an end bone which has the Goal selected.  Ussing Add Child Bone will make
positioning the new bones MUCh easier.

15. LIGHTNING WITH MARBLE TEXTURE

"Just curious... has anyone ever tried to create lightning...using the
marble texture...  and if so ... what were the results?"

Yes...

With the proper settings, usually very large on either
the X or Y axis, and a velocity setting, you can get
some pretty random looking lightning.  Once you've
got the settings the way you like, render out the
image sequence, and then transparency map them
onto the a lighting type object... works great.

Or, you could model a couple of bolts of lighting,
and set a fast object dissolve envelope on it.

Yes - sort of.  I was able to use the marble texture for a Jacob's Ladder
style spark that climbed up two poles.  I had to set the veign sharpness
pretty high, and I made the texture luminous.  I also mad a "normal" and a
"warped" version of my polygon in Modeler so I could map the spark to the
warped object and morph it back into place.  It created a nice "messed up"
effect that was perfect.


16. LIQUID POUR

"I am currently working on a lightwave animation showing liquid pouring
from a large urn like object."

Depends on how much of the water-pouring effect you need to show...if
you're talking about showing the entire effect from beginning to end
(Urn tips,water starts to pour, urn empties out all water) then a large
morph might be your best bet although Bones could probably do the trick too.

If you only need to show a few seconds of water pouring from the urn with no
beginning or end, then you're already on the right track...for surfacing of
the water-stream object, try very thin, long Fractal Noise that is moving
down the object...you can probably use the same Fractal Noise texture for
a very small amount of displacement or bump mapping.  The toughest part will
be duplicating the shape of the water where it leaves the lip of the urn.

The most important part of tackling an effect like this is to go pour some
real water out of a container...you'll see that if the rate of water release
remains constant, there is very little change in the shape or "texture" of
the water...it's a very subtle effect that (like all 3D graphics) is highly
dependent upon proper lighting.

I've never tackled this particular effect, but I have done lots of work with
water and given a scene like this a lot of thought...just never had the time
to try out my theories, yet.  =)


17. SWIMMING POOLS

I've found the following to be a good Displacement map to use when starting
a pool.  Should have no problems with flipped or distorted polygons.  (At
least, I haven't.)

Object
X=15m 75 polys, Y=0m, Z=10m 50 polys.  Triple.
This gives you a flat plane 7,500 polygon object after you triple it.
 150x100 would be better for final production (30,000 polygons after
tripling) but this will let you see the wave pattern and takes a lot less
time to render.

Color 30, 210, 195
Spec = 100%
Refl = 30%
Gloss = MAX
Trans = 100%
Color Filter ON
Refractive Index = 1.3
Smoothing ON

DMap:
Ripples
Texture Amplitude = .05
Wave Sources = 3-4 (3 is a more defined wave pattern, 4 gives "rougher",
more random looking effect.)
Wave Length = .5
Wave Speed = .025 - .05
Texture Size = 5, 10, 5  (increasing Y gives the appearance of a longer
wavelength in one or more of the wave sources.)

This is a good place to start.  it has an easily seen wave pattern, and it's
easy to adjust a parameter and see what happens.  With ripples changing
wavelength, texture size, texture center and amplitude can  all have similar
effects.  So vary one parameter at a time and watch the changes.  One nice
thing about DMaps is that you can (mostly) see the effects without having to
render it.

Sometimes Bump Maps can do just as good a job as DMaps with water, and they
don't take nearly as long to render.  Here's a Bump Map that will give a
similar (but not exactly the same) effect as the Displacement map above.

Bump Map:
Ripples
Amplitude 75%
All other settings the same.
This will not have as much definition as the dMapped object, but the texture
will be the same.

To see these best position the camera at an acute angle looking down on the
object, say 80 deg pitch.  Put a spot light off to one side at a shallow
pitch, say 20 deg. to the object.  This will show the definition of the
pattern best.


18. EXPLODING SHOCKWAVES

I made a reasonable nice shock wave using falloff without a problem.
I believe I first made a long multi-segmented rectangle and tripled and
subdivided to get a moderate mesh and saved it as the object to surface.
Then I rolled it into to tube using Bend, then squashed and tapered it to
get a tear drop cross-section, then rolled it into a dougnut (Bend again)
and saved it as the morph target object.

Using a Transparency channel Grid texture (line size = 1) with a proper
Falloff on the short axis of the flat rectangle, I was able to get the
required feathering (remember, the center of the flat mesh is actually
the outer edge of the shock wave ring and the long edges becomes the
ring's inner edge).  The Color channel gave the color (duh) along with
some noise with velocity.  The Luminance channel was mapped with animated
noise, too.

"Just a quick question on the repeat episode of sea quest last
night at the beginnin of the show they had this blob under water emmiting
shock rings.. any1 know how they where done.. I was trying to repeat
this for a planet explosion.  I have gotten some cool effects of my
own but was pretty impressed with the ones on the show.."

I am not shure how Amblin does there shock waves, but I have done a
couple on some of my animations. I morphed a simi transparent sphere,
and in one case a simi transparent Toroid, (doughnut) with the center
removed.  Make one  object small enough to fit inside your planet or
inside the blast center. Save it as shockwave. Then copy the shockwave
object and increase the size until the front of the schockwave goes
through the camera position a little bit. Kill (K key) the polygons so
all that is left are points, and save it as shockwave.target.  For
surfacing, I used a faint fractial pattern with different velosities in
all directions to give it some life. In layout, set-up the morph to move
as fast as you can. 10 or 15 frames should work. (if your camera is
lightyears away you may need to add more frames) Use motion blur with a
blur length around 75 to 85% to make things happen smooth.  For the final
touch you may want to add a astoroid or a small ship near the camera to
get blown away when the schock wave arrives. When the shockwave  gets to
the camera, give it a little shake and  dissolve out the schockwave once
its past the camera.


19. SPIRAL PATHWAYS / STAIRS

"I'm trying to build a spiral pathway.  I have the spiral curve and I have
cross section built - the problem is when I try to use the rail extrusion
tool to produce the path.  I get a path which looks almost right except
for the fact that the end of the path is no longer horizontal its tipped
at a slight angle.  I have the orientation box ticked since if I don't I
end up with a path becomes contracted in some places. Its funny the tool
works fine when the path to be extruded along is planar like a circle.
I've using the clone tool with an extruded version of the cross section
but I end with a stepping effect which I don't really want.  Does anyone
know what I'm doing wrong or how I can find a work around?"

    I used to run into this problem also. The best solution is to create
your stair and then use multiple rail extrude (or multiple rail clone) by
creating two or more spline to extrude with. Making good splines for this use
may take you a little longer but the results you get are much more controlled.
I used this method to create the scrollwork on a self-modelled Ancient Greek
Ionic column - it worked quite well. I've also created spiral staircases with
relative ease.

As for the spiral pathway... I don't know if this would help, but you
MIGHT be able to lathe a shape (say, a rectangle that's off-axis of the
lathe center) up to make a twisted pathway.  You'd do something like
setting the lathe with 3600 degree rotation and 160 sections (or more, and
moving it up X meters in the shift (or whatever it's called) zone.  That
might work, but for some reason I don't thing that's the effect you want...

Hmmm.  I just tried using a box with segments and twisting it, but all I
could get was a double helix (cool id you want DNA -- you could make rope,
too, by twisting some cylinders), but no path.  Sorry -- got me stumped...

I just tried Vortex, too -- works kinda, but not really.    If you do
Vortex, it thins out the ends.  But I think I stumbled onto something...

AHA!  OK, do this:

1)  Make a box about 20 meters wide (x), 0 meters deep (z) and about .5
meters tall (y).  Give it about 100 segments on the X.

2)  goto Modify/Vortex.  Make the vortex area box thingy really big, so it
covers the whole object, and put the + center at one end of the
100-segment block.  Do this from the TOP view  (so all you see is a line
from the top view).

3)  Drag with the right mouse button from the + center to make the path
spin around the center until it's about as tight as you want it.

4)  Click Multiply/Smooth Shift.  Hit OK.

Voila!  A nice, spinning path.  The reason for the height in the path is
so Smooth Shift knows which way to move the polys (I don't know if 2-point
polys'll work -- you can try it).  The reason I didn't use Vortex to start
is because it looks the path'll taper at the end.

BTW, if you wanted a SPLINE path, just use a 100 (or something) segmented
spline, vortex that, and then you could even rail extrude along it (but
you were having problems with that, right...? DOH!)  Hope this helps...

Instead of using a spline path, try using the Extrude (Multiply) tool.
With it you can set the End angle to how many turns your spiral
is to make (times 360), the number of segments in the entire
object (try turns times 32), an Offset on presumably the Y axis
that will drop the cross section down the spiral's major axis as
it turns, and an X and/or Z Offset to taper the turns if needed (I
think).


20. STENCILING IN MODELER

"I know this was discussed a few days ago but I was hoping John Gross and
the other person - sorry I forgot who it was - who commented on using the
Stencil feature in Modeler could elaborate on this proceedure? If you mean
using a polygonal version of the 'decal text' as a template drill this could
be a problem for people using custom fonts."

Sure.  Here ya go...

My last project for Manny's Digital Fantasies and Light Speed video tapes
had me building a fairly complex robot (ED-209-like).  Rathe than using
image maps, I picked a pretty font and stenciled the letters into the
missile rack, ankle, and gun pods, as well as the lettering for the walls.

It's pretty simple:  you want the number "6" stenciled into the side of a
box.  Make a box in modeller (say, 1x1x1 meter).  Go to another
layer, then click on TEXT, load up any font you want (UnPact is pretty
simple), and type "6".  Scale it so it'll look nice (from the front) on
the box.

Got to Multiply/Extrude an make it 1 metter deep on the Z axis.  Now you
should have (in the backgound layer) a box, and a 6 in the FG layer.  Move
the 6 so that, from the top and side, the 1 meter extruded part intersects
the front of the box.  it'll look something like this:
     _______
    |       |
    |   _   |
    |  | |  |  (Top View)
    |  | |  |
    |__|_|__| ---- BOX
       | |
       |_| ------- 6

Now, hit ] to swap layers (put the box in the FG and the 6 in the BG).
Select Tools (I think)/Solid Boolean.  You'll get a requester with 4
options.  Select the 3rd one (stencil) and another set of options for a
surface name pops up.  Type in something like "6-Face" and hit return,
then click OK.

Now you get to wait (for a very short time...), and there should be a
polygon in the shape of a 6 in the face of the box.  The box has the
surface name DEFAULT, while the 6 has the name 6-FACE.  Pretty easy, huh?

Quick note about cylinders:  you'll want to use Wrap to Sphere of Bend or
something to warp the text around the cylind so it looks good, but if the
curve isn't too extreme (putting a 1 cm C= logo on a 1 m wide can), it'll
look OK (it did for the number of my robot's ankle and the missile casing,
which is cylindrical...)

Things to try:

label on a floppy disk/video tape
USAF on an airplane wing (where image mapping would be damn hard)
Also, extruded pictures (from PixPro) might be useful, if you still need
to image map a Stencil (that way, you could use the same picture as used
for the stencil, and it would fit perfectly where the stencil is)


21. TEXT SHADOWS

"I'm doing some logo work at the moment (hey I know its not
groundbreaking - but it pays !) and I am trying to get a line of text
that is emitting beams of light - if you've seen the rather fancy
Lightstorm logo where the text seems to leave a light trail that is
what I am after. The tubes are then aligned with the text, the tubes
facing the camera, but the effect doesn't look right - the tubes look
just like tubes and I tend to get some stray bright pixels at the
supposedlyinvisible end of the tube."

Have you tried using Edge Transparency on your tube object?  This should
soften the edges quite a bit and reduce, if not eliminate, the "tube"
look.

Not sure if this will give you the effect you're looking for, but try
this....import the logo into Modeler and give it different surface
names...export it to Layout with a different filename, parent it to the
original logo and then stretch it so that the front edge goes past the
camera's view but the rear edges of the two logos are on top of each other.
Then in the Surface settings, add a moving fractal noise pattern to the
Transparency map that moves toward the camera...you'll want to make the
entire copied logo somewhat transparent to make the regular logo more
visible.

This will give you a look like the logo has gaseous trails emanating
from it and moving towards the camera.

I tend to get some stray bright pixels at the supposedly
invisible end of the tube.

Make sure you have all Specularity turned off for the copied logo or your
tubes....a totally transparent object will still be visible if you make
it shiny with Specularity.


22. WALL OF FIRE

"I'm trying to create a Wall of Flames. I created a pretty good texture
using Kai's Power tools. The difficult part is getting both the edges and
portions of the interior to be transparent. I can create a transpaency
map where the edges are partially transparent, but I can't animate it
because the top edge has to remain partially transparent. I guess to be a
little more descritive, I have a flat plane that will be my wall. It's
got a fire texture moving up in the Y axis. I have transparency map that
is also moving up the axis, but at a different rate. If I make the left
and right side transparent, can't make the top transparent and still
move it up along the y axis."


Forget the plane.. Use a very flat tube, wide side towards the camera,
and set Edge Transparency to it (but without DoubleSided on).

Go into Modeller.  Find the location of the BOTTOM of the fire wall, and
the height of the wall.  The Bottom # will be the texture center, and the
height'll be used to figure out the falloff.

Go to Layout and find your firewall surface.
Set the transparency of your SURFACE (not the texture) to 100%.

Go into the Trans. Texture Map (the T). Go to the Texture Center, and punch
in the Y coord you got in modeler (the BOTTOM) into the Y in the Texture
Center.

The whole purpose of that thing above was for the Texture Falloff.  Since
falloffs always go AWAY from the center, you would want the center at the
bottom.

Go to texture falloff.  figure out what percent of 1 meter the height of
your wall is ( 2 meters is 200%, 1/2 meter is 50%, ect.) and punch that
into the Y falloff (as a PERCENT, like .5 for 50%).  Hit F9.

What this SHOULD do is make a nice, gently gradient from completly solid
at the bottom to 100% transparent at the top (the texture falls off to no
effect, so the 100% surface transpanrency kicks in.  If the surface trans.
was 0%, the map would disolve into a solid surface.)

A quick note:  You may have to select Negative Image for the map to look
correct with the 100% transparent surface.

make the Surface panel value for transparency = 100%, then use a falloff
in the Transparency texture so it falls off to 100% transparent at the
top. You can still use your image map for the other transparency.














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