Chapter 2. Modeler

 

Display Options

Lets start out with the Viewports and how they work. When you load Modeler up you should be able to see four views. Each of which can have their own unique settings. Open up the Display Options panel by hitting "d" on your keyboard, it should look something like figure 5.

Figure 5.

The display options lets you customize Modelers Interface. We are going to change the settings for the second {Perspective}Viewport,click the "Viewports" Tab at the top of the panel and make the following changes as in figure 6.

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Figure 6.

This will set the background to purple, or you can change it to your own clicking OK when you are done. The Top Right Viewport {perspective}should change into the colour you have chosen, and the Grid should also be removed. This is just a preference of mine, if you prefer you can leave it the way it was, the point is that you can change it to your liking. You can do the same to the other Viewports, just play with the settings until you're satisfied.

Bring up the Display Options again and click the last Tab - "Units". Set the Units to "SI" here and the "Default Unit" to "Meters". Click OK when you are done. This is to ensure that things will be the same when we do our tutorials later on.

Viewport 2 should now be the only one without a grid.The three other Viewports should still have the grid visible, it's there to help you model and correctly measure your objects.

 

Each Viewport has got a Move, Rotate and Zoom Tool, and a variety of render modes, figure 7. shows the Toolbar of one of the Viewports.

Figure 7.

As you can see in figure 7, this view is set to "Top XZ", but it can easily be changed to any of the others by using this pull-down menu. To the right of the View Type menu we can select what type of render preview we want to use for that view, such as Wireframe, OpenGL etc. The Move Tool lets you Pan the ViewPort. The Rotate Tool only works if you use a Perspective for View Type. The Zoom Tool will zoom the view in and out.

Modes & Tools

At the bottom of Modeler, you will see two buttons named "Points" and "Polygons". These are the two modes of Modeler, that will give us more control over what we are doing when we model our objects. If you read the first part of this Guide then you should know what Points & Polygons are.It is essential that you know what Points and Polygons are if you are to progress with modeling.

The Tools that come with Modeler, have been categorised under the Tabs, just above Viewport 1. The "Create" Tab is selected by default when you open Modeler, if you click any of the other Tabs, you should see that the Tools down the left side of Modeler change. To activate a Tool, simply click on it once. Activate the Box Tool in the "Create" Tab now. If you move your mouse over any of the Viewports you can see that the mouse pointer has turned in to a small box. The same thing happens with the other object tools, the Ball Tool turns into a small ball, the Disc Tool into a small cylinder etc. To Deactivate a Tool simply click it again or hit "Space" on your keyboard.

The Numeric Panel

Most tools in Modeler come with a Numeric Panel. This panel lets you enter the exact values of how you want your object to turn out. Activate the Box Tool and hit "n" on your keyboard. A Small window will open showing the default values of the tool selected, in this case the Box Tool.See figure 8.

Figure 8.

 

Once we activated the numeric panel, a box is created in each ViewPort, and as you make any changes in the Numeric Panel, they will affect the Box in all the viewports. Try it out, change the "Low X" value to "0" and hit "Enter" on your keyboard. The Box changes immediately. Close down the Numeric Panel by clicking "n" ,then hit "Space" on your keyboard to deactivate the Box Tool which will create the Box.

Objects & Layers

You can have several objects loaded at the same time in Modeler, and just above Viewport 2 there is a pull-down menu which currently says "Unnamed". This is the object you are working on at the moment, if you have more than one object loaded, you can switch to which one you want to work with from here.

Layer tools

You have even more control over your objects while you work with them, Modeler has layers. Each object can have 990 layers, more than enough for anything we want to do. Just above Viewport 2 you should see 10 small boxes, these are the layers. Figure 9. shows the boxes.

Figure 9.

The one to the very left is fully coloured yellow, which means that it is active,while the one that is only half filled is an active background layer.When any of these boxes have an object in them you will see a black dot appear in each layer.

There is also the Layer Groups. Which enable us to have, 10 Layers per group and a total of 99 groups.Giving us a total of 990 groups. figure 10.shows the Layer Groups.

Figure 10.

Workflow

The Workflow is also one of Lightwaves stronger areas. If you look at the interface, you'll see that every Tool or Button is named with text. No silly image buttons that takes ages to learn, plus that the interface is very clean. To achieve even higher workflow, you also have shortcuts on your keyboard for almost every Tool in Lightwave. I choose to use the default settings for shortcuts and menu systems, but you can also configurate your own to suite your needs. But I wont go into that in this tutorial.

If you look at the Box Tool button in the "Create" Tab, you'll see that in the right side of the button there's an "X". This means that a capital X is the shortcut key for the Box Tool, so if you hit "shift+X" on your keyboard, you'll see that the Box Tool gets activated, and that's how it works with all the other Tools.

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