Chapter 3. The Tutorial

 

A Glass Bowl

Okay, lets start using Lightwave for real then. Keep your Modeler running, and to the top left, click the "File" pull-down menu and select "Close All Objects". This will clear the Modeler so we can start over with our new project. In our first Tutorial we will be creating a basic glass bowl,however this is a great place to start and here are some of the things you get to learn and use as you progress.

Pen Tool
Box Tool
Flipping Polygons
Assigning Surfaces
Numeric Input Panel
Glass Materials
Basic Camera Settings
Basic Light Settings
Basic Rendering Option

The Bowl Shape

First lets use the Pen Tool to create the shape of the bowl,before we do this, we need the correct grid size in Modeler. In ViewPort 3, change the ViewType to "Back" if it isn't already, then place your mouse pointer in the centre of all four views and drag it up and to the right. This will increase the size of the "Back" view and we will have more control over what we do. Look at figure 12 and you'll know what I mean.

Figure 12.

Now how do we set the grid size to 10mm? Well, it's simple. When you use the "Zoom" Tool, Modeler will automatically adjust the grid size whether you zoom in or out. In Viewport 3, click the "Zoom" button and drag with your mouse to zoom in. Keep an eye on the Grid Size as you do this,you'll notice that the Grid Size changes into smaller values. Zoom in now until the grid size tells you 10mm.

Before we start creating the bowl. Use the Move Tool in Viewport 3 to Pan the view, and drag until the centre of Modeler is at the bottom of Viewport 3. Once again, have a look figure 12,and you'll see what I mean.

 

The Pen Tool

Ok lets create a shape for our bowl. Activate the "Pen" Tool. It's located under the "Create" Tab. We are going to use the Pen Tool to place the points in the shape we want our bowl to be, as we place these points, Modeler will automatically make them into polygons for us. We need to do this in a counter-clockwise order, starting with the first point being located at the centre of the Modeler viewport window. I used a total of 29 points to get my shape, but you can use more or less for your shape if you want to. Have a look at figure 13; you'll see each of the points in the order I created them, so try to create a similar shape.Dont worry if it doesn't match mine exactly.

Figure 13.

This is the shape we will use to create our bowl, and this is where the "Lathe" Tool comes handy. The Lathe Tool will spin this shape 360 degrees around the Y axis.An important thing we need to do first is make sure that the 2 points that are positioned to the very left is placed exactly at X=0.

If you have any points selected right now, deselect the pen tool by clicking on it, then select the two points shown in figure 14, by just clicking on them with your mouse.(to select multyple points hold the mouse button down or hold shift key on your keyboard)

Figure 14.

We need to make sure that these two points are placed exactly at X=0, and now that we have a selection, we can use the "Set Value" Tool to do this. Go to the "Detail" Tab,you should see the "Set Value" Tool there, or if you prefer to use the keyboard shortcut, it's "ctrl+V". A small window will pop up as you activate the tool,set the axis to "X" and the Value at "0", then hit OK.

Now we have made sure that these two points are exactly at X=0. Click on any points that are high lighted and deselect everything.

 

The Lathe Tool

Resize Viewport 3 so that all four views are equal in size. If you press "a" on your keyboard now, the shape you have created will fit perfectly in all the views.Rotate the perspective view until you see the polygon shape,looks like figure 15.

Figure 15.

Ok lets make a bowl out of this shape. Click on the "Multiply" Tab and activate the "Lathe" Tool. Press "n" on your keyboard to bring up the Numeric Panel, once the numeric panel comes up, Modeler created a real-time preview of the object in all the views. The default values are all that we need. We want to spin it 360 degrees around the Y-axis, so we don't need to change that. The only thing we need to change is the number of sides, set it to 16. Then close down the Numeric Panel and hit "Space" on your keyboard to deactivate the Tool and complete the operation.

The basic bowl has now been created, so hit "a" on your keyboard to centre our object in the views. We need to create a surface for this bowl. Press "q" on your keyboard and the "Change Surface" panel will open up. Name this surface "Glass", after you have typed in the new name, the other options in this panel will be unlocked. Click the small Colour box to change the colour of the surface, set it to "R: 175 G: 185 B: 200". Set the Diffuse to "80%" and the Specular to "75%". Click the "Smoothing" box, and click OK. These are only the basic values; we will change them later in Layout.

Using Subpatches

The shape still looks a little too rough, so we need to smoothen it out a a little. Lightwave can turn objects into Subpatches, which will smoothen the polygons out. Then when the object is smooth we can freeze the Subpatches and the object gets a new smooth shape permanently. Make sure everything is deselected in Modeler, and hit the "Tab" key on your keyboard to turn the object into a Subpatch.

We need to tell Modeler how much smoothing to give to the polygon Hit "o" on your keyboard an Options Panel will open up. We can set various settings here,but we are only going to change the "Patch Division" setting. We want a Division of 3 here so enter that number in the "Patch Division" field. This means that each Patch in our mesh will be subdivided 3 times when we freeze it. Click OK to close down the Options Panel, and then hit "ctrl+d" on your keyboard to freeze the Subpatches.

You can see our object is now much smoother now. Figure 16,shows my bowl at this point.

Figure 16.

Completing the Object

Make sure everything is unselected and hit "c" on your keyboard to copy the object. Now we to use the Layers. If you look at the 10 small boxes to the right, you'll see the little black dot I was talking about earlier (the box to the very left). This means that that Layer is occupied, we know it is, by our bowl object. Activate Layer 2 now by simply clicking in the upper part of the box; it should look like picture 17.

Figure 17.


 Once you click on Layer 2, the bowl object will disappear from the four Viewports. We have a new empty work area for our next procedures, and anything we do in Layer 2 will not affect Layer 1 where the bowl is. Paste the object in by hitting "v" on your keyboard; we're going to change a few things with this one.

We want to flip all the polygons in our object,making them face inwards instead of outwards.(Hit "f" )on your keyboard. This is essential if we want the Glass surface to turn out good later on. We need to give this object a new Surface, hit "q" on your keyboard again, the "Change Surface" Panel will open up. Name this surface "Glass_Solid", set the colour to "R: 175 G: 185 B: 200", the Diffuse to "80%" and the Specular to "0%". Smoothing should also be turned on. Click OK to apply the surface to our object.

Now that the Polygons are flipped and the new surface is attached it should look something like figure 18 in the Perspective Viewport.

Figure 18.

Hit "x" on your keyboard to cut the object out of Layer 2, then activate Layer 1 again and hit "v" to paste it there. You won't be able to see any diffierence because object will be pasted "inside" the other one, making the Polygons double-sided. We now need to merge the points, since we will have a lot of duplicated points that we need to lose. Hit "m" on your keyboard and the "Merge Points" Panel will open up, just select "Automatic" and click OK.Several thousand points will be deleted optimizing our obect to a small file size.

Our bowl is finished,and ready to be loaded into Layout. But I thought we should create something for it to stand on? and also to give you the oppertunity of learning to use the box tool (after all this is a tutorial) Click on Layer 2 again, which should be empty. Activate the Box Tool under the "Create" Tab, and then hit "n" on your keyboard to get to the Numeric Panel, use the settings shown in figures 19. and 19a.

Figure 19.

Figure 19.a

Enter the values, and just close down the Numeric Panel. Hit "Space" to deselect the Box Tool and to create the box. We need another new surface for this object, so once again hit "q" on your keyboard, and this time name the surface "Floor". Give it a colour of "R: 175 G: 200 B: 200", set the Diffuse to "80%" and the Specular to "25%", click OK and the new surface is created.

One of the things I like about Modeler is it lets you view Layers in the background as well, which means you can view two or more layers as foreground at the same time. With Layer 2 still active, hold down "Shift" and click on Layer 1. This will make both Layer 1 and 2 active, and the objects in both Layers will be visible. Hit "a" on your keyboard to centre the objects in the view, they should look similar to figure 20.

Figure 20.

All the objects we need for our scene are now created. At the upper left of Modeler there is a "File" button. Click this and select "Save Object As". When the save window pops up, select a place on your hard drive to save the object. My advice is to create an "Objects" folder on your C: drive,where you can keep all the objects you create. Name this object "BowlScene.lwo" .

Because we have 2 layers to object (the bowl layer and the floor layer), Lightwave will save both of them as one object,however it will remember what layers were used and which object were in which layer. I'll go into this later on when we load the object into Layout..

 

In the next section we are going to take our object into Lightwave Layout to set our scene add lighting apply textures and finally render our Master piece.

 

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