Basic Lightwave Tutorial

by

Stag

Introduction

This is a step by step tutorial for the beginner and although the image above might not be awe inspiring.The idea behind this tutorial is to take you step by step through some of the settings in Lightwave that will be of a good use to you in any future objects you want to create. After following this guide you will have a good foundation, which when mixed with your own imagination will enable you to build some complex objects of your own instead of relying on some of the terrible ones you may have down loaded before.

To my mind a picture cant ever be 100% your own work if you have had to rely on down loading 3d objects of low quality from the net.

I hope to be able to explain what a 3d program is and show you the basics of how to start creating your own 3D objects.

The first thing you need to do is download this texture,just right click on it and save as.Use the link below.

Download texture

This is not a definitive guide this is just my way of working,you will find others have their own way to achieve similar results,in other words there is no one way of working in any program. Although this tutorial is primarily for lightwave the techniques are pretty much the same for all 3D programs.

Basics

The basic thing to remember is that all objects are made up of points and polygons as in the two images below which shows a simple box which serves our purposes to explain this quite well.As you can see from figure 1. the box is made up of eight points and in figure 2. each side of the box is made up of a polygon.{six in total}.

      
Fig 1.                      Fig 2.

So even a simple object like this is made up of points and polygons and we are able to edit or add to them in many ways.The polygons as shown in figure 2. are the areas that we use to Surface on and apply textures to later on.

Creating Objects is a small part when it comes to producing nice 3D art,but lighting and texturing are the most important things in a 3D picture. A very simple object can look awesome with the right texturing and lighting, while a complex object can look flat and uninteresting if the texturing and lighting is wrong.

Ok that's the basics out of the way lets get into lightwave.

For ease and understanding I have broken this tutorial down into the 4 chapters that follow:-

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