LightWave 3D For Virtual Beginners By Mark McCrickard

ttention all lightheads!....Attention all lightheads!....the Graphic Artist formerly known as Leo Martin has been fragmented! Our resources tell us that his drives were consistently running well over 80% capacity and we are sorry to tell you that TGAFKALM (as his closest friends like to call him) is taking a break from the grind...(well so to speak) and enjoying the new-found joys of marital bliss... (and now for the maritally impaired...Leo's new bride won't let him stay up late at night anymore writing technical reports).

Enter me, Mark McCrickard. I am the President of Crimson Media Group in Tampa, Florida. I produce corporate video. I became a Lightwave artist in order to jazz up the otherwise hum-drum industrial video I create. When I first started on Lightwave, I was operating on an Amiga 2000. Surely you remember this remarkable computer, with its unique chip array, and its unparalleled video processing capabilities. The biggest hindrance to operating Lightwave on that machine was that instead of measuring CPU speed in Mhz, it was measured in MRUHDW, (Molasses Running Uphill During Winter), consequently the learning curve was a little slow! So, I hired a tutor, searching high and low for the best guy in the biz. That guy was Leo Martin. Leo proved to be extremely valuable in accelerating my understanding of Lightwave3D. I had about six sessions with him and learned more in a few short weeks than I had learned the previous 5 months working on my own.

Now the time has come for the student to replace the teacher. I feel a little like Kwai Chang must have felt when he finally snatched that pebble from Master Po's hand. Thank you Leo for all of the help and inspiration you have provided to me and so many other Lightwave Artists. We wish you and your lovely wife the best life can offer, and we hope you are able to de-frag soon.

Ok, Ok, I realize that you came to this page in our magazine to learn something about working in Lightwave3D. It is my intention to write about some of the tricks and tips I have learned over the years, provide you with few shortcuts, maybe some workarounds, hopefully something that proves to be productive for you and your aspirations. Most of my learning has sprung forth from solving a specific need. A client wants his logo to look just like the one he saw that morning on TV. You know the one, the one that cost thousands of dollars and was created by a team of geniuses from around the world - yeah that one! Oh, and incidentally he wants it done yesterday and he thinks 5 seconds of animation equals (and he's being generous) 5 minutes of work. I won't pretend to tell you how to handle that guy, but I can teach you some basic skills that will get you well on your way to achieving the technical end of your client's vision. After all necessity IS the best teacher.

Once a client called and asked for a model of a globe like he had seen on a popular news show. A globe that was made up of longitudinal and latitudinal grid lines seems easy, and it is, but my first few attempts were....well we won't talk about the WRONG way of doing it.

Before we build our really cool grid globe we need a basic understanding of our favorite multiply function, the bevel tool. Bevel can be accessed from the multiply menu in Modeler, or strike the "b" key on your keyboard to access the numeric requester panel. Before we use bevel, we must have something to apply a bevel to, Capice?

From the objects panel, create a 1 meter box. When done with that, select the top polygon and strike the "b" key. A requester will pop up asking you for numerical data to construct the bevel. Briefly, inset is the amount Modeler will create and move a new set of points and polygons, related to the selected polygon, in a direction parallel with the plane of the selected polygon. Shift is the amount Modeler moves the newly created points and polygons in a direction perpendicular with the plane of the surface. If you can remember those two things bevel will become a "no-brainer" tool that you will use often. So let's do some beveling.

Enter a value of 100mm for both inset and shift. Cool, huh? A nice bevel on the top of that box. Strike the "u" key to undo the last operation, strike "b" again. This time enter a value of 100mm in the inset only. Notice what happened: the new polygons and points are oriented in the exact plane of the original selected polygon, only smaller than the original. Strike "u" and "b" again and select outer as the edges, click on ok. The new polygons now extended out away from the center of the selected polygon. Inner and Outer simply tell the bevel operator which way to extend the newly created polygons.

Strike "u" and "b" again, give the bevel a value of 100 for the inset, select inner and make the bevel. Strike "b" and give the inset a value of zero and the shift a value of 100mm, create that bevel. Notice how the polygon is shifted to a position perpendicular to the plane of the polygon. Selecting "custom" as the surface, you can give the bevel its own surface name when it is created. Always do this. It is such a pain to have to re-select a group of bevel polygons because you forgot to do it here.

Well, we are ready to make that grid globe! From the objects panel, create a 2 meter ball and give it 22 sides and 11 segments. When done with that, strike "b". Enter an inset value of 15mm and a shift value of 10mm and create the bevel. Neat looking globe, don't you think? Strike the "u" key and undo that bevel (I just wanted you to see a cool looking globe, it is not exactly how we will build the grid globe). Strike "b" again and enter a value of 15mm as the inset and zero as a value for shift. Select inner as edges and custom as the surface. Enter the name grid as the surface name and make the bevel. Doesn't look like much yet, but it will. Click on the "polygon" operator at the bottom of your screen and strike "w". This will bring up the polygon statistics window (accessible from the Display panel). Click on the pull-down bar located at the bottom of the statistics window, drag to and select grid. Click on the + sign located left of the "with surfaces" box. This will select all of our newly created bevels. Strike "x" and cut these polygons from the original sphere. Select another layer and strike "v" to paste these polygons into their own layer. Voila, a grid globe!

Well not quite, one more step to make it look cage like. As I am sure you have discovered, looking at the back side of a polygon is like looking into nothing. In order to give our globe a 3D cage appearance we have to see the polygons on the other side too. From the polygons panel select "surface". From the surface requester select double sided and click on change.

So, until next time, walk in the light!

Mark McCrickard is the President of Crimson Media Group in Tampa, Florida, and is also a LightWave instructor in the Bay Area. Contact him via Email at: CMGpost@aol.com.

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