The Beyond Average
3D Tutorial Series for LightWave 3D
By Sandin John Denton
I will try and make these tutorials as simple for beginners as possible. However you will find these tutorials
most useful if you are someone who knows the basic ins and outs of LightWave’s Modeler & Layout.
These tutorials are not about learning LightWave 3D or what the buttons do. What I try to tap into with
these tutorials is the tricks, cheats, and the special techniques that allow you to do things faster or better. I
would not be where I am today without the hundreds of books and tutorials out there to help me along the
way, so these tutorials that I will release here and there is my attempt to try and give something back. For
this tutorial I will be using LighWave8.5, but if you are using LightWave7 and above you can still follow
the steps. Well, that’s all I have to say about that, so let’s get to it.
From LightWave 8 to 7
Bones have been around for a long time, and along with the search for more
realism with lighting, texturing, modeling and rendering there has also been
many new developments for the realism of motion. There is for example
inverse kinematics, dynamics, weight maps and morphs. But for me, the
greatest new improvement to the realism of motion so far has been the
concept of mixing endomorphs and bones together in movement. This kind
of process has been called smart skinning, smart morphs, bone morphs,
motion morphs, joint morphs, happy go go morphs. Okay maybe that last
term has only been used by me. Anyway the correct term is Bone Motion
Driven Endomorphs, but NewTek is currently calling them Joint Morphs,
which is easier to say and is accurate if you only apply them to bone
rotation. So for the rest of the tutorial I will refer to them as joint morphs. If
you are unfamiliar with joint morphs you may be asking what makes them
so important. If you bend an arm using bones you will most likely never get
the elbow to bend out properly or have the mussels flex correctly. If you
move your character’s arms up and down how do you intend to have the
shoulder blades move with them? How would you model in wrinkles for
when your character has a closed fist? All of that along with countless other
uses can be accomplished using joint morphs. This tutorial will show you
how to use LightWave 8 to create accurate joint morphs applied to a
character with no weight maps or skelegons, or use LightWave 7 to create
joint morphs for your character without extra plugins.
Lets start in Modeler. Using the Box tool create a box with height and depth
of 3m and a width of 10m. Its segments should be set to 2 for Y and Z, but 4
for X.
Now hit the Tab key to SubPatch the box and hit F2 to make sure it is
centered.
Go to File and save the object as box temp, now open it in LightWave
Layout.
Open Surface Editor and turn on Smoothing.
Now its time to add some bones. Go into the back [XY] view with a
Wirefame display.
Click on Draw Child Bones under Add in the Setup tab.
(for LightWave 7: Items / Add / Bones / Draw Child Bones)
Now at the very left of your object click and drag out the bone to the objects
center and then click and drag out another bone to the objects right.
Now hold down the shift key and select both of the bones. Now just hit the
[r] key to activate them.
You should have something like this:
With only bone (2) selected rotate its pitch to -90 degrees. You could adjust
Joint Compensation and other controls for bone properties, but that will not
be necessary since we will be doing the same thing with more control using
joint morphs.
Part of the object is stuck in the air just as it should be. Select the object and
hit the [p] key to open Object Properties. As you can see, the Subdivision
Order is set to First.
Having Subdivision Order set to First is bad for various reasons. The two
biggest reasons are that deformation is not as smooth and joint morphs will
not work correctly. Since this is a tutorial on joint morphs you should set it
to Last.
Before you close the Object Properties panel set Display SubPatch Level to
0. This is an important and temporary step for SubPatch objects.
Now go to File / Save / Save Transformed Object. You may get a save
warning, if so just click OK. Now give the new object a name like Pitch
Morph.
Now that you have saved a transformed object you can set Display SubPatch
Level back to 3. If Display SubPatch Level was set to 3 when you saved the
transformed object then LightWave would have saved the subdivided
polygons instead of just the mesh behind it.
Now go back to modeler and load the Pitch Morph object.
Copy the Pitch Morph object and paste it into box temp’s second layer.
Now while in layer two set layer one as a background layer.
Go to the Map tab and click on [Bkg to Morph] which of course stands for background to morph.
The morph you are creating is temporary so name it temp like this:
Note:
You have probably noticed that LightWave 8 has a built in tool called CreateJointMorph. This tool works
perfectly if you are using weight maps and only weight maps with the bones, otherwise this technique
which lets you use modeler to create the morphs and just about works under all conditions is one of the best
ways to make joint morphs. It is also pretty much the only way if you are using LightWave 7.
In the lower right corner you can see that the temp morph is selected. Click on it and switch back to (base):
disposal. If you ever want to compare your changes to how it looked before
then just switch between box temp and Pitch Morph. Just remember to only
adjust box temp in layer two.
I over exaggerated a little with my adjustments to make the difference clear.
Here are my changes:
the morph.
In the lower right corner click on (base) and switch back to temp, you will
notice that the object is now oddly distorted, as it should be.
Now we do the reverse of what we did earlier. With layer one in the
foreground and layer two in the background select map and click on [Bkg to
Morph].
Name the morph Pitch Joint and hit Enter.
Now that the morph is applied to layer one, you no longer need the object in
layer two, so delete it. You can also delete the Pitch Morph object file.
Note:
Since this is a tutorial you can just delete layer two, but when you are making joint morphs for your
characters you should cut and past the object in layer two to a new object file. Name the new file
Joint-Morph-Collection and add every new joint morph to a new layer in the file and then give the layer an
appropriate name. After you have a big collection of joint morphs and you want to edit a morph you will be
happy to have that Joint-Morph-Collection file.
After you have deleted the object in layer two you will find that the temp
morph is also gone.
Now back to LightWave Layout to make the joint morph work.
Open Object Properties and go to Deform tab and select JointMorph under
Add Displacement.
Under the JointMorph panel select bone (2). Uncheck Heading and Bank.
Set Morph Minimum to 100%, Morph Maximum to 0%, Angle Minimum to
-90 degrees and Angle Maximum to 0 degrees. Everything is sort of
backwards because the rotation is negative:
action.
Checking and unchecking JointMorph makes the morph disappear allowing
you to compare the difference that the morph makes.
The morph will also disappear when you rotate beyond -90 degrees. That’s
just how the joint controller works. To fix that you can apply JointMorph
again and set Morph Minimum and Maximum to 100%, set Angle
Maximum to -90 and Angle Minimum to something like -180. Instead of
JointMorph you can also use other tools, expressions or plugins to control
the morph.
That’s all there is to it. You now know how to setup, create and apply joint
morphs to take your animations to the next level.
yourself what the beyond part means. You reach beyond simple joint morphs
if instead of bone rotation you apply the morphs to bone position or bone
size using small expressions or the Follower modifier. You reach beyond if
you apply morphs to other morphs to create non-linear morphs. You reach
beyond if you apply the morphs to nulls and other Items in a scene. Anyone
can learn. The goal of a 3D artist is to explore beyond.
