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 LightWave 7 and above you should still be able follow the steps. Well, that’s all I have to say about that, so let’s get to it.
From LightWave 8 to 7
By now you have most likely heard of and used this wonderful thing called Radiosity. Being such a natural real world property it can give your renders a level of realism like nothing else and even if you are not going for photo-realism Radiosity can still improve your renders with diffuse lighting. But of course there is this one downside, which is the LONG, LONG and let me repeat LONG render times. But then came along this great little tool called Surface Baker and with it you can take one render and burn Radiosity to a map so every frame after would render in seconds without having to recalculate Radiosity. But this too was said to have a downside. After Radiosity is burned onto a map you can no longer move any of the objects in the scene because if you move an object the shadows would no longer align and the light direction would be wrong. So if you have a scene with only the camera moving you are okay, but if any of the objects need to move around in the scene you are doomed. But luckily this is not true. So what is the answer to this big problem? Well it’s easier and more fun to simply show you than it is to explain, so just sit back and follow along with the tutorial to find out.
Ok, so let’s start in Modeler and make a box for the ground. Give the box about 20m width & depth, but only 2m in height. Make the box centered to 0m in the X & Z, but -1m for Y and then hit Enter.
Then make a box with 2m in width & depth, but 6m in height and then set its Y center to 3m to have it sit on top of the ground box.
Now make one final box about 3m in Width Height and Depth and set X center to -15m and Y to 1.5m.
Give the ground box and the 3m box a dim tan color (about 180 175 170) and call the surface stone.
Then give the tall box in the middle a green surface (about 130 200 140) and let’s just call it green-stuff.
Now you need to make the UV map for the objects
Select the 3m box, the middle green box and the top polygon of the ground box.
Your scene should look be somewhat like this:
In Layout rotate your light to -145 On its heading and in Light Properties give it a nice sunny warm color like (255 245 180).
Now move your camera to a position you like. I set it to X: 20.5593 m Y: 9.925 m Z: -17.5704 m H: -49.30° P: 14.00° B: 0.00°
Then play around in the Surface Editor if you want to. I made my stone surface look a little more like stone by adding a Turbulence Procedural with 50% Texture Value for Bump and I added a Turbulence Texture Color of
(090 085 075). Also I made the green stuff look more like I suppose some kind of green stuff by adding a Turbulence Texture Color of (040 070 040).
Set up a low level of Antialiasing in Camera Properties and Turn on Ray Trace Shadows in the Render Options panel.
Now hit [F9] to make a quick render, and what you get should look something like this:
Make a sky blue color like (209 225 255) as the Backdrop Color in the Backdrop tab.
Now go to the Global Illumination Panel under Light Properties.
Enable Radiosity type Monte Carlo then add 2 to the Indirect Bounces and then just click ok if LightWave gives you a render time warning.
And be sure to turn Ambient Intensity to 0.0%
Hit [F9] to see what you got. And you should get something like this:
Go to Surface Editor and with stone selected go to Shaders and click on Add Shader. Now look through the list till you find Surface Baker and then click on it.
Then Surface Baker will appear on the list below, double click on it to open its options.
Now that the Surface Baker option panel is open set the Image Resolution to 800 and name the image Surf Burn. Don’t forget to choose a place for the Image Map on your computer.
Then set RadiositiyBurn as the UV Map and leave everything else as default like this:
Be sure to uncheck Continuous Map if you are using LightWave 7.5c and below. LightWave automatically discerns how the shading should be applied in later versions.
Now just hit F9 and let Surface Baker do its thing.
After awhile you will get an image like this:
Now go to the Image Editor and Load Surf Burn0000.tga then be sure to disable it’s Alpha Channel.
In the Surface Editor set Luminosity for both stone and green stuff up to 100%, Diffuse to 75% and for the color texture change the Layer Type to Image Map with Projection set to UV and then set UV Map to RadiosityBurn.
Now select Surf Burn.tga for the Image and turn Pixel Blending Mipmap Quality to Off.
Just like this for both stone and Green Stuff:
If you are using LightWave 8.0 and below turn off Texture Antialiasing. Having Pixel blending and everything turned off is not a must, but it tends to stop some problems you may have with low-resolution image maps and this technique. For those of you who are experienced LightWave users it is about time for you to try and stop yawning now and to start reading more closely because the slightly new part is coming up. And yes I am fully aware that I skipped the whole HDRI process.
If you were to make a render now it would look like a nuclear bomb went off near by. This is thanks to the light intensity adding to the precalculated Radiosity Luminosity. Try and say that five times fast.
Now most people would just turn the light off but instead we are going to clone the light and set the cloned light with the negative value of the first light. So if Light (1) has an intensity of 100.0 % then we set Light (2) to -100.0 %
Now if you hit F9 to render you can see the burned radiosity and texture map. Now because we did not include the extra ground box polygons in the UV map they are all messed up now. This is ok because we are going to delete them anyway.
Okay now we need to go back to Modeler and if the Hub is on then all the changes you made in Layout will be present in Modeler.
First Select the bottom and Sides of the ground box and delete them. Now we have a ground plane.
NOTE:
So why in the heck did we not just make a ground plane in the first place? Basically Surface Baker does not treat flat planes and non-solid objects the same as normal Radiosity. If you go back and start with a flat plane then you will find that the Rays will magically go through in the baked surface where Real Radiosity will not. This is especially important if you ever wish to blend real Radiosity shots with burned shots.
Now select the small 3m stone box and cut and paste it into the next layer.
Now go into a new empty layer and make a 2m ball set to Tessellation with 2 Segments.
Hit the [Q] key to give it a new surface and name it metal ball then in surface editor give it 20% Diffuse 100% Specularity 15% Glossiness and 200 200 250 color.
Now select the entire ball and bevel it with Inner Edges and 15cm for Shift and Inset.
Hit the [Q] key again and give the selected polygons a surface called red ball with 80% Diffuse 90% Specularity and 210 020 020 Color, then hit OK.
If the ball is not centered then hit [F2].
Now there are two reasons why I wanted you to make this ball.
And one of which is because it just looks cool:
I positioned the ball at X: 6m Y: 4m Z: 0m.
Now in the render there are two problems. The ball is getting no light and it is casting no shadows:
Go to the Light Properties panel and select Light (2) (the negative light) and under Objects tab exclude the ball object.
Hit [F9] and you will see the ball receiving light and casting shadows!
All of the objects have Radiosity but the ball. So now you can add lights that only effect the ball to fake Radiosity. Just be sure to uncheck Affect Specular on any fake Radiosity lights. And if you want to be really clever you can turn on Backdrop Only Radiosity just for the Ball object.
Now what you get with the ball is an object that can move and rotate in a scene with burned Radiosity, but can still cast and receive accurate shadows:
Now to make use of the box you need to first exclude it from the negative light. Now the box looks like a nuke went off beside it again, so you need to clone the negative light and exclude everything but the box.
And there you go:
NOTE:
There are some things to keep in mind when using the Surface Baker if you want to have the burned radiosity look exactly like the real calculated Radiosity.
1. Don’t burn polygons with more then four sides.
2. Burn to a .hdr format that contains much more of the Light-Dark spectrum and can be edited for brightness. There is a great tutorial on this by Emanuele Salvucci titled Baking Illumination.
3. Make sure that all the objects have depth. No flat planes.
4. Make to map as big as you need or bigger if you can, and take up every bit of map space you can. The closer an object will be to the camera the bigger it should be in the UV maps. If you are using 8.1 and below then be sure to unweld and edit your UV maps. And don’t forget to weld your objects back together.
5. Pay close attention to how your lighting should change on your animating objects. For example the 3m box was lit from below by the backdrop sky when it was burned and that would not be so if it were setting on the ground. To fix this we would burn a map to the box sitting on the ground and then move it and burn another map for the ground without the box. The change is subtle but sometimes it makes all the difference.
Now, I know we skipped some of these rules, but it kept the tutorial short and we got to the main point faster. Some of those rules would take an entire tutorial just to cover them. As I mentioned before rule 2 is covered very well in another tutorial on baking illumination.
Now, after going through this tutorial you might be thinking: “Hey wait a second, there is something missing here.” And you would be correct. The red ball is casting shadows, but it is not casting back any light to the surrounding objects nor is it receiving any bounced light from the surrounding objects. Now there are a few ways to achieve this effect and the one I prefer opens up ways of getting the SSS effect and glow effects, so I will save it for my next tutorial. Well that’s about all I have to say so until next time just explore beyond and see what new possibilities this technique opens up.
