Lightwave - Surely the most underrated 3d app.

Fjrb

From all of the four major 3d manipulation apps (softimage, maya, lightwave and 3ds max) Lightwave is probably the most underrated app. IMHO Softimage 3d with its mental ray renderer is probably the best of all, but still has a steep learning curve as it provides top notch state of the art effects (check out matrix, the mummy, etc.. etc..) out of the box. Maya is an unbelievable tool but it's really almost impossible to use it on your own, and it's geared to a production house more than a single user. And even though it's touted as the best new thing since sliced bread I still find Softimage superior in many fields, especially out of the box with no add ons. Then there's the other two poor cousins, 3dsMax and Lighwave3d, with 3dsMax I'd agree with the label, it's indeed a poor cousin, I started out with it (who didn't?) and now when I come back I find myself in hell - "shite how in the hell did I manage to do something in this purgatory of an app?" - the answer is easy: I didn't, and most don't, it's a great medium to start on though as it has loads of resources online, because of all those reasons and more, my congratulations to the people who manage to squeeze out some good work from it, check out www.raph.com/3dartists/.

Then there's Lightwave, small, robust, intuitive and with loads of features that are usually only acessible in its higher end cousins like radiosity, particles, softbody simulation, or caustics. Lightwave has its origins on the old Amiga and it shows, it's a brise to use it and a definite goodbye to the old labyrinthic menus of other apps. One of its major features is the ease of creation. So let's begin with a superficial look onto it.

First of all Lightwave unlike other apps is divided in two: the modeler and Layout. In the modeler, you can model, and in the latest versions paint weight maps and apply textures; in Layout you set up the scenes, the lighting, the animation and all that stuff. Both can be on at the same time and work made in modeler can be updated with ease on the fly in Layout. The Lightwave modeler is the best around, period. Some people use it just for the sake of its modeler. But let me completely contradict myself and start out with the layout module, I'm using Lighwave3d version 6 for this purpose:

The one thing you notice immediately is that Lighwave completely leaves the windows interface in the trashcan, forget all about those chaotic interfaces and those features that are there but no one ever sees. In Lightwave they're all at the distance of 2 or 3 clicks. All the menus are straightforward and easy to understand even for a complete newbie. On the right you have a portion of the initial Layout out module panel, in just 5 cms of screen you have the whole core of basic tools in any 3d app, moving, rotating, loading, saving, sizing and texture and animation editing; not too bad. Don't think that beneath lie unending sub menus, they don't, all is a couple of clicks away and within very interactive panels, not in insert-number-then-check-results tedious crap. If you know Poser from metacreations: it kind of has that intuitiveness, but, of course, with a lot more powerful tools.

Rotating, sizing and moving objects is a breeze, click the button then left click & hold, rotate, zoom, move the entire scene, select an object and it will rotate that one alone, you can only work in one big window so you don't have to be clicking in hopes of getting the right object. Needless to say changing between views is also a breeze, only one click away in the top bar. No loading in between panels or clicks, it's all loaded beforehand, actually Lightwave consumes uncaningly low amounts of memory for what it does.

Until now this looks like a cheesy infomercial, but it isn't; it's that in the present world of memory non-intuitive apps prevail, and finding one that isn't is exciting. So, let's actually do something. Let's fire up the Modeller and create a crystal ball, look into primitives and select the ball tool, create one ball dragging from the center to edges, then fire up the surface editor, and make the following settings on the side.

Save all yer stuff, clear all and then create a simple plane where the ball will stand. Do as you wish, I'll just make a white, flat one. Save that one too as ground or something, close Modeller and open up the Layout module. Go into add -> objects -> Load file and bring your balls :-) and plane into the scene. Select them and position them at your will. Ok, now let's select the light that's already there and set up its Settings -> Light type -> Area Light, leave them as they are and only activate 'enable caustics' on the bottom, then position the camera by selectng it, and using the camera move, rotate buttons in the bar

by clicking & holding and rotating, zooming, etc ... to position it as is below. Then let's configure the renderer, Render -> Render options, to our needs and start to render our scene, Render -> Render scene or F10.

This is what you'll come up with:

A couple of simple texturing and lighting steps later on, here's only a small snippet of what can be done in Lightwave with just a simple ball and an even simpler plane. Coming up with high quality realistic imagery never was so easy, or fun.

3d modelling and animating is of course so much more than this, this is just a window of what can be done with it, and also a small showcase of the many features of a package like Lightwave. Even using it on simple logo creations you achieve such a better result than in a 3d app like Photoshop. Of course these types of work are still in their infancy, leading to the idea that working on a 3d package lacks some of the creativity or talent a pixel per pixel image might have. I agree, at this time it's true, only because not enough talented people jumped on it and used it creatively as happened with 2d apps. This is mainly due to the fact that the general idea is "this is easy" - it ain't, and actually the main problem is exactly that, it's that it is too hard to go past the point where it becomes art, check the links in the end to check out some of the stuff done by people working on sfx houses for fun alone, there's some pretty amazing wizardry going on there.

I also got some request on file format info and integration of it in engines. Lightwave 3d has a simple file format easily acessible with any text reader, and unlike the.max format it's not cryptic at all, for that and more give a try at the links that follow:

Flay - The biggest Lightwave user site \ resource.
Lightwave World
3d Artists - The best 3d artist gallery around.
Highend 3d - The stop for all 3d highend packages.
Newtek - The makers of Lightwave 3d
Softimage - The makers of Softimage 3d & XSI

Don't forget to check out Lightwave's mailing list, it's a great resource and people are more helpful than usual. Don't forget, always use your creativity, add what you have inside, use the tool to create the imagery you see inside. Making cubes and spheres sucks, don't stop there. I'll try come forward with some decent tutorials myself - this is just an introductory note. Enjoy.

F j r b