LW 9 Help

fluxfire

Ok i am very new to LW and would like some help. IF any one knows where on this site there is a tutorial for the following and can point me to it i would appreciate it.

Weapon effects (edit got a tutorial for that thx Lonewriter),Shield effects
Warp effects
B5 jumphole
SG-1 jumpin effect
Explosions
and finaly how to switch camera veiws when the video is rendering so that, say i have 4 cameras it gives each one equal time on screen during the render(if thats possible?),
And do remember I am very new to this so if there tutorial on this site that can help PLZ just put the link up so i can read them. THX

Andrew March

Okay dokey, you've come to the right place my friend. First I will start with the bad news.

There is no tutorial for the SG-1 effect, either the kawoosh or the Hyperspace one. Nor is there one for the 'going to warp' jump.

More bad news, explosions are created using a combination of stock footage and hypervoxels. Hypervoxels increase rendering times dramatically and really are a question of tweaking to suit your needs depending on the scene. The website below has some tutorials that will help you using HV's

The best Lightwave tutorial site is here: Main Menu - LightWave Tutorials on the Web

Weapon effects can be acheived a number of different ways from using geometry to using volumetric lights and if you're a little more specific I'm sure we can sort you out with something to suit.

By the way, not wanting to seem picky or anything but your sig should read 'Quiet', not 'Quite'

IRML

fluxfire wrote: »

Ok i am very new to LW and would like some help. IF any one knows where on this site there is a tutorial for the following and can point me to it i would appreciate it.

Weapon effects
Shield effects
Warp effects
B5 jumphole
SG-1 jumpin effect
Explosions
and finaly how to switch camera veiws when the video is rendering so that, say i have 4 cameras it gives each one equal time on screen during the render(if thats possible?)

And do remember I am very new to this so if there tutorial on this site that can help PLZ just put the link up so i can read them. THX

you're a new user like you said, so don't be trying to achieve everything you want at once, take it one step at a time, also last time I checked there was no way in LW to switch cameras while rendering, you just have to do it separately, it shouldn't be a problem if you render as an image sequence and do your editing later, but there was a plugin made to do it if you really want to render all at once

fluxfire

Andrew March

By the way, not wanting to seem picky or anything but your sig should read 'Quiet', not 'Quite'

your right hehe. have to fix that thanks.

IRML

you're a new user like you said, so don't be trying to achieve everything you want at once, take it one step at a time

This is also true. So what your saying when i have say a ship fireing at another ship is to do the render of one ship sooting at the other end it when the other ship gets hit then do another render with the same ship getting hit then use the models i have a the ships peaces moving away from the explosion in the next scene then just splice the 2 together in LW?

And do you have the link to the plugin that allows multiple camera views in one render?

Thanks again for the help guys.

P.S. i will be posting my vids in here so ppl can see some of my work.

[Deleted User]

There is a plugin called 'Camera Selector' which I think is standard in LW9. You can add it from plugins/utility and get running by adding it to the master plugins list. (From memory. It was a while ago that I was using this.)

Whenever you need to switch cameras you can go to the relevant frame, select the new camera, and just click 'add' in the plugin window. Works well and easily.

mattc

You should really do multi camera stuff in post....

M

Lonewriter

here is a good source for lightwave fx
Meshweaver Galleries

fluxfire

Yeah i supose i could do still shots of my video work........

I will check out those links to see what all i find. Thx

Andrew March

As a matter of course render your animations as image sequences as opposed to straight to video.

This has a couple of benefits the first being the ease of which you can edit in a video package (Premiere, After Effects). The second is if your machine crashes while rendering you won't have to render the whole animation again. just render from the last frame onwards.

fluxfire, if you have any questions at all feel free to ask them, there's no such thing as a stupid question.(Well there is but generally it has to do with beer and wanting one).

IRML

fluxfire wrote: »

So what your saying when i have say a ship fireing at another ship is to do the render of one ship sooting at the other end it when the other ship gets hit then do another render with the same ship getting hit then use the models i have a the ships peaces moving away from the explosion in the next scene then just splice the 2 together in LW?

And do you have the link to the plugin that allows multiple camera views in one render?

I don't understand what you just said there, but you should do all your camera changing in post, some people render the whole scene 4 times with 4 different cameras, then they can make the switches between any of those at any time in post, but most people just know what camera they want to cut to and when, so they render the first lot of frames, select the next camera and render the next lot..... you get the idea, LW is not an editing program, so if you try and "splice the 2 together in LW" it'll be a hack job and you'll end up with bad results

I don't have the plugin because I've never needed it, haven't got a clue where it is, but go to flay.com and search for it and you should find it

Andrew March

fluxfire wrote: »

So what your saying when i have say a ship fireing at another ship is to do the render of one ship sooting at the other end it when the other ship gets hit then do another render with the same ship getting hit then use the models i have a the ships peaces moving away from the explosion in the next scene then just splice the 2 together in LW?

Wow, slow down Tonto, you're going way too fast for yourself. Walk first, do the marathon later

What you've tried to describe is a piece of storyboarding, you could just as easily film all of your sequence using a single camera, but yes multiple cameras would make the animation more dynamic. Lets say your animation is 300 frames long, you could render all 300 frames using camera 1, render them all again using cam2, and so on. Or you could study the timeline and pick the frame from which you want to render each camera, (Cam1 frames 1-120, cam2 frames 121-240, cam3 241-300).

The best way to plan an animation is to storyboard it, even if you use simple boxes or spheres to represent your ships/characters/whatever. Storyboarding will help you to understand where a camera change might look good and will also give you an understanding of timeline.

One of the biggest mistakes made by people when they start animating is time, animations are either too slow or too fast. Lightwave comes with a hell of a lot of included content, it even comes with an animated scene of a space battle.

Load it up and see how it's been done.

fluxfire

realy it comes with its own space battle sweet i will have to load that up.(ahh where is that file?)

And i understand what you are saying i should make the scene with different camera view then use (well i use any way) Sony Vegas to splice it all together. Sounds like what i already do with ingame video footage. (easy work)

Right i will look at that battle scene that comes with LW9 and i will try frame rendering instead of the whole thing. that does sound like it has more controll options that way.

But i would still like to see if any one has done a proper shield tutorial for LW. And is there any one that knows a way to do the cloaking effect from star trek4 with the klingon ship? in LW that is i know there is a way in Max.

Thanks for the help if yall need any help rerendering video i have the latest version of Sony Vegas.

Andrew March

I think Ed Giddings did a cloaking tutorial for an early version of Lightwave, it involved using alpha planes. I think he took it offline though. Let me look.

Shield hits would be acheived using a combination of using a lense flare for a primary texture, together with some procedurals with a falloff. I'll have a play about when I've got a minute and see what I can come up with, I'm a bit busy, so no pushey pushey

DAve

One old skool way of doing it (LW 5.6) would be to use a transparent sphere (cube, lowpoly mesh whatever) and add a noise texture using a reference object (say a NULL attached to your laser).

As the NULL approched the sphere the texture would appear.

If I have time I'll try to knock up a tutorial as well (also no promises)

DAve

fluxfire

Hey guys that would be frigin sweet. THX

Do either one of yall know how to do wep effects like phasers and disruptors? or if there is an appropreate tutorial that can show me these things?

Does any one know how i can do stop frame editing like say i have an object in say 0-10 then 10-20 i want the object gone do i just delete object? Thought i saw a tutorial similar to this but not sure.

Andrew March

You need to add a disolve envelope to the object to make it vanish over a period of time, click on object properties.

I wrote a tutorial for phaser fire years ago, doesn't hole up well now I'm afraid. Dave Jerrards tutorial holds up quite well though. http://www.mohhs.com/lw/pdf/Lasers.PDF

Remember though that nearly all the FX you've asked for are produced in post production by the FX houses for the series.

Try getting into Adobe After Effects, you're going to need it anyway if you want your animations to look anywhere like half decent.

fluxfire

I will take a look at that tutorial Thx

So what your saying is that i would just need to do the models make the 3d space round them then use after effects to make the explosions and torpedos phasers and what not?.........hum...........

Andrew March

Well, it's not quite that simple (Never is), it's all dependent on the type of FX you want to produce and really the way that suits you best.

A good example would be all those really cool space explosions at the begining of Star Wars Ep III they were made using a combination of stock video footage and particles (Like Lightwave's Hypervoxels). They weren't rendered with all the elemets in place.

IRML

fluxfire wrote: »

I will take a look at that tutorial Thx

So what your saying is that i would just need to do the models make the 3d space round them then use after effects to make the explosions and torpedos phasers and what not?.........hum...........

it would seem like you're really jumping in at the deep end, like I said earlier take it one step at a time, you can't learn everything at once

fluxfire

I know, So far i have learned how to do torpedos. Animations of ships and cameras as well as lights, How to make a null and make some things out of them.

Now i am learning how to create a 3D starfield for my ships. Then i will add nebulas and planets. Then i am gonna use that Laser TUT to make my phasers and other weps, that aren't torps.

The only other thing i need to know is it better to do explosions and shield effects in AE? or is it better to do them in LW? Still wondering which way is better do most of the effects in AE or LW? I can get the models and the models that are broken into chunks for explosions. But i am not quite sure how to add a disolve envelope? (sorry guys still learning the controlls )

Andrew March

Have a look at this image below.

The scene was created in three seperate layers, with the background being layer 1, the Enterprise Layer 2 and the Reliant layer 3.



1)The weapons fire is a post process effect.

2)The explosion is a combination of three distinct elements, stock explosion footage mapped onto a flat plane with alpha channel data (transparency), and some Hypervoxels to spice it up a bit.

3) Some modelled bits n pieces to simulate debris.

So, it's not as simple as doing it in one or the other, you should find which suits best for the situation.

fluxfire

Wow that makes alot of sense.

Ok then tell me i want to have as much controll over the scene as possible, I would like to do say a oh i don't know 5min space battle scene. Would it not be easier to do say the space background and ships and lighting and torpedos in LW first.

Then use AE for the phasers and explosions and shields?
Any way i do this i still have many aspects to learn before i can do a complete scene.

So why not learn all that apply to what i am doing in both programs to make a more complete selection......thats what i think any way. Or am i over complicating it?

IRML

fluxfire wrote: »

Wow that makes alot of sense.

Ok then tell me i want to have as much controll over the scene as possible, I would like to do say a oh i don't know 5min space battle scene. Would it not be easier to do say the space background and ships and lighting and torpedos in LW first.

Then use AE for the phasers and explosions and shields?
Any way i do this i still have many aspects to learn before i can do a complete scene.

So why not learn all that apply to what i am doing in both programs to make a more complete selection......thats what i think any way. Or am i over complicating it?

I think you have to understand the reasons why we use a post processing application before you start trying to work with it, this is the way I use AE, I do everything in lightwave but I render it all out separately, so I have say 20 image sequences which make up the scene, like weapon effects, lighting, background passes.... I bring those into AE and I can tweak them separately and layer them together just the way I want to

I can use AE to apply certain effects to these layers like brightness changes and glows, I can do post process motion blur which looks more realistic than what you get out of LW, I can simulate realistic high dynamic range in AE.... the possibilities are endless, but rarely would I ever create an effect from scratch in AE - I just use it to complement the LW work

still images are a lot different though, you can afford to do way more bespoke post work on a still image because you only have one frame to worry about, if I was doing an animation and I needed to insert a 2D video of an explosion into it I would texture a plane in LW with that explosion video, fit it into the scene and render it out in its own pass from LW, then I can bring it into AE and work on it, if I was doing a still image I would just take the best frame from the video and paste it into photoshop and position it in the image there

right now your most important concern is the LW part of your animation, because without it you'll have no renders to work on in post

fluxfire

IRML

right now your most important concern is the LW part of your animation, because without it you'll have no renders to work on in post

Well in that case i just have to wait for one of the guys in the forum to make a shield TUT since there isn't one that i have found for LW.

Now i just need to learn how to do all the rest of the commands like dissolve envelope so i can do scene's properly :P

Andrew March

Waiting for people to write tutorials for you isn't going to help you in the long run. My honest advice to you would be to experiment.

In fact I have just found a shield tutorial on the website that I gave you in my first reply to your question Special Effects - LightWave Tutorials on the Web

scroll down till you see 'Energy shield effect'

IRML

fluxfire wrote: »

Well in that case i just have to wait for one of the guys in the forum to make a shield TUT since there isn't one that i have found for LW.

Now i just need to learn how to do all the rest of the commands like dissolve envelope so i can do scene's properly :P

yeah when jurassic park came out the artists didn't wait for someone to make a dinasaur tutorial before they got to work, LW is so easy to use you should be able to look at most things and think 'I know how I'd do that in LW', if you can't then cg probably isn't right for you

Andrew March

IRML wrote: »

LW is so easy to use you should be able to look at most things and think 'I know how I'd do that in LW', if you can't then cg probably isn't right for you

Yep, have to agree here. Whilst I can't model for toffee apples (as ma wee mum would say), You should within a couple of weeks be looking at things and having some idea of how to start creating them in Lightwave.

If I can ask Fluxfire, how long have you had Lightwave, because the next thing I'm going to ask you to do is post a picture here in this thread that you've been working on.

Don't be afraid to, and I'm sorry if this comes across as patronising (It's not meant to). Anything that you've been working on will do.

fluxfire

You know i have never seen that TUT on that page before :eek:

Andrew March

If I can ask Fluxfire, how long have you had Lightwave, because the next thing I'm going to ask you to do is a picture here in this thread that you've been working on.

I have had LW for aproximatley 4days now as for what i have been working on. Here is a scene with an image i got for the background and 2 ships i had laying round with a torp shot

I did 2 images just moved some things basicly. What i am eventualy gonna do is a real complete 3d enviroment that ships can either crash into or blow up But i don't have as much time as i would like to for experimenting in LW to learn how to do things like shields. If i did i probably would have not asked for help

And i do appreciate the time you guys take to help me where you can.

Andrew March

Try not to use other peoples backgrounds, especially without getting permission (they will sue you, trust me). Turn off ambient lighting completely (you really don't need it for most things). Using still images for as a background for animations just ain't gonna work unless you have very little movement. Creating your own backgrounds is going to give you endless possibilities for motion.

Next thing is find yourself a tutorial on three point lighting or space lighting, use the web site I gave you as a starting point.

Most importantly of all if you're displaying your work is always put credits on the image, by credits I mean something like: Species 8472 ship by Jo Bloggs, Alien Zero by blah, blah, blah (You get the idea I'm sure).

Do you know how to change the image resolution and increase anti-aliasing etc...?

fluxfire

well i put the image in so it wouldn't be a black background for the scene.

I do know of a TUT for LW that is for real space lighting. As for the Image i have no idea where i got that can't ask for permission if i don't know who to ask the models were given to me from a buddy of mine.

It would be a good idea to ask him if he did them or he got them from some one else. Normaly when i do a video i put in all aplicable credits. Never done a still image render before in LW was my first attempt.

Andrew March

Do you know how to change the image resolution and increase anti-aliasing etc...?

As for res no i don't know how to do that. Was still playing with some settings trying to figure it out.(sadly not getting far)

Andrew March

It sounds like you're going to need a crash course in reading the manual, either the physical one that came with your purchase of lightwave or the electronic one.

Whilst reading the manual may seem really dull & tedious the Lightwave manual really will explain all the different tabs and tools.