Essential LightWave 3D- P3

Essential LightWave 3D- P3: What you have in your hands is, quite simply,a collection of tools and techniques thatmany professional LightWave artists useevery single day doing what we do in ourvarious fields. The tools and techniquesexplored in this book are essential to creatingthe caliber of imagery that you see onfilm and television and in print and videogames.
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Essential LightWave 3D- P3Chapter 2 · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·LightWave ScreamerNetLightWave ScreamerNet is a stand-alone Using LWSN and a local area network,program that does nothing but render. you can expand your rendering capabilitiesThrough discipline, focus, and binary-level to almost any machine on your LAN. (Don’tprogrammatic optimization, the coders at throw out that old 366 laptop! Hook it upNewTek have managed to condense and use it as part of your render-farm!)LightWave’s awesome might at creating theincredible; they have distilled all that awe-some rendering power until it fits into the Note528 KB space of a little command-line pro- Because of the way networks generally han-gram that would leave room to spare on a dle filenames, never have spaces in the names for your objects or scenes if you planfloppy disk. on rendering over a network. Even if you don’t immediately think you’ll be rendering across multiple machines, not using spaces in your LightWave names is just a good habit to get into. (That’s why you see all of the names in this book divided with under- scores (_) instead of spaces.)Figure 2-106: As simple as it may look, this littlething has all the power of LightWave’s renderer atits command. Note LightWave was first built on the Amiga plat- game favorites were able to do in the space form, back when its 1 MB of internal memory and with the hardware that an electric tooth- was seen as ludicrously large by the PC and brush of today would find constrictive. Most Apple crowds. Back then, memory was pre- of them, like Ms. Pac Man, Defender, Star- cious (even as late as 1994, an 8 MB SIMM gate, and Star Wars, are less than 40 KB could cost almost $1,000). worth of information!) Even though memory and hard disk space The larger a program is, the longer it takes prices have fallen below where any of us to get a memo from one end of it to the other “old-guard geeks” could ever have hoped, (just like in any other bureaucracy or corpo- and a simple word processor can require up ration). LightWave has not expanded to fill to 500 MB of space to run, the programmers the gaps left by cavernous memory and blis- at NewTek seem to remember the old days tering processor speed but remains stream- when space was limited. Why is this impor- lined, leaving you more space for complex tant? Optimization means speed! objects, surfaces, and FX and resulting in one (Take a look at how much our old video of the fastest, most reliable renderers, period! ···All of this is LightWave … and we have justbarely scratched its surface.48Chapter 3Modeling 1:Foundation Material“You gotta learn to walk before you can fly,” Max Plank, Copernicus, Albert Einstein.the old saying goes. They could have explored the same This is the chapter where you will learn well-traveled trails everyone else at theirthe foundation material of modeling from level had hashed and rehashed. Instead,which all your other modeling skills will armed with granite understandings of theirgrow. In this, as well as every aspect of all respective foundation materials, they informs of art, the foundation materials give essence said, “I’ve already been down thatyou the rules to follow to get something road. I know where it leads. Aaah now, thisdone quickly, easily, and reliably. After you path over here … this looks like fun.”know the “rules” like the back of yourhand, you cast them to the wind and ex- “Some rules may be bent…plore as far and as wide as you can. Re- others may be broken.”member the paths explored by the great — Morpheus, The Matrixartist/scientists before you: Nikola Tesla,Points (Vertices)point n. 1. A mark formed by or as if by Hot Key Blockthe sharp end of something. 2. Mathematics. Create Points and PolysA dimensionless geometric object having activates the Create Points too ...