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Tutorials LightWave 3D Blood Cells LightWave® Style Qua Jan 26, 2011 4:29 am
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| by Adrian Thompson |
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While working on my never ending demo reel I made an image of some cg blood cells and posted them on my site, well I’ve had a few requests from people asking me how I made it, I think they are under the illusion that it was difficult, trust me if it was hard I wouldn’t have managed it. So I figure its time to share the wealth This tutorial is a beginner level so don’t expect anything to high powered  . Hereis the final image so you can see the kind of thing we are working towards. Modeler Section First lets sort out some filing, hit “o” and open up the options panel, here we are going to change the content directory so that everything we make and use will be in a nice easy to find filing system, this is going to be a tiny project but it’s a good habit to get into, ok enough babble, change the content directory to some thing like “blood” (just create the directory with a right click once your in the file browser) Now with that done were ready to roll into the modelling.  Inthe top view make a flat box with 2 segments in either direction (fig 1) The size of this doesn’t matter as we are going to force it to shape later on  Nowwhile in point mode select the four corners of the square, make sure your translation modes is “selection” then select the size tool (shift+h) and use it so shrink the points down until you have a round ish looking shape (fig 2) again the accuracy of this doesn’t really matter as I’ve never seen a blood cell up close and we are just going for a good look not something medically accurate. By the way the translation mode i'm talking about is selected using the mode button at the bottom middle of the modeler window.   Ok now onto one of the greatest tools in modelling “smooth shift”, select all of the faces and hit smooth shift (shift+f) and move the new faces up a little, now with the faces still selected and the mode still set to selection use size again to shrink the faces down a little (fig3) repeat this process until you get something that looks like fig 4.   Now centre and rest your model on the ground by using the “rest on ground “ tool (names a bit of a give away).  Oknow use mirror in the back view and along the x axis to give you the other half of the cell, with that done hit the tab key to make sure its looking good or al least in one piece, if you don’t like how its looking undo the mirror and tweak the shape until you get what you want, as I said there is no right and wrong here (fig 5).  Thisnext stage isn’t completely necessary but it will help us a little a bit later on Select the “absolute size” tool in the modify menu and enter the values as shown in Fig 6, this way all our cells are the same size and applying materials next will be easier. Speaking of that now hit “q” and the surface requester should come up, call it blood and hit ok, now would be a great time to save When you hit save it should bring you to your blood directory, right click and make another directory called objects, now open that directory and save your object calling it bloodcell. A little side note, try not to have spaces in your object, scenes or for that matter anything you save in LightWave  ,don’t get me wrong you can do it and it will work fine in most situations but when it comes to network rendering it’ll fall over because of spaces, you might as well get into the habit now, just use an underscore “_” instead of a space. Ok where pretty much finished in modeller now so hit the little arrow in the top right of the screen and hit send to layout. Layout section  Thelayout window should now open up looking like fig 7, one grey and dull blood cell, lets surface it. First lets rotate it so we can get a good view, just standing I up should be enough for now, just put 90 in the pitch value for now ok now turn on the viper and hit f9 to render. Ok now the viper window should show any surface changes we make. Lets think about the surface before we try and make it Basically we want has that bright look on the edges but normal colour when facing the camera and a little grain to give it that electron microscope look.  Okopen up the surface editor and lets set the base colour. No point messing around here for blood I think red will do (fig 9) Unless you’redoing some alien blood of course. Ok now how do we get the nice colour change effect, luckily for us LightWave hasgradients, which will perform this effect, no problem. Hit the little texture “T” button next to the colour option and a new panel will open up, this is where you set up texture layers, which is the main method for “building up” and mixing material properties Ok first of change the layer type to gradient by clicking the button in the top right.  Withthat done now move to input parameter and change it to read incident angle (which just happens to be the exact effect we are looking for, LightWave sthe greatest). Ok now in the colour bar you assign the different shades that the surface should be depending on the surfaces angle to the camera, to add a bar level just click on the bar and then adjust the colour in the right hand settings (use the arrow to move a marker up and down and the box to delete it if you mess it up) (fig10).  Getit to something similar to mine and you shouldn’t go far wrong, remember to keep refreshing the viper this will give you a nice interactive feedback so you can get just the look you want. We also what this surface to glow a little so lets ad a similar gradient to the luminosity channel you should be getting the hang of it now so just get it similar to fig 11.  Nowits starting to look good but it’s a little smooth so lets go to the bump channel and add a little something to break it up (fig 12), I used a very small dented pattern to get the look I wanted but you can play and go for whatever you want When your happy hit save object and then save scene (you’ll have to make a directory for this too, I’m thinking it may have been quicker to make them all at the start).  Openup camera properties set the anti alias level to medium and hit f9 (you need a pretty good anti alias to get the best out of procedurals) Ok we should now have a nice new blood cell (fig 13). Tell you the truth its looking kind of dull there so lets give it a background.  Okhit scene/background, then hit the add environment button. You want a texture background see fig 14.  Oknow open up the panel and lets add some fractal noise (make sure you still have the viper open), now just make the material procedural and fractal noise and make its colour red, as you can see the viper doesn’t’ show much more that an plain red background cause the noise scale is to big, try taking it dhow to 100mm in each (fig 15) ok close that up and hit f9 again.  Nowwhere getting there, ok save the scene before something bad happens. Now we need a few more cells to fill up the scene. All where going to do here is copy the cell we have and move them a round randomly and rotate them a bit, so select the cell and hit items the add item/clone. I cloned it 10 times but you can do as many as you want, I just get bored easy. U might want to change your screen layout about now too make it easier to adjust the new cells, so now just pick the new cells from the object list and move them randomly about (making sure you leave cell 1 alone as this is the one we want to focus on) and giving them different rotations to randomise it, use the camera view to make sure its looking ok.     Hitf9 again and see how it’s looking, mine was getting there but still lacked something (fig 20) and that something was depth of field. Luckily LightWave can also do this forus, as you might imagine the setting for this are under camera properties but first we need to find out the distance to the cell we are focusing on, we can do that with a range finder. Range finders can be added to objects to give you the distance between that object and anything else in the scene.  Selectcell 1(which should still be right in the centre of our view) and hit properties. Then under the custom objects tab hit range finder, a line should then appear telling you the distance between the object and the camera (the range finder will work between the object and anything you select in it options but cameras the default so we got lucky and don’t have to do anything but read).  Okopen up the camera properties and go to dof at the bottom of the panel, activate it and in focal length put down the value you got from the range finder Of as things are so close together we need a big f-stop value so put in 45. Ok hit render and see how it looks, this may take a min or so depending on your machine but you should end up with something like (fig 25). Its not a bad effect but the dof is looking a little rough round the edges so we need to smooth that out just to give us a nice finished image.  Openup image processing under the scene tab and then ad the depth of field blur image filter (its setting are taken from the current camera so there no need to adjust anything), ok hit render again. Wherefinally there, we now have our electron microscope view of blood cells, LightWave style (fig27)I hope this has introduced you to a few new features and got your imagination going Have fun and if you have any problems with this tut email meTake it easyAD. If you'd like to contact Adrian Thompson, send email to: [Tens de ter uma conta e sessão iniciada para poderes visualizar este link] or visit his website at: [Tens de ter uma conta e sessão iniciada para poderes visualizar este link] Download Source Files Here |
