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| Figure 1.1: Ball Parameters. |
To kick things off we're going to create a Ball primitive. With the Create tab selected, press the Ball button (or alternatively you can use the keyboard shortcut 'O').
Nothing will have happened yet, that's Ok. There are two ways to Create the primitive; by dragging it out, or by entering values in the Numeric requester. We'll use the Numeric requester as this is a tutorial and it makes life simpler if things end up in just the places intended.
Press the 'n' key and up pops the Numeric requester, this enables us to enter exact values for the properties of our ball. Make sure all of the settings are as shown in Figure 1.1 - Note that when entering the values the units used are of crucial importance.
Close the Numeric Requester, and press the Spacebar to deselect the Ball creation tool. You have now modeled our Robot's left eye.
This will appear as a distant dot in your view windows, to view our work
so far press the 'a' key to zoom in and centre the view on the our eye.
You can also use the '.' and ',' keys to zoom in and out. Other
techniques for manipulating your view include; hold the 'Alt' key and
any mouse button whilst dragging your mouse within a viewport, and using the
Move, Rotate, and Zoom buttons in the top right corner of
any viewport (just click and drag on them to change your view). From now on
in this tutorial use these techniques to change your view as you find the need.
A Robot with only one eye would have a hard time gauging distance, and would probably bump into loads of stuff. To avoid such potential mishaps our Robot needs a second eye. We could just create another ball where his other eye should be but the current one is so nice we'll just duplicate it instead.
Select the Mirror tool from the Multiply tab. We could use the Mirror tool using the Numeric requester we used before, however variety is the spice of life. Move the cursor over the 'Top' view zoom out a little, and hold down the left mouse button and drag down theY axis (ie the vertical line labeled Y).
You should now have two rather flattened spheres next to each other, with
the mirror line still highlighted (if you missed the Y axis hold down the
left mouse button and drag the line into place). When all is well press the
Spacebar to deselect the Mirror tool.
Now you may be wondering why our robot has such faceted eyes. The answer is because we haven't finished them yet. To make our robot's eyes nice and smooth we will do two things, adjust the texture, and convert the object to a SubPatch model.
First ensure that no points or polygons are selected. This can be done by clicking on almost any part of the top, bottom, or lefthand side of the user interface which is not a button. A good choice might be the little panel in the bottom left hand corner which reports how many items are in your current selection (This should say 'Sel: 0' if nothing is currently selected).
Now press the 'q' key. This brings up the Change Surface requester. To get the correct surface for the robot's eyes you should fill out the requester as shown in Figure 1.2
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| Figure 1.2: A Simple Robot eye surface. |
In the requester we have requested that new polygons will not automatically have this surface (after all our robot would look quite strange then). We have also set the colour of the surface (R=0, G=10, B=40) a dark blue that's very close to being black. We have also set the specularity to 75% to make it noticeably shiny, and the diffuse to 75% to provide diffuse (matt) shading.
When you click 'OK' on the requester the changes are made. The eyes still look very blocky, so we will convert them into SubPatches.
Making polygons SubPatched makes Lightwave display them as a rounded shape based on
the original polygons position. Converting polygons to SubPatches can make
modeling curvacious objects a lot easier. There are limitations however, the main
limitation is that polygons can only be SubPatched if they have three sides (called Tris
or Triangles) or four sides (called Quads). In our case the ball primitive has generated
polygons which meet this requirement so this step is simple. To convert the our robot's
eyes to being SubPatched simply ensure that no points or polygons are selected and press
the 'Tab' key.
The final step in creating the eyes for our robot is to move the eyes into different layers. In Lightwave layers provide an easy way to work on different parts of a model, they also allow the different parts to be animated independently without needing to use Bones or Endomorphs. To move the two eyes into different layers we will use Copy, Paste, and Delete.
We'll start by selecting all of the polygons in the robots left eye. To do this set the selection mode to Polygons by clicking the Polygons button in the bottom lefthand corner of the screen or by pressing 'CTRL-h'. Ensure that no polygons are currently selected (as in Step 3). Now move the mouse over the robot's left eye, hold the left mouse button down and drag the pointer over the left eye only until at least one polygon is highlighted. We will now use the Select Connected function to select all the polygons connected to those in our current selection (ie all those that make up the left eye). The Select Connected button is accessed via the Display tab, however as this is such a useful command it's worth learning the keyboard shortcut ']' (the righthand square bracket).
Now we will copy the eye so we can place it in another layer. In Lightwave the keyboard shortcut for copy is 'c' by itself. Once you have copied the eye to the clipboard we need to change to the destination layer, the easiest way to do this is using the layer controls in the top righthand corner of the screen. Click here for more information on layers. We want the left eye to be in layer #4, set this layer to be the foreground layer by clicking in the top left half of the fourth of the little boxes in the top righthand corner of your sceen. Both of your eyes should have vanished and the box turned a creamy colour, the eyes still exists but are hidden from us. Now paste the left eye into the layer using the keyboard shortcut 'v'.
Time to move the other eye, return to the first layer (click the top left corner of the first little box in the top right of your screen), select all of the polygons in the right eye (as we did for the left), and copy them to the clipboard. Now paste them into layer five. Now return to the first layer, since the eyes now exist in the other layers we can now delete them, to do this you can either select all of the polygons in the eyes, or ensure that none of them are selected and press the 'z' key (delete) to remove them. Alternatively we could have used cut instead of copy earlier on by pressing 'x'.
You are now ready to model our robot's head.