BASIC LIGHTWAVE TUTORIAL NUMBER ONE
Constitution Class Saucer
I've had a number of requests recently from budding 3D modellers on how to build starships. This isn't an easy question, and not something one tutorial would cover. But I'm going to start at the very beginning here with a basic guide on how to build a Constitution Class saucer. I'm not going to go into the technical greebly bits and pieces right now, many things you'll have to work out yourselves. But in learning the basics of starship modelling, the saucer is the first thing to tackle. I'm using the Constitution as the benchmark here, as in a way, all Starfleet ships grew from this first, simple design. Once you've mastered this ship you're well on your way, and this saucer tutorial should hold anyone in good stead for future starship modelling in Lightwave, it will at least give you a grasp of some of the common methods and tools that Lightwave has. This tutorial is made though with Lightwave 5.6 in mind, but the concept will work with other versions, as well as Inspire 3D.
This tutorial is aimed at people who have at least a rudimentary grasp of the concept of Lightwave and its interface. If you're an absolute beginner I suggest you visit the site below to consider some very useful Lightwave tutorials: This particular site provides links to a huge selection of tutorials where you can learn everything from explanations of basic tools for novices, and some more advanced techniques, such as spline patching, character modelling and special effects:
Okay, to start with, I hoping you are familiar enough with the general layout of Lightwave, and know where most things are... When directing you to functions and menus I will use the method: Objects>Box, or Polygon>Flip. This will direct you to the Polygon menu and the Flip button.
STEP 1
Study the screencap below and configure Lightwave similarly. This box can be found under Display>Options.
I suppose the main thing here is the quad layout of Lightwave, with Grid snap set to Standard and Units to Metric. This is so we at least have some level of compatibility between how we view and interpret things over the course of the tutorial.
STEP 2
To create a complex shape which is a starship saucer like this you have to use the Lathe tool, which is what this is all about. I take it we are all reasonably familiar with the concept of Points and Polygons...? Well, to make this saucer originally, I had to load a picture of the Constitution Class into the background of Lightwave, and trace the contours of the shape with the Sketch tool. We will dispense with that, and instead concentrate on the Points pattern that I came up with. This will be the general shape of the saucer's cross section.
Press number 4 on the numeric keypad on the keyboard, this will select the Face and Top view. In the lower face view you are going to place a series of individual Points. Select 'Points Mode' on the bottom left of the screen. Then go to Polygon>Points. Starting at the centre line of the Y axis, at the top, continue right in a clockwise direction using Right Click to place the Points one by one until you come up with a pattern like the one in the picture below. Use the comma and period button as necessary to zoom and in out, if you need.
If you're not fully satisfied with the position of some of the Points, go to Modify>Drag and use the drag tool to position the Points more precisely. Once they are all in place it is very important to make sure they have all been selected in the right order. If one or more of the Points was deselected and reselected out of order during the process press the (/) button now, or click the mouse on any blank area of the toolbar to deselect everything. Starting again at the Point in the top, work your way right using the Left mouse button held down, dragging the cursor over each Point in turn, hence selecting it. Finish up on the final Point, which should be directly beneath the first Point on the Y axis. If you make a mistake by missing a Point, you can resume the selection process with the Left mouse button and holding down the Shift key.
I suppose if I was fastidious about this I could find several of these Points to delete, being not altogether vital for the eventual spline we are going to make. But feel free to withhold or add Points to this pattern as you see fit.
STEP 3
The next thing we have to do is create a curve, or spline, that follows the line of these Points. A spline, if you were wondering is simply an intelligent curve that follows a line of points. With all the Points selected press CTRL-P.
Selecting the spline in Polygon mode you should have this:
By now I expect you can see the familiar shape of the saucer coming into being. We're almost there. If you press (5) on the keypad you will snap back to all four viewports. Now press (a) to auto-size, and you can view your work from all perspectives.
STEP 4
Now we need to start looking at the Lathe options. Lathe is a powerful and versatile tool. The kind of operation we are going to do now is by no means the limits of its potential. This is what you are to do first of all: Go to Multiply>Lathe. In the Top view position the cursor where X meets Y, as in the picture below.
This is just to get a manual grasp of where we want Lathe to begin its operation. When the crosshair sits directly on those Y axis Points, go to Lathe's Numeric options.
Owing to where we had just placed the cursor for Lathe, the correct settings will already be input. Y axis will be selected, so the other things to worry about here are at the top of the dialogue box. Start angle should be 0, end angle should be 360. Sides is up to you. The less sides you have the more facetted the model will appear. In this instance I've gone for a perfectly adequate 80 sides. Click OK.
STEP 5
Now we're ready to let Lathe do its thing. With everything set up and selected, press Enter. You should have this result:
Pretty cool eh. It may look a little facetted and rough around the edges, but that's because we haven't assigned any surface properties to our saucer yet, such as smoothing values. We'll worry about that later, but it's best now to save the object to your hard drive. If you feel the need to experiment with Lathe, hit the Undo button on the bottom right of the screen. Go back to the Lathe>Numeric and alter things according to your requirements, before performing the operation once again. If you prefer to make a low-polygon model, for instance, you'll be wanting to reduce the number of sides for one thing...
Okay, now at this stage the next obvious thing to do is to surface that sucker. This is easier said than done, and it can be quite a tedious and laborious task. But if you want to texture your ship it has to be done. An object like this can be surfaced in two or three sections. For my Constitution mesh I kind of cheated by surfacing it in two sections (and doing it the quick way by applying my surfaces to the spline before I used Lathe - but we're going to do it the hard way because this will introduce the concept of surfacing, and using the lasso). Anyway, originally I specified the top of the saucer and the sides to be one surface, because I wanted the saucer aztec texture to wrap around the edge and down the sides. The second surface was the bottom. Sometimes though textures can misbehave by not wrapping themselves to your model correctly, the main cause of this really comes when you're modelling the mesh and assigning surfaces. So when creating the model it really is essential you take no liberties or short cuts with surfacing. But this tutorial will not enter into the hows and whys of mapping texture images...
In this exercise we're going to do the surfacing properly, with no short cuts. We're going to surface our saucer in three separate sections - the saucer's, top, sides, and bottom. Regardless of whether this is absolutely necessary (you can get away with only two with this mesh- top and bottom) it will help you get to grips with the very important skill of surfacing groups of polygons on your models.
STEP 6
You need to be in Polygon mode for this, so hit the Polygon button in the bottom left of the screen. Now I hope you're familiar with 'lassoing' to select Polygons. Hold down the Right Click button of your mouse and 'lasso' around your object to select some Polygons. They will turn yellow to indicate they have been selected, and a small blue line perpendicular to the face will signify which way the Polygon is facing. If your saucer looks really weird as if it's 'inside-out', it's something that can happen with the Lathe tool, depending on the original spline. In this case the blue directional lines will be pointing inwards. If this is so, with everything deselected go to Polygon>Flip. This will flip the Polygons over to face outwards.
Right, you need to lasso the Polygons on the top of the saucer like this:
You will need to use a combination of viewports to get this done, but to get the texturing process nailed down later on it's essential to get this right, or image maps won't align correctly. Because eventually, you'll be wanting to map some form of panel texture across the polygons which are on the dorsal surface of the saucer, and if there are any stray polygons to this surface scheme the texture images won't sit correctly.
Okay, when you've lassoed the top portion use the Left Click button to deselect unwanted Polygons that are not on top. Again you will need to zoom in and out for precision. When you have the top of the saucer selected, go to Polygon>Surface, to create a profile for the surface.
These are the surface properties I chose. I called it 'saucer_top', selected a plain grey colour (the colour in truth is up to you as the final image maps will override colour, and it can be useful to colour code your ship surfaces by having purples, greens, yellows and blues for different parts of the ship for visual reference when modelling.) It can also be useful, if you wish, to select a low Diffuse value, say 50%, and a high Specular one, such as 70%. This way you can inspect the model in the Open GL preview window to search for imperfections and smoothing errors. Finally, although I have a smoothing angle of 89.5 degrees, 30 is perfectly adequate for our needs.
Now that you've surfaced the top of the saucer, save the object once again. Now go to Display>Statistics. Here you will see the various stats for your object. From the drop down menu select 'saucer_top', and click the + button next to where is says 'With Surface' - this being the surface you've just created. The Polygons of that surface will now be selected. This is very useful, because now all you have to do is select the inverse of the already selected polygons to complete the surfacing of the rest of the object. Go to Display>Selection>Invert, and the remaining, as yet unsurfaced Polygons, will now be selected. You can also do this via the Statistics window by selecting the 'Default' surface from the drop down menu. This will turn on all the Polygons that as yet don't have a surface, ie, the saucer's edge, and the bottom.
Once all these polygons have been selected you need to individually deselect the unwanted ones for the surface you next want to create, or again, if you're confident, use the Right mouse button to 'lasso away' large areas of these polygons to get rid of them.
With this saucer there will be three surfaces in the end: saucer_top, saucer_edge, and saucer_bottom. In the above screencap I had switched to the top view by hitting (7) on the keypad and deselected the Polygons on the Ventral side of the saucer, which left only the saucer's edge. I gave the surface the name saucer_edge. Then, selecting the 'Default' surface on the Statistics panel I automatically select the remaining Polygons, which are the ones on the ventral (bottom) side of the saucer. Similarly I gave it a suitable name, like saucer_bottom.
Save the object, and you're done!
After viewing and studying various Constitution Class pictures you can plan the construction of the rest of your saucer, hopefully coming up with something like this:
and then:
...being the basic completed mesh without any textures....
The next tutorial will cover the bane of many novice starship modellers (and some experienced ones too) - the secondary hull!
Until next time
Tutorial 1 | Tutorial 2 | Tutorial 3 | 3D starships Index
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