BASIC LIGHTWAVE TUTORIAL NUMBER THREE
Adding Starship Details
PART 1: Applying Windows to a Saucer
My tutorials are made 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 site provides links to 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:
This is the third Lightwave tutorial, and a bit of a mixed bunch this time, as we're going to be looking at various things, from applying windows to our starship, as well creating and stencilling registries.
Right let's begin. Again I shall be using the method: Objects>Box, and so forth to point you to various menus and functions in Lightwave. In this instance, I would mean you to go to the Objects tab, and then the Box button (etc)
Step 1
As in the other tutorials, study this screencap to configure Modeller to our mutual compatibility.
Step 2
The first thing you want to do here is start with a circular saucer. For experimentation's sake you could refer to Tutorial 1, which details the creation of a Constitution Class saucer. But this class of ship had no windows on the saucer's top, but you could use the technique to create any number of saucers. In this instance I'm going to use the circular saucer of the Niagara Class, a ship I built some time ago. It's the only circular one that would have windows on top that I had to hand, and that I had copies of in its old, raw state. Okay, open Modeller if you haven't already done so, and position your saucer precisely on 0 metres on all three axis lines. Like this:
Now we're going to create the basic shape for our window. Move to another layer, and using the Objects>Disc tool, make a simple disc of say, 18 sides will be plenty. Ensure the disc is flat, i.e. being a single polygon. Now, in Points mode select the Points of half the disc and use the Modify>Move tool to drag the Points away to make a lozenge shape, coming up with something like this:
Position the window according to your requirements with the saucer in the background layer. I say 'requirements', as this is in regards to where you want to position the ring of windows that we're going to create. It could be towards the centre of the saucer, or on the outer edge. Initially, I personally chose a position near the outer edge. Finally specify a surface for your window. I called it 'win1', and gave it a white colour, and a smoothing angle of 30. Play around until you have it aligned approximating something like this:
Ensure that the window is straight and at precisely the right angle, and is positioned perpendicular, away from the saucer.
Step 3
Once you have the position, this is when we're going to move to the tool which will create our circle of windows. With the window still in the active layer go to Multiply>Array. Click Radial and have a look and some of the options here.
Radial Array clones the object in a circle. Here I've chosen the number 120. This means that the window will be cloned 120 times in a perfect circle, above the saucer on the Y axis. Depending on where your ring of windows is, and its size, you'll want to vary the amount of clones to create. A ring of windows close in, circling the bridge perhaps may only require 50 clones.
In cases such as this it is vital you specify where the centre of the circle is going to be. As we're going to later 'stencil' these windows on to our saucer, it stands to reason that the centre of our window circle must be the same as the centre of our saucer. Luckily we've already positioned our saucer to be 0 on X, Y, and Z.
Right, click Okay and let's see what happens.
So we have our circle of windows. Yet something's not quite right, they look too perfect; too uniform. So now's the time to start deleting some of those windows to make them appear more naturally spaced. A quick way of doing this by the way is to remove all but one quarter of the windows. Delete a few of these remaining windows until you come up with a pattern you think resembles the windowing schemes of a Federation starship saucer. Then use the Mirror tool twice (Multpliy>Mirror) to recreate your circle once again, beginning like this:
Step 4
Right, next we have to switch back to the first layer containing our saucer. Hopefully you've remembered to surface your saucer? This is important, so if you haven't, and it's all one surface scheme called 'Default', refer back to Tutorial 1 on how to select Polygons to specify a surface. Because now we have select only the saucer's top polygons, as we are going to kind of 'trace' our windows on it. So, with the windows in the background layer, go to Display>Statistics, and from the drop down menu select the appropriate surface, which in my case was saucer_top. Click the + button next to 'with Surface'. Those polygons with now be active and will turn yellow.
With the windows on the background layer you might be able to see exactly what polygons on the saucer will be affected by the windows in the background layer. There will be many polygons on your saucer which are not aligned with the windows at all, so it might be a good idea to deselect some the irrelevant ones, because what we'll be telling the Drill tool to do is to apply the windows to the selected saucer polygons. It's essential that the polygons that the windows will be drilled onto are selected, and by deselecting some of the polygons that won't come into contact with the windows the whole operation will be speeded up.
If, for instance, you selected none of the polygons on your saucer the windows will still be correctly drilled onto your saucer, but they'll appear on all polygons that lie in the windows' path, meaning they'll be drilled onto the bottom of the saucer as well, and onto anything else they come into contact with. That's why it's very important to tell Lightwave which polygons it definitely needs to affect, and having the ones it won't, deselected.
Next we move on to performing the Drill operation itself. Go to Tools>Drill. Under 'Operation' select Stencil. What this does is traces, or 'stencils' the objects in the background layer onto the selected polygons in the active layer. As we're drilling downwards, we need to select the Y axis. Then specify the surface by scrolling the drop down menu to find the surface name you gave to the windows: (in my case win1)
As you can see I've deselected some of the irrelevant polygons facing upwards that will not be affected by the operation. There's no need to be infinitely precise with this, by deselecting every possible polygon you don't need. All this does, as I said earlier, is speed the operation up a little bit, because Lightwave doesn't have to reference or make calculations for these polygons not involved. When you're ready hit Okay. Now the windows should be nicely stencilled onto our saucer.
Step 5
Go back to that Statistics panel again, select win1, and all windows will now be selected. What we're going to do now is perfrom a Smooth Shift operation. This will give the effect that our windows are inset into the saucer. Depending on the scale of your saucer (mine is approximately 200M in diameter), we will inset our windows by just a small amount.
With the windows selected go to Multiply>Sm Shift. I've chosen to offset the windows by 30 cm. Smoothing angle is 30 degrees.
Step 6
But all the windows are white, some should surely be greyed out, shouldn't they? As the Drill tool can only stencil one surface at a time, I find it easier to do things the way I've just described. The next thing I would do is deselect everything (you can quickly do this by hitting the / key). Go to Display>Statistics again and select the surface 'win1' and select it. Now in the Top view go round your saucer deselecting some of the windows at random, or to any pattern of your own design. When complete give these windows a new surface name, such as 'win2' and give them a darker colour. This will give the more realistic impression that all lights on the ship are not going to be on at once!
And there you have it. With the final touches of your windows being both white and grey and slightly inset the final effect is achieved. You're well on your way, and can repeat the operation as many times as necessary to complete the windowing scheme on your ship. Once you're ready to do some renders of your ship in Lightwave Layout it can be a cool idea to experiment giving more life to your windows. You can either create a texture for the lit windows that gives the impression of rooms inside the ship, or you could experiment with Fractal Noise effects, this similarly produces a varying light and shade effect. It just the ship a sense of further realism by having the windows suggest there is something through them on the other side, rather than simply have them glowing white.
According to your ship, experiment with window shapes, as well. But when using the Drill tool remember to keep them single poly. You can use the technique to window the secondary hull also, just line them up, select the polys you want to drill onto and you're away.
PART 2: Applying Windows to an irregular Saucer
Perhaps you're thinking: "well the Radial Array tool is all very well for a circular saucer, but what about elliptical ones, and the like...?" This is a good question, something I'm now going to briefly cover.
The novice may well think that the solution is straight forward: Create the circle of windows using Array and then simply use the Stretch tool until you come up with a rough oval shape similar to your saucer. Wrong. If you do this the windows will stretch and warp, and you're going to end up with some serious problems. No, you have to use a different technique for this. In this instance I'll be using the elliptical saucer of the Nebula Class to demonstrate.
Step 1
Begin with your saucer, whatever that may be. This technique would work with a saucer the shape of a figure eight if you wanted (although that wouldn't be seen as a very sound starship design... :)
Firstly, envision precisely what window arrangement you want to create. For the sake of argument I'm going to create a simple pattern of windows towards the outer rim of the saucer. In Top view zoom in far enough to get a good look at one quarter of your saucer. In Points mode follow a line around that quarter selecting the Points as you go. Something like this.
Step 2
Copy those Points into another layer. Ensure that you have copied only one line of Points, sometimes, when doing this from any axis you can select unwanted Points hidden from view. You only want one single line of Points from the saucer's mesh, if there are any unwanted ones that you've accidentally selected, delete them now. Select the ones you now have in order and hit CTRL-P to create a curve, or rail. You should now have something like this.
This rail is the defining shape of one quarter of our saucer, and we are going to use this rail for our windows to follow and adhere to when we come to clone them.
Step 3
In another layer create a suitably sized, standard lozenge shaped window, like before, and position it over the curve, something like this:
Go to Multiply>Rail Clone. I've chosen Uniform Lengths, and specified that I want 100 clones of my window. Oriented is on. (These options are explained with the similar tool Rail Extrude, in the previous tutorial). Hit Okay.
And there you have it, a perfect line of windows that follows the shape of the saucer perfectly.
Step 4
All you have to do now is delete some of those 100 windows (an arduous task I know), then Mirror them twice to come up with your final elliptical pattern to drill into the saucer.
Repeat the technique as necessary until the job is done. As you can see here, I used the same method to Rail Clone the pattern for the lifeboats.
PART 3: Creating and Applying Starship Names and Registries
We're going back to using the Constitution Saucer for this demonstration, which you would've at least partly constructed in Tutorial 1. So let's begin with opening your saucer into Modeller.
In a new layer go to Objects>Text>Numeric. In the text window at the top of the dialogue box you can enter the text you wish to create. Beneath it though is a drop down menu where you can select the font to use. If you have the necessary Trek fonts used on Starfleet hulls, but it doesn't appear on the menu click the button which says 'Add True Type'. Here you can select a True Type Windows fonts to import into Lightwave. I'm using Amarillo USAF here, this is the correct font for usage on Pre-TOS Starfleet ships
Use the above screencap to follow what I've inserted. The actual size of the text specified depends on how large your saucer is. You may have to experiment with scaling your text up or down (for reference my saucer's about 130M in diameter in this instance). When you click Okay, the data has been input, so hit Enter on your keyboard.
Using the Move tool, as well as the Stretch tool (if necessary) to modify the text to meet your requirements, formatting it and aligning it correctly to sit over the desired position on your saucer.
Now, move into another layer to create the registry. Follow the steps outlined before, except make it a little larger this time. The only difference with this piece of text is that it's curved, so we have to use the Bend tool.
I bent the text along the X axis dragging it with the cursor until I 'guessed' the bend ratio was adequate. I had to use the Undo button a couple of times to start again if the bend wasn't right, so a lot of the time Bend is done manually, initially anyway. But this box (Modify>Bend>Numeric) indicates the final values used to create the necessary bend (in my case). Instead of manually dragging the cursor to bend the text after the first couple of tries, simply input alterations to the value in the 'Angle Box'. For the outline and shape of this particular saucer I eventually found that 85 degrees was about perfect.
With the saucer in the background layer I then had to fiddle around with the Move and Rotate Tools to align the registry correctly.
When it was, to my satisfaction, I cut the registry text back into the USS Enterprise text layer, combining the two together. I then gave the objects a surface name- 'uss' or 'registry' will do, and I gave it a black colour. Then I had to line them up a little more to sit in the perfect position for the eventual drill procedure.
I then employed my own customized technique for this next part. What I did was, with Right Click Lasso, selected all the polygons the text will fall onto. I then deselected the unwanted ones on the underside of the saucer, by lassoing them away in Face view. I then copied those polygons into another layer (by pressing 'c' and 'v', or using the Copy/Paste buttons in the bottom right hand corner of the screen), and came up with this:
Why I've done this will become apparent in a minute.
Right, on to the next part which involves stencilling the text. Go to Tools>Drill, and select Stencil, and Y axis as before. This time we'll be stencilling the registry surface, in my case named 'uss1'. Perform the operation. You should now have your section of saucer with a perfectly stencilled registry and ship name.
For the next step, remaining in this layer, go to Display>Statistics. Find the surface name which corresponds to the section of saucer. This could be something like saucer_top, or whatever you had called it. Select this layer by clicking the + button next to 'With Surface'. The saucer polygons should now be yellow, with the registry text unselected. Delete the saucer away, and you should now have something like this:
This is now the correct shape of the saucer, and should sit on the hull perfectly. The reason I've done this, and not simply stencilled it directly onto the saucer is because if I did that, it would become a permanent fixture of the mesh, and could not then be removed. If I were to delete 'uss1' from the full mesh it would just leave a large registry shaped hole in the saucer, so doing it this this way retains the original, and unaffected polygons of the saucer, but using a replica of those saucer polys it gives a copy of the exact shape and dimensions with which to stencil our registry onto. Now we can simply copy/paste the registry on to the saucer, and in future, if we want to replace it with another name and registry, such as USS Endeavour, or whatever... we can, easily.
First though we need to do a little close up work. With the registry objects active, and the saucer in the background layer zoom in to make a slight adjustment. We want to move the registry up, just a tiny amount so it sits away from the hull. Because as this surface isn't stencilled, but pasted on, it has the tendency to 'blend' in with the the surface of the saucer's polygons, and may even be invisible when it comes round to rendering. So using the Move tool lift the registry away from the surface of the saucer. As mine is scaled, the registry was moved 5 cm up the Y axis.
It would be a good idea to save this registry object now. Later, in Lightwave layout it can be loaded as a separate object and parented to the ship. This is always useful if you're doing more modern ships with the newer font, as those registries can turn out to be quite points intensive. The last thing you want is a mesh of 52,000 polygons, 20,000 of which are just the registry! You can of course always skimp on the points by Merging, deleting, and so forth, but this way, having the registry separate, seems to be much easier and no problem at all, and manipulating objects in Open GL mode it becomes a lot faster and smoother.
As a rule I always model the text and pennants rather than rely on textures. It's much easier to align them precisely, and at least with this TOS font, it's hardly Poly and Points intensive.
Finally, if you wish, copy/paste the registry onto your saucer temporarily, to view your work.
Tutorial 1 | Tutorial 2 | Tutorial 3 | 3D starships Index
