ResPower Education Center: Lightwave, Part II - An Introduction to Materials

Figure 1: Default surface.

Figure 2: Dull red surface.

Figure 3: Shiny green transparent surface.

Figure 4: Finished scene.

Overview

The second installment for LightWave in the ResPower Education center covers basic materials. The article assumes the reader is at least comfortable with the material presented in the last article and will build on concepts presented there.

First Material

Open the LightWave Modeler. (I'll just be calling it Modeler from here on) Add a box to your object and then save the object as "dull_red_box.lwo". Now open the Surface Editor by hitting F5. The Surface Editor should look like figure 1. Click the button that says "Rename" near the top and rename this surface to "dull red". Now change the settings for this material to mirror figure 2. I've only changed the settings in the "Basic" tab, so there's no need to worry about the other tabs for now. The settings in the Surface Editor are pretty intuitive. Settings like "Glossiness", "Transparency", and others should be self-explanatory. Now save your object again.

Second Material

The first object we created had a dull red surface, so let's make a shiny, green, slightly transparent surface for our second object. Choose File->New Object to create a new object. Now add a Ball to the object and scale it to whatever proportions you like. Save it as "shiny_green_ball.lwo".

Open the Surface Editor as before, and rename this surface to "shiny green". You will notice that "dull red" from the other object is still available. You will need to choose the surface called "Default" under "shiny_green_ball" and rename that in order to see any change on this object. Now, just mirror the settings in figure 3 to get a shiny green surface. Again, I have only altered the settings under the "Basic" tab, so don't worry about the others. Now, save the object and close Modeler and we'll put these objects with materials into a scene.

Simple Scene

Open Layout. Now go to File->Load->Load Object, or just hit the '+' key. Now select your two objects and hit "Ok" to put them into your scene. The objects are loaded at the origin and are on top of each other. Move them around, and move the camera and light source around until you get an interesting scene, and when you are satisfied, render using F9. Congratulations, you should have a nifty little scene. Mine looks like figure 4.

For convenience, I am posting the dull red box object, the shiny green ball object, and the finished scene for those who want them. If you try to open the scene file, LightWave will ask you to locate the two objets. Just point to wherever you saved the objects on your computer. Also, since LightWave scenes are just straight text files, simply clicking on the link for the scene may open it in your browser. If this happens, just right-click and select "Save As..." or "Save Link As...".

Conclusion

LightWave has many, many, many more options when it comes to materials. Hopefully we can cover some of these topics in later articles here in the ResPower Education Center. While this has been a very basic introduction to materials in LightWave, using the information here, you can create any number of interesting materials for use in your scenes. Thanks for reading, and check back for new entries very soon.

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