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Tutorial 01
Instant home gardening with LightWave 3D

Coverage
LightWave 6.0-7.5

Difficulty
Beginner

Description
This tutorial is intended to give you a few tips on how you can easily create interesting looking terrain and then clone and fit numerous objects, such as rocks, trees and grass onto the geometry.

Instant Home Gardening with LightWave 3D
Although meant for beginners, this tutorial assumes that you have at least a basic understanding of how NewTek LightWave 3D works as I will not cover every single step of the way. Neither will any texturing, lighting or rendering be covered in this specific tutorial. The intention is to give you just a general idea which you can then implement into your own projects. Please refer to the manual for basic information on how to use LightWave 3D.

Fig. 01

Fig. 02

Fig. 03

Creating the terrain
Let's start off in Modeler by creating a multi-segmented plane. 8x8 segments should be enough (Fig. 01). Change the plane into SubPatch mode by pressing "TAB" (Fig. 02) and save and load the object into Layout. Rotate the viewport in case the object faces away from the camera (Fig. 03).

Select your object and press "p" to open up the Object Properties panel. Stay in the Geometry tab and change the Display SubPatch Level to somewhere between 30 and 50 (Fig. 04). Your object should now have changed to a very dense mesh (Fig. 05).

Next go to the Deform tab and click on the Displacement Map button (Fig. 06). The possibilities of LightWave's Texture Editor are virtually endless so I will just briefly show one of the many ways to displace geometry. Change Layer Type to Procedural Texture and Procedural Type to Multi-fractal. Have a play with the different settings to see what kind of patterns you can achieve. (Fig. 07) shows the settings I used, but feel free to try any other type of procedural texture.

Fig. 05

Fig. 04

Fig. 06

Fig. 07

Click on the Use Texture button and close the Object Properties panel. Finally save the object as a Save Transformed Object and give it a different name just in case you need to go back and do any changes (Fig. 08).

Fig. 08

Fig. 09

Fig. 10

Go back into LightWave Modeler and load the object you just created. You may notice that it is very heavy and way too slow to move around in any viewport (Fig. 09). Don't panic as we will now reduce it's polygon count with qemLOSS2 located under the Construct tab (Fig. 10). Once again you need to play around with the settings to get an object that has a fairly low polygon count while still maintaing its initial shape. Setting the Goal to somewhere between 20000 to 50000 polygons seems to be suitable for any machine that has a reasonably fast graphics card (Fig. 11). Click OK to generate the optimised version of your terrain.

Fig. 11		Fig. 12
Ahh much better! The object looks pretty much the same as the first one but has now just a tenth of its initial polygon count (Fig. 12).

Planting grass and rocks
In this section we'll learn how to quickly generate grass and rocks onto our newly created terrain without any commercial plug-ins.

You might wonder how on earth we are going to create hundredths or thousands of individual objects without spending numerous hours fitting each individual piece onto the terrain. A quick method in these cases is to use a free third party plug-in called KO_PointFit along with LightWave's native Spray Points and PointClonePlus+ tools. You should note that if the object contains UV maps you will have to use another cloning tool, e.g. Clonez, which preserves the data. It can be found on Flay.com.

The Clone Wars
Let's start with the grass. In LightWave Modeler, goto your next empty layer and model a single grass object (Fig. 13). Make sure the objects rests on a positive Y axis and give it also a new surface name.

Fig. 13

Fig. 14

Fig. 15

Next, goto a new empty layer and set the landscape to be seen as a background layer. Start "planting" the foundation for your lawn in the Top viewport by using Spray Points. This tool is located under the Create tab (Fig. 14).

Spray Points is very useful for quickly generating random points. Its radius can be adjusted with the right mouse button and the Rate is controlled through the numeric panel which you can bring up by pressing "n" on the keyboard. (Fig. 15).

Once you've finished creating the points you will need to check that they are all positioned above the terrain. Confirm this from the Front/Side viewports and move up points that are placed too low. (Fig. 16).

Next, open up KO_PointFit which is located under the Construct > Additional tab. Leave the Mode on Flat but change the Axis to Y and the Direction to "-" (Fig. 17). Click OK and be prepared to wait a while as the plug-in can sometimes be a bit slow when there are many points in the foreground and background layer. Once finished, delete any excess points that weren't inside the boundaries of the object (Fig. 18).

Fig. 16

Fig. 17

Fig. 18

Go back to the layer with the single grass object and set the sprayed points to be in the background layer. Open up PointClonePlus+ under the Multiply tab and try as usual different settings to see how they affect the randomness of your object. The important thing is that the X, Y and Z Axis's are set to "+" as the grass won't otherwise be placed on top of the terrain. (Fig. 19) shows the settings I used. Voila! How's that for some instant grass? (Fig. 20)

The Rock
Next we'll create some pebbled rocks to accompany the grass. By now you should have a general idea on how to do this so let's just quickly recap the key steps.

Fig. 19

Fig. 20

Fig. 21	Fig. 22
Fig. 23	Fig. 24

Create a simple rock shape (Fig. 21). Spray some points where you want the cloned rocks to be placed (Fig. 22). Conform the points onto the terrain with KO_PointFit (Fig. 23). Clone the rock with PointClonePlus+ (Fig. 24). And here's the final result: Fig. 25.

That's it! I hope this little tutorial has given you some ideas for when you build your next landscape. As for real world examples, I used this exact method for the rocks, plants and grass in my Jungle and 193X MG-P images. Even the clip mapped trees in the background were made with the KO_PointFit and PointClonePlus+ method.

Fig. 25

KO_PointFit can be downloaded for free at:
www.studiohiro.com


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