Tutorial: Page (1) of 3 - 11/25/05

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Deformation Along a Path in LightWave[8], Part 1 Let's get our project prepped for some good old-fashioned mutilation By Kevin Schmitt

LightWave is one of those programs that is heavily dependent on plug-ins, so when you hit upon something that LightWave can't easily do by itself, it's not real difficult to find a plug-in to pick up the slack. One particular shortcoming that frustrates many a LightWaver is that while you can have an object follow a motion path, there's no real built-in way to have an object deform along the path it's following. But fret not: there's a darn good plug-in that will ultimately save the day, and it's free to boot. Let's check it out.

First thing's first: huh?

Let me elaborate a little more on the issue at hand. If you're doing a space battle (for example), you're probably dealing with solid objects like ships and asteroids and stuff. So, if you want to have a ship follow a curve you've drawn, LightWave conveniently offers a built-in way to do this (through the CurveConstraint motion modifier). While we're not going to be getting into that technique in very much detail (be sure to check out Newtek's own tutorial on this process if you're unfamiliar), we will be building upon that functionality and taking it one step further.

But what if you're trying to animate something like a cylinder moving through a pipe? This isn't exactly a unique problem; everything from a slithering snake to blood moving through an artery requires deformation along the object itself according to a preset motion path, and the CurveConstraint modifier isn't going to help you with that at all. Figure 1 shows the problem of relying solely on CurveConstraint:

Figure 1

Folks, that ain't gonna do it. Since the object has to conform to the geometry of the pipe as it moves through it in order to believable, it would be nice if we could end up with something like this (fig. 2):

Figure 2

Unfortunately, there's still no easy way to do this using just the base install of LightWave. When I had this very problem during a medical animation project I was working on a couple years back, I was finally able to track down a relatively obscure plug-in called Psycho-Graph that would deform objects along a path like in Figure 2. It had several problems, though. One, it was in Japanese, and what with the small issue of me not understanding Japanese, it took a while for a mere Yank like me to figure it out. Two, it was kind of limited, requiring some precise placement to get the effect I wanted. Three, it was for the Windows version of LightWave only, meaning that I couldn't open the project on my Mac even if I wanted to. Four, and admittedly not a problem at the time, it seems to have disappeared. Fortunately, there's another option: Trailer from D-Storm. It's cross-platform, it's got an English version, and (most importantly) it's free. It's a little light on documentation, though, but it's pretty easy to figure out. First, however, let's head to Modeler and build the various objects we'll ultimately need to illustrate how Trailer works.

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