Tutorial: Page (1) of 4 - 11/30/05

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Deformation Along a Path in LightWave[8], Part 2 Ready for Trailer By Kevin Schmitt

When we left off, we had just finished modeling the various pieces for our oh-so-exciting "cylinder going through a tube" masterpiece that, I'm confident, will earn us a much-deserved Academy Award nomination in the category of best Animated Short. It's just that good. Anyway, today we're going to move over to Layout, set things up, and apply Trailer so the cylinder will actually conform to the tunnel it will be traveling through.

To Layout we go

If you're just joining us, be sure to check out part 1, so you can get to the point where we are right now. We've just saved our object in Modeler and are ready to fire up Layout. Once Layout is running, let's load the Trailer plug-in. If you didn't happen to grab it from the link in part 1, go ahead and grab Trailer from the D-Storm Web site. Once you've downloaded it, unzip the archive and then move the Trailer.p file into your LightWave's plugins directory. It doesn't really matter if you stick it into one of the subdirectories or not (I stashed mine in the animate folder), but once it's there, head back to Layout, click the Utilities tab, and then select Add Plugins. Navigate to where you put the Trailer.p file, and click OK. LightWave should tell you that two plugins were loaded, and you're set up with Trailer.

Now it's time to pull in our tunnel object. Go to File:Load:Load Object and browse to wherever you saved tunnel.lwo. Once that's loaded up, the first thing to notice is that the default Camera and Light are rather large compared to the objects in the scene (fig. 1).

Figure 1

To fix this, just tap the left bracket key ([) a couple of times to get the grid size down to 500mm, which leaves us with things a little more in proportion (fig. 2):

Figure 2

Let's also give the sequence a few more frames to work with. By default, LightWave creates scenes that are 60 frames in length; double-click on the end frame field on the right side of the timeline and enter 120 frames as the length. With that done, it's time to move the Camera into position for our "beauty shot." Click the Cameras button at the bottom of the Layout window to select the default camera, and then click the Modify tab at the top of the Layout window to bring up the modification controls. Select the Move tool, and move the Camera to X:-4.2m, Y:3m, Z:-4.75m. Next, select the Rotate tool, and enter in H:40.00°, P:26.00°, B:0.00°. Now, hit the 6 key to switch to the Camera view, which should now look like Figure 3:

Figure 3

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