Ranger's main - Gary Wong - 20032004S - CSCI140 - Galleries - Desk Gallery

Problems and Solutions

For this project, I have lots of problem and learn a lot about LightWave. Also I learn my lesson about LightWave in a tough way.

Here is the list of my problem:
1.     How to make a glasses look real?
2.     When I am in the layout mode, why the pivots point of my object always off the center of the object?
3.     How to make the object looks smooth on the surface?
4.     My Object look fine in LightWave Modeler, but it look way different when I rendering the scene, Why?
Solution:

I have been lots of different online tutorial, and they all have different approach to make the glass model realistic. I ask my friend to help me out on this, and he suggests that I should make glasses with two different surfaces. On these two different surfaces I should have different setting on the Refraction Index. The outside layer of the model should have a Refraction Index about 1.5, and the inside layer of the model should have a refraction index between 1.1 to 1.4. By adjusting different setting of the lighting, that will bring the model to life.

     This is one of the fun problems that I have. I found out there are two different way to fix it.
     Make sure when you build the model, they are on (0,0,0) on all axis
     If you make the model already, you still can move the object around by the move command
     If the Object in the layout, you can click on Pivot and selected move pivot point. So you can freely move the pivot point of your object, click on move again then the pivot point will snap on the object.

To make the surface of the object look smooth, you can use the subpatch tools. The select the polygon(s) and hit tab depends on the complexity of the polygon, which will take a second to make your polygon look smooth. BE VERY CAREFUL; make sure you do the subpatch when you have your final model done. Otherwise it will take FOREVER to modify the object. (I learned my lesson)

It is all about lighting. In the first time, I only use the default light source and my model look different. By adding more lighting into the scene and lower the intensity of the light will help a lot. Once again, I learn my other valuable lesson here. I do my first rending without Ray Trace Shadows, Ray Trace Reflection, Ray Trace Refraction and Ray Trace Transparency. It took about 10 minutes for my computer to generate the pictures. Since I add couple more light sources and turn on all the options. It took more then 20 hours to render. To keep it simple, I use only 2 light sources and turn off the anti-alias for rendering. It still took 50 minutes to generate the picture.

Reference

http://members.shaw.ca/lightwavetutorials/Main_Menu.htm
http://www.liquid-arts.de/welcome.htm
http://www.newtek.com/products/lightwave/tutorials/
Jerome Heuze