-------- Cloak me up baby!! A Cloaking effect for Lightwave 5.6/Inspire 3d -------- Lightwave 6/6.5 revisions by Fabio Passaro NOTE: This tutorial is not complete. As such you may find you get unexpected results!! This tutorial assumes you have a basic understanding of Lightwave/Inspire Modeller and Layout. This technique hit suddenly while I was looking at my Warbird... Love it when it does that :) Before you do anything else set up a simple scene with some stars in the background and an object or ship in the foreground. This ship/object must dissolve, either into the scene or out of the scene. So for example in the Objects panels, set it's dissolve from 0%, too 100% then press the Envelope button. Create a new key frame at frame 60 and set the Current value of frame 60 to 0 and press Use Envelope. You don't have to have any camera movement at the moment as this is just a test. Once you know how to do this effect you can go nuts with your scene :) We need to create one object in modeller for this tutorial, so load up modeller and we'll get started. MODELLER We need to create a subdivided plane. The size of this depends on what size you want your animation to be. I render most of my animations at 640 * 320, which has an aspect ratio of 2.000. So for that size of animation we'll need to make the plane 6 metres by 3 metres. Doesn't have to be Metres but it does have to be that ratio. The width has to be twice the height. So draw out your plane in Face view. We'll be using this plane to simulate the 'wobble' of the cloaking effect. To do that we have to put a displacement map on it, and for that to work the plane must be subdivided! Bring up the subdivde panel and set the type of subdivision to Faceted. Leave everything as it is and press ok, repeat that about 4 or 5 times. You should have this now: That level of subdivision is more than enough to create the rippling effect. Couple more things to do yet. Bring up the surface panel and give the plane a surface of something like 'Cloaking_Plane'. Save the object. That's it for modeller. LAYOUT I'm asusming you've set up the scene where your ship cloaks at this stage so we'll move onto the next. The scene in which your ship cloaks doesn't have to have anything out of the ordinary. It does have to have a ship/object that dissolves in or out of the scene though. Make sure you've got the scene saved when it's fully setup as we're going to do some minor changes. First of all get rid of any envelopes on the ship and completely dissolve it so only the background elements are visible. Save this scene as 'Background_Setup.lws'. Render out the Background to an image sequence of jpg's or your preferred image format. No need to save the alpha maps just yet. Don't put any number at the end of the filename to save the images as. So for example save the images as: 'Background_.jpg' Inspire/lightwave will put numbers after the underscore. If you put say a 5 at the end of the filename, Layout will assume the frame of the image sequence starts at 5001 instead of 001. Now that you've rendered out the sequence load up the original scene. Now dissolve or delete everything but the Cloaking ship, save the scene as: 'Cloaking_Setup.lws'. Again render out the image sequences to jpg's or your preferred image format. This time save the Alpha images to a seperate sequence aswell. Ok, that's about it I think. Clear the scene. Now load all the image sequences from the images menu. In the effects panel under the compositing tab set the Backround Image to the Background image Sequence. Set the viewport size, in the camera panel, to 640 * 320. Load up the Subdivided plane you created earlier. Now odds are if you switch to camera view it won't completely fill the viewport. It'll look like this instead: Size the plane so it just fills the viewport. Don't size it too much or too less. It should look like this now: Ok, open the surfaces panel and map the Colour Ship sequence into the Colour channel. Use a Planar map setting along the Z axis. Also Automatic sizing will ensure it fits correctly. Map the Alpha ship sequence into the transparency channel. You'll have to turn the Negative Image option on too. -- Lightwave 6/6.5 -- In LW 6 and above set the alpha as a layer above the original colur image sequenece and set it's type to alpha. -- Lightwave 6/6.5 -- Now open the Objects panel and select the Plane object. Select the Deformations tab and click the Displacement map button. Set the type of displacement to Ripples. --- Texture size: 3M on all axis --- Texture Amplitude: 0.015 --- Wave Sources: 20 All other settings remain at their default values. Now you'll have to create an envelope for the Texture amplitude corresponding to the time your ship dissolves in or out. That's easy enough so I won't go into it here. But I will say this: If you're decloaking a ship, the texture amplitude should start at 0.015. It should not exceed that value at any point. You should have an envelope that looks something like this: -------- Lightwave 6/6.5 users: Make a displacement map (Procedural Texture, Ripples) and set the Texture Value to 0.015, the Wave Sources to 20. Now use an envelope for Layer Opacity: cloaking: from 100% to 0%, decloaking: from 0% to 100% -------- That's pretty much it. All you have to do now is render it to an AVI! Have fun! Ed Giddings [Main][News][Gallery][Downloads][Tutorials][Links][E-Mail]