Original subtitles

So, to finish up today, we're going to build

on the principles that I just showed you,

but we're going to try to do something a little

bit more exciting with some more fun-looking imagery.

We just used a basic sphere and a ground plane

just to demonstrate the concept of animation.

But in the end, the whole point of being able

to animate stuff is so that we can actually

animate, you know, some cool-looking things.

So what I'm going to do is I'm going to load

in a spaceship and a background prop so that

we can do something maybe just a little bit

more fun, a little bit exciting, even though

it's only going to be the same basic concepts of what I just showed.

But like I said, it should be a little bit more fun because it will look more like a

movie instead of just like a ball and a flat plane.

Okay, so what I'm going to do is first, I'm

going to load up a model that I made a while

ago for a tutorial and let's go load object and under our objects folder, I'm going to

go and grab my starfighter model, I'm going

to grab the starfighter model lightwave merged so it's not in multiple layers.

And it is loaded my spaceship, let's turn on

a VPR, oh wonderful, and I've got my normal maps and everything are already working.

So what the normal maps do, they're sort of,

they give the sort of like a bumpy detail.

There's other things called bump maps, they do

similar things but normal maps create sometimes

a little bit more realistic looking bumps.

So you can see all these panels and detail

and stuff, so those are what's called normal maps.

If we just go to shaded solid, you don't see the textures, texture shaded solid.

See how you don't really, you see the color

information but you don't see the bump detail on this.

But when you go into VPR mode, it actually

shows like a rendered version of this model.

Okay, so that's a lot more fun than that ball.

So we will take this model and we will set it up now texture shaded solid.

So what I want to do is I want to create a

nice little space scene, nothing super fancy

because we just don't have time for it right

now because we're almost finished this tutorial for today but almost out of time.

But what I need to do is just like what they

do in Hollywood, they'll have your model,

you'll have your models and objects that will

be moving and then you usually will have like some sort of background prop.

Sometimes they use green screen and blue screen

stuff, or blue screen and green screen to

mix models and actors and stuff with a background image.

In this particular case, we actually have

our own virtual stage here so I can actually

put the background prop in behind and we don't

have to green screen or blue screen anything.

You can mix it or be mixing it right in here.

So all I'm going to do is take an image and apply it to a background plane.

So what I need to do first, actually let's go into, let's first save this out.

Let's go save scene as, and let's go back to scenes and I'm going to call this space

FighterFlying01.

So let's go into Modeler because I'm going to create a, it's actually thinking I want

to bring the starfighter over into Modeler for some reason, I'm not exactly sure why

it's here, and okay, let's give it what it wants for some reason it wants to, it seems

to want to load this up, I'm going to close this down, close object, okay, let's just

check to see if it did anything weird in layout, no, okay, everything's fine.

That's the one thing is if you have the model

selected it will load it through, oh, okay,

it loaded everything through but that's not what we want, we want to close that down.

If I select camera, I'm going to hit Modeler,

it still brings the model through so that's

the thing about the hub, you might say, well

I don't want this model in here, I want to

do something else, well, like I said, just close

it out and you'll be fine, just close the object.

So we want to build a background plane here right now and I'm going to bring up, click

N for numeric or the numeric button and actually

before we do that I need to get the measurements

of an image map that I'm going to be using, let's go image editor and you can see the

actual image maps from the Starfighter, this

is the normal map, that's the color map, if

you double click on them you can actually see them up large, okay, but I want to load

up, let's go under images, I want to load up my star field background and you can see

here it tells the size, 6,000 by 3,000 pixels,

so I want something that has the same kind

of dimensions, I'm not going to create a 6,000

meter by a 3,000 meter star field or a background

plate, I'm going to start off, I'm going to actually make it 60 by 30 just so that it's

not dwarfing my spaceship when I first bring

it in, but we can size this up to where we need it.

So let's hit N, okay, now I want something, actually I'm going to delete that out and

I'm going to create it from the side, let's go

box because that's the direction the spaceship

is facing, now I'm going to go over to height

and depth and the height was 3,000, so we're

only going to make this 30, the depth was 6,000 but we're only going to make this 60

and we'll just hit spacebar and we're going to go T for move, control, I'm just going

to put this in the middle here, okay, perfect.

So that's all I need right now for my background

plate, now under the surface editor, or sorry,

let's first save this out, let's save the

background plate and we'll call this objects

and we'll just call this star field background plate, perfect.

So you can actually apply this star field

image to the background plate either here in

modeler or in layout, so generally I usually

will do this, I will actually do this in layout

for most surfacing, I generally don't do my

surfacing in modeler unless there's a specific

work pipeline that I have to follow, usually

if I'm just trying to give something colors

to differentiate between something, so because

that's done, let's shoot this over to layout,

so let's go send object to layout, okay, so you can see right here that it has loaded

up our star field plate, we also have our star fighter, so we can select between the

two objects, if I rotate this, now you can see that it's, see notice that it's kind of

see-through right now, because once again I

said that if it's not double-sided, it isn't

clicked, if it's just a flat one thick, one polygon thick, it will not, there's really

no thickness so you don't actually see anything,

so what we're going to do is go to the surface

editor, under star field, let's rename it, I'll just call this background plate, and

we will, let's click on, move this over so you can see, let's click on double-sided,

okay, so you can see that now we can actually

see the actual surface, okay, but we're not

done yet, now what we need to do is apply that image to it, and now because we have

the proper dimensions, so let's go, and we're

going to use a planar map, okay, and it's

going to face down, oh so let's pick the image

first, load image, grab that map right there,

okay, now let's put it down the x-axis, and

let's click on auto-sizing, and actually I'm

going to, let's remove that for now, I just

want to show you how this works as it's coming

in, let's move this over here so you can watch

this happening on the fly, how I'm doing this,

so if you go under the color channel, and you click on T for texture, okay, we want

to put that color photo on top of this model

here, so I'm going to click on T, and the

layer type is set to image map, which is perfect,

projection type is planar, so it'll project

on a plane like this flat plane that we just

created, now if we click on image, right now

there's none, okay we can load the image directly,

okay, and now you see that there's just these

bars going across, so that's not very helpful

to us right now, the reason why is it's because

it's not being projected on the correct axis,

so we could try, you can try, a lot of times

people will just sort of click through these,

a lot of times you'll know what axis, I know

that it's on the X axis, but the problem is saying well I just clicked X, why is it not

working correctly, well because you need the

proper sizing for this, and you can see that

the scale is set to one meter by one meter by

one meter, if I click on auto sizing, you'll

see these numbers will automatically jump to

the correct setting to fit that background

plate image onto this plane, so let's click

auto sizing, you see how it just jumped, but

if I go to Y and see look what happens, you get these weird stretchy images, but X is

the correct plane for this, so from here you're

saying well we need a lot bigger image plane

for this spaceship to work, so we could either

shrink the spaceship down or we could make

this larger, I'm going to make this actually

larger, this object, so let's click use texture,

so that's working great, let's go under the modify tab and let's zoom back, let's pull

back a bit and let's go to a left view or

left or a fagonal view, so see where we have

move currently selected, let's go down to size, and with our left mouse we're going

to drag and we're going to make this a lot bigger, okay, and another thing I want to

do, let's go up to perspective, and you can see that the plane is cutting our spaceship

in half, so remember we have auto key check

marked, so this is recording what we're doing,

we have it on frame zero, so make sure you have it on frame zero otherwise we'll have

a problem because we want to set everything up on frame zero, let's go back to move and

grab the little red arrow widget and just sort of pull this back a bit and just away

from our spaceship, let's go back to, so I hope you can see the method to my madness

right here, so what's going to wind up happening

is with my camera I am going to position this

so that I can sort of follow the spaceship sort of flying along, now right now you're

seeing this ugly grid, okay, we can get rid of the grid if we want to, we can turn that

off but we don't really need to actually do

that right now, so you can see like grid type

and then it goes off and then now you can

see closer to what where I'm actually heading

with this, so I'll be taking this camera and

positioning it from the side and I'll sort

of follow the spaceship along so that we can

actually create this nifty little little animation,

so we can turn it back, I think it was set

at 80 for now, so with that being said let's

start the spaceship where we want to put it

to get for the beginning and let's grab that

little arrow, let's pull it back to about here and I'm going to switch back to that

left view and zoom back, now remember these move and zoom widgets, so let's pull this

back a little bit more here and so that's at frame 0 and at, okay let's make it a 120

frame animation, 120 frame animation, so that's

like 4 seconds or 120 divided by 30 is 4,

so that would be 4 seconds and at frame 120 will be over here, okay so let's just save

over top of that current file and let's go

back to perspective, okay so you can see the

camera is not where we need it, so this is our big expensive Hollywood dramatic set we

have here in the background, now if you want to

get these type of background images I believe

you can go on the NASA website and you can kind of download them and you have to kind

of look at the copyrights for them and things like

that, as far as I know you can't be distributing

these images, I can't even remember where I even got this from, I've had it for years,

so do not, I will not be distributing this

image or any other images from the NASA website

or any other websites, this is the kind of stuff you're going to have to kind of find

on your own, I probably will be giving out

the spaceship for free because it's actually

mine, but I don't distribute other people's models or distribute other people's images,

so sorry if you're upset that you wanted this

image I'm not going to give that out, so let's

go back to the camera view and so I'm going

to hit, so let's click the camera button and

let's go Y for rotate and let's find where we are here, let's zoom back and rotate and

rotate everything into position here, so now

you can see that we're coming in and out of

frame here, we also need to set our image

size of what we're going to, how we're going

to render this out, let's go 19 HD and let's,

now we're on frame 0, T for move and I'm going

to go Y for rotate, T for move and I want to make sure that I'm within the bars here,

let's go to VPR mode for a second and you can see here that this looks pretty cool,

now there's all sorts of other lighting information

and different things that we can do to this

to make this look even cooler but we're just

sort of, like I said we're starting with the

basics here, so that's what a render would look like right now, I mean you could add

stuff like engine lights and fire and all

sorts of stuff and you could, once again lasers

and but at some point we will get into all

of that but for now I might be showing a lot

of this stuff in a VFX series, I'm going to start soon and so let's go back to, so we

have our camera, once again it says auto key

create, we had to make sure that our spaceship

and our background prop are within frame and that

we're not seeing any of that grey background,

otherwise we'll give the dead, because we'll

kill the illusion if you actually can see

the outside of this background, where are we here, you can see how even though it's

black you can see the edge, we don't want to be able to see this edge, we just want

to be able to see stars in our image, so let's

go back to shade solid and go back to our

camera view, so now from here we want to go

to frame 90, so you can see that the spaceship

is flying away, what we want to do with our

camera is we want to move and kind of follow

it along the way, so I'm going to hit T for move and I'm going to follow this and I'm

just going to try to create a different position

and we want to make sure that everything is

in frame, Y for rotate, T for move, ok so let's follow this along and see if anything

goes out of frame along the way, oops, ok so it looks like everything is staying in

the frame, ok so let's save that and let's go into VPR mode, ok so that's cool, now

you can also notice that in solid shade texture

mode the background, the backdrop image doesn't

look as clear as the final render, you know there are some settings that you can change

for output if we want something a little bit

more higher res, ok so you can see over here

under GL under preferences, so if I hit the O

key and I go under GL, ok open GL, see where

it says open GL textures, if I turn that off

see how it kills all the textures on our object

and our background plate, if you change this

right now it's under 1K, if you bring this

up higher it will up the res of the background,

it took a little bit for it to kick in, so

it's a little cleaner, yeah so you can see that it's gone cleaner, let's go back to

256, see how it blurs it out, a little bit

more steeper progression, 512 the background

is a little clearer, so if you're running

out of memory or you're worried you're going

to run out of memory you can change these settings just for setup purposes because we

don't really have much going on I can get

away with having some higher settings but the

default was at 1K which was perfect for setting

things up but it's not really necessary just

to set something up like this unless you're

specifically looking for some sort of detail

in the background, you might want to try 2K or 4K if it's really that necessary but it

goes all the way up to 16K, 8K and 16K which

you probably won't use just for something

like this but the option is there, let's just

put it back to 1K and go back to VPR, so let's

save that and you can see as we scrub along

and the VPR update so it's like it's rendering

things like pixels at a time

and we're just kind of following this along,

now for fun let's make a preview and it's

already set for 120, click OK, now this will

actually take a little while for it to render

here see it's on frame 2, we'll see what kind

of resolution we're actually going to get

so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to pause our video and when it's rendered

we'll come back so we'll be back in a moment,

OK so now that our animation is rendered the

preview playback controls show up so let's press play and see what we got, OK so not

bad for preview, OK now generally if you want

something to look probably for a space kind

of scene you can kind of see the depth is a

little odd, you can kind of tell to a degree

that this is a background plate just by the

way the angle is going, a lot of times a lot

of these space images would be paced to more

like a sphere kind of object but I just wanted

to give you an idea of something a little bit more simple, now one of the reasons why

you're actually able to see the, you can tell

that it's more of a background plate is because

of the camera rotation that I use because I kind of I'm starting to rotate and you're

actually getting to look at things it's no longer perpendicular to the camera, if we

would have just stuck with a right square

dead on shot right from the side you wouldn't

notice the so much of a change in perspective

to the actual image but anyways I'm just hoping

that this actually gives you an idea of what you

can actually do, you know blending background

images with models just so that you don't

have to recreate an entire galaxy from scratch

or you don't have to create an entire background

from scratch you can you know like I said

you can use stock photos, you can use stock video and blend it with you know animations

with your models, there's lots of different things you can do but background plates are

very very popular because they don't take a long time to render like the images don't

like just using a background image plate whereas

if you build everything from scratch and you've

got you know hundreds of thousands of polygons

or millions of polygons then things can take

a lot longer to process in the computer so

this is actually like I said it's a now that

we have vpr it's a pretty cool before we couldn't

do like a preview like this in lightwave you

generally always had to render it out and then once again bring it into like an image

sequence and bring it out into Adobe Premiere

or After Effects or whatever other software

and and and then play it back from here so this is a sort of a quick way that you can

play it back right within lightwaves interface

and just get an idea of what it looks like

you can see it's a little pixelated on this is

playing back smooth on on my computer screen

but because you guys are viewing this at 10

frames per second because that's what I recorded

it at for the screen capture software it might

look a little jaggy at your end but anyways

I hope you guys learned lots once again we're

just scratching the surface here on what can

be done so until next time this is Adam Gibson

from learn3dsoftware.com and we'll see you again next time.