Texturing a Wine Glass in LightWave
by Tony Gilchrist

Press <f9> for a preview of the scene. You should see that the wineglass is now mostly invisible! It is faithfully behaving like glass should ­ it is showing off its environment, rather than generating any significant amount of color itself.

We’ll want to adjust the wineglass’s settings shortly, but before we can do so, we need to establish the environment it will live in: other objects, background settings, and most importantly, lights.



1. Background settings are an easy place to start. Of the three main tabs at the top of the screen the middle one is labeled "Settings" ­ choose it, and then near the bottom of the main panel you’ll see a button marked "background". Click on it top open the "Effects / Background" panel. In the interest of simplicity, I just choose the checkbox "Gradient Backdrop", which will give us a blue gradient, and a brown gradient that meet each other at the horizon.

You might now wish to save, and do another quick render <f9>.

Lights

2. Next, close the "Effects" Panel, and let’s slap in a couple of lights. Press "5" to switch the view port to "light", and then press "Shift-L" to switch to Light Edit mode (the view port could also be changed via the drop down menu in the view port, and the Light Edit button is in the bottom middle of the screen).
3. Since you should now be editing a light (if you followed the previous steps), pressing "m" should open the "Motion Options For Light" panel. The third item down from the top in this panel is "Target Object" ­ click on the Target Object drop down list, and choose "Wine Glass" ­ this will cause the light to always point at the wine glass. Close the Motion panel.
4. Now that we have out light targeted, lets make two copies of it. At the top of the screen, click on the "Actions" button. Then in the main panel find the button "Add" (near the top of the screen), and choose "Add / Clone Current Item". Choose to make 2 copies, as shown here, and Ok the requester.



5. It is a good habit to rename your lights before you continue (just to make the scene a bit easier to work with). Just below the "Add" drop down we just used to clone our lights is a button marked "Replace". Hold your button down on it and choose "Rename Current Object". I renamed my three lights as shown here ­ I started each name with "Light", and the called them "Main", "Side", and "Back".

 

6. Press "p" (or click on the "item Properties" button next to the edit mode buttons at the bottom of the screen) which should open the "Light Properties" panel.

• In the top half of the panel (see the illustration) you should see a big button labeled "Global Illumination". Our first step when lighting a scene should always be to click on that button, which will open up the "global illumination" panel (which contains settings which are not specific to any one light) -- In the Global Illumination Panel there is a line labeled "Ambient Intensity" ­ set it to zero. If this setting is above 5 or 10, it tends to wash out the scene, making it look flat and crappy.

• Close the "Global Illumination" panel to get back to the main Lights Panel.

1. I started out by selecting "Light Main" from the "Current Light" drop down in the top part of the panel, and then made some changes in the bottom part of the panel where the Light Type and Shadow options are found. I changed my Light Main" to resemble the settings shown below ­ that is I made it a spotlight, and told it to cast a shadow using Shadow Mapping instead of Ray Tracing ­ see the various settings in the image below.



2. I then set up the other two lights to be spotlights, and turned off all shadow options for both of them. I lowered the intensities of them to around 30% and 50% -- (the actual values can be varied, to brighten and darken your scene, but try to keep the approximate proportions on your three lights ­ 100, 50-60, 30-40). As shown below.
3. Our next concern is the arrangement of the lights in space. They should be organized as follows:

• Main Light ­ "Over The Shoulder" of the camera operator. This light serves as a "Sunlight" source.
• Back Light ­ Behind the focus, and at or below ground level. This light serves to simulate light that should bounce up from the floor.
• Side Light ­ On the side of the focus away from the Main Light. This light serves to replace light that should bounce off of the walls, or be scattered from the sky.

Note: In order to arrange the lights, you will probably want to look at the scene from various views ­ which you can do by either changing what is shown in the existing view port, or by splitting the view into several view ports. To split the view, you can either press <f4> to toggle through the various possible configurations, or you can open the "Extras / Display Options" panel (press "d") and pick from the drop-down list at the top of the screen. I’m going to do this by looking through the lights, but you can do it from a different view if you wish.

• Rearrange your lights to resemble the examples shown here (from left to right, these are the views through the Main, Side, and Back lights). Note that the camera is visible in each light view ­ the light’s position should always be adjusted in relation to the camera, so it is helpful if you keep it in sight while adjusting the lights.
• Seen from the traditional quad windows, this should look something like the image below (I’ve made the Top view bigger here because it is the most informative. Notice haw the lights are distributed around the focal point, and notice their relationship to the camera.

• Save Your Scene! Now is a good time to test render, and tweak the lighting values if you see anything that needs changing. For instance, I experimented with turning the shadow effect on for the "Side" light, and I increased the "Side" light’s intensity from 43% to 58%.
  
  Before we continue with the texture setup for the wine glass itself, we want adjust the texture on the table to make it a bit more appealing…