Texturing a Wine Glass in LightWave
by Tony Gilchrist

VIPER

Before we do, let’s make our lives a bit easier by enabling "VIPER". Near the bottom of the main screen ("Actions" Menu), choose "Render / Render Options". In the resulting window ("Render Options") put a checkmark next to "Enable Viper". This turns on the "VIPER" buffer, but it will initially be empty. We need to give it something to work with, so do a quick render <f9>. When the quick render is complete, open the "Surface Editor", and continue with the steps below.

Surface­O-Rama

11. Open the "Surface Editor", and select the surface named "Table_Wood_Top".

1. In the main part of the "Surface Editor" window, make sure the Tab marked "Basic" is selected from amongst the tabs across the top of the window.



2. Choose a basic color for the surface by either clicking on the color swatch (the little white square near the top of the panel) or by click-and-dragging on the colored numbers next to the color swatch. I set mine to a light brown, as you can see.

Note: When you make these changes, the "VIPER" window should update immediately to show you what this looks like on your object. If you don’t see the VIPER, then click on the "Options" tab in the Texture Editor window, and choose "Open VIPER".

3. Next to each named line in this part of the panel are two buttons ­ one marked "E" (for "Envelope" ­ an animation feature), and one marked "T" (for "Texture"). Make sure you still have the table top surface selected, and then look for the line that reads "Diffuse". Click on the "T" next the "Diffuse" to apply a "diffusion texture".



4. In the resulting "Texture Editor", check to make sure the blue bar across the tops says the same thing the one shown here does.

• At the very top of the panel is a button marked "Layer Type". It will initially read "Image Map" ­ click on it and change it to read "Procedural Texture". (Procedural textures change the appearance of your object without the benefit of an image map ­ they are sometimes called "algorithmic texturing" features because they use fancy math to change the surface of your objects. For example: Fractal Noise.
• In this case, we want wood. About a third of the way down the panel is a drop down reading "Procedural Type" - -select it and find "Wood" in the drop down of possible algorithms.
• Change the other settings in the middle part of the window to roughly match the ones shown in the example.
• Finally, at the bottom of the panel, change the Size and Position settings as shown in the example.
• You should be seeing these changes happen in the VIPER as you make them. You might want to do an actual test render <f9> at this point, and see this in a bigger window. Note the direction that the wood runs in ­ this is because we left the "Texture Axis" for this procedural texture set to "z" in the Texture Editor*.
• In the All Texture panels in Lightwave are similar to this one, so what you learn here can be easily transferred to applying a bump map, a color map, or whatever.

1. Now we want to add another procedural texture to complement this one. In the upper left hand corner of the Texture Editor, find the drop-down marked "Add Layer", and add a "Procedural" Layer.

 

2. In this new layer, we want another procedural texture, but this time we want "noise". I choose the nifty "FBM" noise (see the example image below), but you could use any of the other ones to get a similar result. In the top of the panel (shown to the left below), set a texture value (lower is darker, higher is brighter) and generally match my settings. In the bottom part of the panel, set size values similar to the ones I’ve chosen. *Note that I’ve made this texture large on the "Z" axis to match the direction we made out wood grain run in above.

 



 

3. Take a look at the VIPER (or test render if you like). I found I wasn’t exactly happy with my texturing at this point, so I went back to the "Wood" algorithm (just click in the layer control window), and made a few changes, as shown below.



4. Once I had the settings tweaked up for the wood texture, I clicked on the button near the bottom marked "Use Texture". This takes us back to the main Texture Editor interface. Note that the "T" button beside "Diffuse" is now "lit up", indicating that there is a texture in that channel.
5. I’d like my wood to be a bit more shiny (like it has a thick coat of "Pledge®" applied for a nice varnish). To get that look, I made a few changes to the basic surface settings, as shown in the example image. The Secularity and Glossiness settings both control the shininess of the surface, whereas the "reflection" setting causes (as you might hope) the object to actually reflect its surrounding.



 



6. If you do a test render, you won’t see any reflection in the wood though, and it won’t seem very shiny. To actually get the effect we want, we need to change a few more settings. In the main Texture panel, choose the tab marked "Environment" (as shown). The settings in this part of the panel control the "virtual environment" in which the surface appears. Since true reflections take a lot of CPU cycles to render, they are turned off by default. To activate them, click on the "Reflection Options" drop-down, and choose "Ray Tracing & Backdrop". (Yes,. this combines to environment methods ­ a nice cheat).
7. Finally, we need to enable "Trace Reflection" globally (it is toggled on / off for the whole scene in the Camera panel ­ again, because it slows down test renders quite a bit). Open the "Render / Render Options" panel (found in the bottom left corner of the main interface), and turn on "Trace Reflection". In the example image shown here, I’ve also turned on "Trace Refraction" which we’ll want to have on for our wineglass (Refraction is the property of bending light ­ the way light is bent as it passes through a piece of glass). You might just as well turn both on since you are here.

1. Return to the "Basic" tab in the Texture Editor.
2. Double-click on the sample sphere to store the texture you have made in the preset shelf ­ a new sample should appear in the presets shelf.
3. Choose "Table_Wood_Sides" from the Layers part of the Texture Editor, and then find the new sample you put in the presets shelf, and double click on it. Agree with the confirmation requester.
4. I like to make the sides of my table a tad darker than the top, so I lowered the "Diffuse" value on the "Table_Wood_Sides" to about 70% percent.