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Tutorial
Poser Figures in Lightwave
Part 1
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Using Poser figures in Lightwave. Part 1.
Level: Intermediate.
The Basics.
Notes:
This is an intermediate level tutorial - so not every step is
explained, I assume you know your way around the Lightwave interface.
To do this tutorial you will need Lightwave 7 or higher, and the free
M3 or D3 figures from Daz. You will need a copy of the free Daz Studio,
or Poser, (Not sure what the oldest version of Poser is that will work,
I guess 4+).
I have done this as one long page, so it's easy to print and you don't
have to jump around online. At least that's the way I like tutorials!
Many Lightwave users are extremely dismissive of the idea of using
Poser figures in Lightwave. The most common reasons I hear for this are:
- Poser figures are unrealistic.
- Poser figures all look the same.
- You can spot a Poser figure a mile off.
- Poser figures use too many polygons.
- Poser figures produce non planar polygons.
This is generally followed by the claim that the only way to get
quality is to model your own, the hard way. But to model a believable
human figure is an extremely demanding task. And to model one that will
animate well adds a whole new level of complexity. Then there is
realistic texturing of human skin to master... If you have the skills
and the time to do this, then by all means go ahead. But for most of
us, and particularly the less experienced 3d artist, pre-made figures
are well worth investigating.
This tutorial will try and show you how to get started in making good
user of Poser based content within Lightwave, for minimal cost and
effort.
The seriously good news is that there are some excellent base figures
available for free. There is also software to export these base figures
into Lightwave readable formats for free, and free plug-ins to help you
get the textures over.
So lets get started!
The real problems with Poser content.
A lot of the perceived weakness of poser content comes directly from
the rather low quality figures provided with older versions of Poser.
Poser 6 and up are a lot better, but the impression gained from those
early versions has stuck. Even with Poser 5, if you start with a
default scene and hit render, production quality, you get Don the
plastic zombie. Eyes staring straight ahead, plastic skin, and
about as convincing as a half melted Barbie doll.
Like this:
And earlier versions were considerably worse...
Now with only a little more effort, you can get something like this:
In both cases these images were rendered inside Poser, but I will show
you how to do the same thing in Lightwave. And before you know it you
will be able to make images like this, from inside Lightwave:
Building, dragon, elf, hair, all taken from Poser objects and brought
into Lightwave.
Getting started: Better base figures.
Important Note:
If you have Vue 5 Infinite, which was bundled with early orders for
LW9, and Poser, you will be able to load models into Vue, and export
them as *.LWO - this is NOT covered in the tutorial as it requires
three separate commercial programs!)
The very first thing you should do is visit the Daz3d web site. They
have produced 2 very good and very flexible FREE base figures for
Poser, Michael 3, and Victoria 3. (There are others, but start with
these two - they are very broadly supported). I am not permitted to
provide the objects here for copyright reasons, so you will have to
collect them from Daz, and follow along.
Click here to visit the Daz web
site.
The Daz3d business model is simple and very attractive
to users -
they like to provide the base tools and products at a very low price,
(or even free), and then sell you lots of add ons.
If you download and install Michael 3, (we will call him M3 from now
on, for short), and render, you will get this:
Well, not an amazing difference, but we have only just got started.
Incidentally, note also that M3 will respond to the usual Poser options
of setting proportions - M3 is not just one figure, but the basis for a
family of figures. I am now going to make a very simple export to
Lightwave.
So, let's get things a bit more the way we want. I will start by
setting the proportions to heroic, and applying a suitable superhero
pose. Like this:
Now we want to get the object out of Poser, choose the menu options:
FILE / EXPORT / WAVEFRONT
OBJ.
Take the default options for all subsequent menus. The OBJ format can
be read in Lightwave, and it will also keep the various
transformations, (the pose and heroic proportions in this case).
Important Note:
If you do not
have a copy of Poser you can do exactly the same thing with the free
Daz Studio core software. This has a lot of add ons available, but the
core product does what you need. Get it from the
Daz3d web site,
where you collected the M3 and V3 figures. I'll be using mainly Poser,
but only because I know it a bit better. Daz Studio actually has rather
better export options, particularly if you are exporting multiple
objects to one exported file. For now the defaults will work fine.
Time to go to Lightwave, and load up our hero, in modeller, like this:
OK, not very exciting so far, although the shape is definitely there.
We need to do a couple of things. First of all, go to the 'multiply'
tab, and click the triple button. That will turn all those potentially
non planar, (that's not flat in plain English) polygons into triangles.
If you look at the surfacing, you will see that separate body parts
have separate surfaces, a big help in getting it to look right. But we
are going to keep things extremely simple for this example.
I have created a nice shiny surface, with a gradient on incidence angle
so it looks more reflective at shallow angles. I turned on smoothing
and gave it a reflection map, to get a rather cool figure,
reminiscent of the "Silver Surfer".
Now I think that looks pretty cool, and I would not want to try and
model him the slow way.
So far so good. But there are limits to the uses of such simply
textured people - not all characters are statues, or cosmic explorers
from the sixties. Of course, there is nothing stopping you from
developing procedural skin surfaces and applying them to the figures.
With the new subsurface scattering in Lightwave 9, you could probably
get something rather convincing. You may already have some you can
transfer from other models you have made. But this tutorial is about
doing it the lazy way, so lets move on to getting good textures in from
Poser.
The best Poser figures use image maps, and often very high resolution
ones, thousands of pixels on a side. This means that you can get in
really close to a face, and the details won't pixelate.
The bad news is that I am not aware of any good free high resolution
character maps.
The good news is that there are a lot of very reasonably priced ones.
My main source for this sort of thing is the Renderosity Marketplace.
The material is provided by users, and therefore the quality is to say
the least highly variable. But it does pay to dig around the best
selling stuff, and you can find some seriously impressive textures for
$8 to $15. For this example, I am going to use the 'Shane' figure, available here for an excellent
value $6.99. Although Shane is a 'David' based figure, it works just
fine with M3.
If you want to consider some other options, take a look at these:
It's also worth investigating other characters by these merchants - I
think you will agree that they are a LOT better than the default Don,
and do not in any way look like him!
Anyway, back to Shane. I loaded him into Poser 5, gave him an
interesting pose, and rendered him so you can see what we are starting
with in Poser:
As you can probably see, the head is the same shape as M3 - this is
because I did not apply any head morphs. We will deal with that
later... For now, I just went through the procedure to export him as an
OBJ file.
If you load him into Modeller, you will find that he has no textures,
exactly as our M3 figure came in.
Of course, tripling polygons and setting smooth on will help remove
those ugly kinks, but how do we get him textured?
Well, when you exported the figure, you did not just export the shape,
the software also produced an MTL file, which has details of the
materials used. In this case, that includes links to the UV mapped
texture images. But Lightwave does not read these out of the box.
There are various object translation utilities out there, and I am sure
some of them will do the job. So if you already have such a utility,
and are happy with it then get stuck in.
If you don't, well there is a free MTL import script available from
"Dodgy", which will do most of the work for you.
Here is dodgy's home page: http://dodgy.ghostoutpost.com/
And go here to get the script: http://dodgy.ghostoutpost.com/Lscripts.html
Another program that deserves to be better known is Accutrans 3D.
This
does a wide range of object conversions, and the most recent versions
can save out Lightwave format objects, complete with the UV maps intact.
It has a fully functional trial version available, and the fully
registered version is only $20, which is great value!
Collect your copy from this website.
Before we continue, a few words of warning. Lightwave's Modeller can be
a bit fragile when importing OBJ files. Save often.
Also, try and keep things simple - for example, exporting multiple
objects from poser into one OBJ file may cause problems. Dodgy's script
is great, and it's free, but it is not 100% bullet proof. And neither
is Lightwave.
Anyway, on with the action.
Here he is,loaded into Accutrans
3d, (click for a larger view). The
display is a little rough, but he has quite clearly got his textures!
There's something odd going on with the eyebrows and eyelashes, we will
fix that a little later.
Now select SAVE AS, and choose Lightwave 2, Mega files. (Lightwave 1 is
the very old small files format). Here are the options I chose:
A few seconds later, your object is saved, and you can load him into
modeller. Lets take a look at what we have!
As you can see in the preview window, the textures have arrived, and we
have a posed and surfaced figure. However I am going to do a bit of
cleaning up, as the conversion has not quite handled
everything, (this
is common with most of the translation utilities - the best job I know
of is done by Greenbriar, but this is no big deal).
(If you deselect QUADS
when exporting
from Accutrans 3D, as shown in the screenshot about, the model will
already be tripled - skip this stage. If you use other scripts, you may
still need to do it.)
First off all, we still have some of those non-planar polygons. You can
clean them up in modeller by going to MULTIPLY tab, and clicking TRIPLE.
Next we want smoothing on for all surfaces - open the surface editor in
modeller, and click on the first surface name, then shift-click the
last surface name. You are now editing all the surfaces at once. Tick
the SMOOTHING box. In some cases you may find that the utility has
dragged in some luminosity settings, or applied strong specular - you
can also clean these up quickly at this stage if necessary. But ours is
looking good. I'll close in on the face, and lets see how he is coming
along:
Well, he has Brezhnev's eyebrows, and Dusty Springfield's
mascara
fetish, but we are getting there. You may also see traces of seams,
(they don't really show in the compressed image), particularly if you
are using low res images for the texture previews. They are probably
artefacts of the image mapping, don't worry at this stage.
The other problem I have come across sometimes is that there are
options that separate the body parts into different layers. If you see
subtle lines around limbs or the neck, check that the body parts have
had points merged, so they shade smoothly. But things work well with
this combination of parameters for Accutrans 3d.
Lets send him to Layout.
You can see the texture seams I mentioned before, as I said they won't
show in the final render. But what is up with the eyes?
Well, Accutrans has not managed to handle the transparency
options -
Poser has an unconventional approach to transparency, and most methods
have this problem, (though again Greenbriar does better than most). To
handle it properly you must wait for the advanced tutorial, but for
now lets just get the transparency set to 100%, (and check that the
specular is also zero), so the eyebrows and eyelashes disappear.
Very few Poser figures use the physical eyebrow polygons, they are
normally painted onto the forehead. And male figures generally do not
have prominent eyelashes.
One other rather odd thing has happened - his eyes were blue, but now
they are black. Examining the textures I discovered that it had used
the reflection maps for the diffuse colour map. This appeared to be in
the Daz3d exported OBJ. It was a simple matter
to point things back at the correct blue eyed image map.
At this stage we also have no bump channel - Shane does not come with a
bump, so to speak, again I will handle that in the advanced tutorial.
How does that look? Here's my test render.
Now that's more like it. Finally here's a render of our finished
figure, with some better lighting and a simple setting.
Some additional notes:
Many of the figures you can buy on Renderosity will require morphs. The
morph packs are an additional product for the M3 and V3 figures, and
are NOT free. They will let you fine tune a mass of parameters on the
figures, everything from thin ankles, to adjusting ethnicity, to pointy
elf ears. If you do not have these, then the figure will have the same
basic shape as the vanilla M3 or V3 figure.
This procedure may seem a bit long winded, but it's fairly quick once
you get used to it. Part 2 of the tutorial, advanced techniques and
animation, will show you how to reuse some of these textures.
There is also a set of plugins from Greenbriar that will help you get
Poser figures and props into Lightwave. They do a much better job of
taking in textures automatically - if you are going to do this a lot,
you will probably find them worth buying. They will even let you create
Poser content inside Lightwave. Here's
the Link.
When I showed this to the author of Accutrans 3d, he said that he had
recently obtained a detailed specification of the OBJ format with .MTL
files, and was planning to improve the way Accutrans 3d handles this
format. So check there often!
Wayne also adds:
Some poser models have
the surface normals pointing the wrong direction
so the triangles are
black or dark when rendered. This was reported by
an AccuTrans
user. He used the align normals group of controls in
AccuTrans.
If you want to change
the settings for selected layer attributes after a
file has been read, use
the "Layers->Batch Attributes" menu command.
Set the attributes and
depress the "@" button to select the attribute
for use".
Check the "Prefs->Batch Attributes" menu item and the batch
attributes will be
automatically applied after the file has been read.
You can manually set
layer attributes after the file has been read. Use
the
"Layers->Attributes" menu command". Select the
layer. Set the
attribute. If
the attribute should be global to all the layers, click
the button with all the
little squares on it.
Quads can be deleted and
recreated. Delete the quads using the
"Tools->Delete
Quads" menu command and then recreate them using the
"Tools->Triangles
to Quads" menu command. Use the "Prefs->Options" menu
command. On
the "General" page you can set whether the quad should be
planar or some what non
planar when created. You can also set how much
the quad can vary from a
rectangular shape.
If you found this tutorial interesting, you may also like to
see:
My
downloads page
Which contains quite a few Lightwave objects and scenes
for you.
My
recommended tools page
Which contains some recommendations for graphics and
other utilities, all cheap or free..
My "Ringed Planet" Tutorial
Which explains how you can make a convincing ringed planet in Lightwave.
My
Galleries
page
Which contains quite a few Lightwave space and science
fiction images - look
under GRAPHICS
for these.
