Many people think the Lightscape plugin for lightwave is broken since Lightwave v5. This is only partially true. Some functionality is lost, which makes the plugin only useful in certain circumstances. However it is still the most profound way of getting your solution back into lightwave as a whole. The problems arise when you have large complex models, and if your livelihood depends on it. This is because once the solution is imported into lightwave, you CANNOT make any changes to the models through modeler whatsoever. This INCLUDES SAVING THE MODELS! This means that once you have successfully loaded your lightscape solution into a lightwave scene, NEVER SAVE YOUR MODELS! the bindings to the lightscape lighting solution will be irretrievably lost. This means your lightwave session cannot be quit (or crashed) after you have imported the solution. You will need to do this on a stable computer, for heavens sake, and be careful! There have been occasions that I have actually just used LW v5 to do all the setting up in lightwave, change the material the way I wanted them to and set the camera motion and so forth. From Lw 5 the objects and scene can be saved. After that it is opened in v8 and adjust things like blurred reflection and blooming, and then render using 8.
Also, for complex scenes, prepare yourself for some amount of tedious work before the solution will actually show up in v6+.
To import your solution, make sure you installed the lightscape import plugin. you can install it using your lightscape setup disc, and add it to your plugins in lightwave. After this, you can just open a .ls file like you would open a .lws file. Just click Load scene, and select 'all files' at the bottom instead of 'lightwave scenes'. you will get a confusing dialog box which has some important settings in case you encounter the dreaded 'object contains too many vertices'. I will solve that problem for you later.
Once the scene is loaded, notice your camera is all the way into nowhere. set the frame slider to frame one, and you'll see that it jumps back to more or less its original position. The camera is looking at a target null. Untarget it for regain rotation control, or move the (hidden) camera target null. Set up your camera, and press F9. You will see.... nothing. This is why most people thing the plugin is broken. However, we can solve this problem as follows:
Open the Surface Editor (F5), and behold your list of materials with strange names. Don't rename them, you'll need those exact names. Go to the first material in the editor, and go to the shaders tab. You will see the Lightscape shader applied. Double click it, and notice the 'object:' drop down box. In this drop down list there are a number of objects and some other things. Depending on the settings you used when importing the model into Lightwave, this list contains the names of each material, or of whole objects. This drop down box tells the lightscape shader in what object to look for the light solution of the material you are editing. Notice that most probably it is set at the wrong entry. This is where it goes wrong. Select the object that matches the name with the material. Sometimes this is the first part, sometimes the entire name, depending again on your import options.
you will need to do this for all materials in your objects. Because when importing a complex scene most objects will be hacked up into smaller ones, it is not unusual to have more than 50 materials in your scene, even though most of them are identical in properties. This is why this process is tedious.
Once you are done with this step, and made sure each material has the correct assignment in the lightscape shader, you will be able to render your scene in lightwave! Neat! You can now add lights, change materials, add reflection, change textures, change colors, and all the functionality of the lightscape shader is still there, so brightness and contrast works.
Problem with this is, you can make animations and stills, but you can never save your objects (you can save your scene though, if you feel the need... it won't help you much though). You can also not bake your solution because you cannot put the model into modeler and add UV's to bake to. When you swap a model to modeler, it is saved by lightwave, and... there goes your solution...
The only way to bake your solution now is to use 'Microwave' from Evasion. ( http://www.evasion3d.com ). You can now take your original lightwave model, UV map it, load it into your Lightwave scene that has the lightscape models in it, and use the projective rendering to bake the solution. Downside to this is that Microwave costs almost as much as an upgrade to lightwave.
The reason for writing this tutorial is that I have developed a way to do this all differently. This is covered in Part IV of the tutorial.
Back to Part I
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