Let me first introduce myself. My name is Martin Aichner and I am 29 years old. I've started with 3d around 7 years ago. As a hobby artist I don't have any special art education at all, everything I learned was out of the books and Internet tutorials. I use a technique within Lightwave which is very different than modeling with other applications. Let me explain what i mean. If you take Maya, 3ds max or XSI, then you have many different modeling methods: nurbs, patch, polygone modeling (box modeling) or subdivision surface modeling. Within Lightwave you use kind of a mixture of box modeling and subdivision surface modeling. Lightwave has the so called metanurbs mode which looks like subdivision, but you can model in it like box modeling. A little bit complicated i know but you will understand it when you see some examples. The most important difference is Lightwave doesnt have the possibility to cut edges. (okay I know there is a plugin out but forget it for now). This makes it difficult to model details if you dont know how, but I will show you a way in a moment. Some important notes befor we can start. Lightwave has many tools for modeling - forget most of them. We will only use scale, move, smoothshift, bandsaw, wrinkle plugin, edit, and the most important spin quads (for explanaiton of spinquads search the Internet). To begin we draw a normal box What I do now is go into general option (o) and lower patch division to 3. Why you ask? Press the Tab key (metanurbs mode) and use ctrl+d for the subdivision. If all worked well you will end with this:
|