Lightwave + PS2?

Hello, I am fiddling around with making a skin and was wondering if I could make some skin colors in Lightwave and then have them in Photoshop CS2 to work on them some more? Basically, I would like some of the lighting Lightwave offers to bring out some natural highlights.

So is this even possible? If so, could someone explain to me how to do it?

Lightwave on playstation 2?


*Edit*
I`m pretty sure its possible to make base files in PS and then do some stuff to them in lightwave, but i`ll leave it to the pros. I wish someone would have told me the advatages of using 3d program to make skins, and told me about baking lighting onto textures (or whatever the proper terms are) when I set out to make a skin.

....Now I understand why my skins look so flat and dull and will attempt to teach myself one of these 3d products in attempt to make a more realistic skin that looks good in any SL light.

Good luck to you.

Just a quick note. Using a 3d program to bake the lighting does not really change the problem. It is just a different set of tools to solve it. Nor will it give you a non-flat skin. In the end, it is all down to artistic sense. Whether you implement that sense using photoshop and the paintbrush tool, or blender and it's various dials, knobs, etc., you must still somehow have a vision of what you are looking for.

What I did was spend countless hours studying my husband's *cough* magazines and looking very carefully at how light wrapped around those bodies I found most appealing. I used blender for the fine skin texture. The rest was hand painted in photoshop. But as was pointed out to me in a different thread only yesterday, the exact same effect can be achieved with a paintbrush and canvas.

Mostly, it is a question of being willing to put in sufficient time and being uncompromising in the results, not the tool you use.

Yes, you can certainly use Lightwave to bake lighting onto your textures. I'm afraid I can't give you any exact procedures though since I've never used Lightwave. I could tell you how to do it in Maya, but that wouldn't really help you. There are certainly Lightwave users on the forums though, so maybe one of them will chime in. In the mean time, consult the help file, and try Googling for "Lightwave texture bake tutorial" or something to that effect.


I'm not sure why, but it seems the biggest myth on this forum lately is that 3D modeling programs have some sort of magic "make my skin look real" button. My constant response to this is it's not the software that does the work; it's the artist. There's nothing, absolutely nothing, that a lighting bake will do for your skin that you couldn't also do in Photoshop. A 3D app is just one more tool. Using one or not is entirely at the artist's discretion; it's in no way a necessity.

Many would argue that using a 3D program to make skin look "realistic" is actually considerably harder than just painting the texture well in 2D. Others would say just the opposite. It all depends on what you're comfortable with.

For a RL analogy, think of it like choosing between paint, pastel, or both, for creating a portrait. Each option, could be used very effectively to achieve a beautifully realistic result. All three come with advantages, disadvantages, and unique challenges, which only experience can explain. Many artists will choose to specialize in just one medium, while others will develop skills with several.

It's unlikely that the specialist painter would every look at the pasteller's work and say "No wonder my stuff doesn't look as real as I want it to. There must be something in those crayons that makes it easier." What he most likely would say is "Wow, that guy's really good with pastels. Maybe I should give that a try some day. It might be fun. Anyway, I really like the way he utilized these particular colors to create that particular effect. I'm gonna try that in my next painting."

That's right, next PAINTING. The painter's not about to try to learn a whole new media in the hope that that will somehow solve all his problems. What he's gonna do first and foremost is refine his technique with what he already knows. The when the time comes that he does decide branch out into other media, it will be to diversify, to broaden his own range and experience, not to feel like the new media will somehow make his work better all by itself.

To put that into digital terms, 3D baking and 2D baking are both equally powerful. From situation to situation, which one is faster will vary, but neither is "better" than the other. Choosing to use one or the other or both together will never be what makes or breaks your textures. Making them look good in ANY medium will be up to you, the artist.



As for making it look realistic "in any SL light", that will never happen fully. When you bake highlights and shadows onto a texture (whether by rendering them from 3D or by painting them in 2D), you're locking them into fixed positions, which technically is about the most unrealisitic thing you could possibly do. In RL, as you move, the highlights and shadows on your body are constantly changing shape, position, and intensity. With baked lighting, obviously that can't happen. What you end up with is a texture that looks "real" only when the avatar is posed in a certain position and viewed from a certain angle. It could still look good the rest of the time, but I wouldn't say it looks real.

What a good bake on a skin does is make the skin "pop" visually. It makes it stand out as looking suitably different from its surroundings, so as not to fit into the category of being "as fake" as everything else.

It's kind of like how we see new special effects in movies. When the movie first comes out, people marvel at how "realistic" the effects look. A few years later though, watch the same movie again, and the same effects look horribly dated and notably fake. So if they're so obviously fake, why did they seem so real the first time around? Simply because they didn't at that time fit into what your brain had already defined as fake. "Not fake" must be "real", right?

When you look critically, what we think of as "realsitic" skins in SL don't hold much water when you compare them to what characters look like in current next-gen games (and as good as those look, they don't come close to what we see in high end movie CGI, which in turn doesn't actually look all that much like RL). It's just that since SL's graphics are stuck in like 2001, and since 99.99% of its content is extremely amateurish, anything we manage to do to push the envelope a bit seems ultra realistic by comparison.

Very true, the artist IS doing the work, and 3D apps don't generate finished skins. Photoshop and any other 3D program will just sit there doing nothing until the artist gives them input. The artist is the only part of the equation that can learn and get better (not counting software updates). So, if I have two tools that do two very different things, and I know how to leverage one or the other to do something that neither could do alone, then there is a tangible advantage to using both tools rather than just one, like Photoshop and a 3D app. Don't think that the art of skinning stops with Photoshop or some other application. It doesn't!

I happen to use several applications (2D and 3D) and maybe a dozen different custom tools to create my skins. When I first started skinning about 3 years ago it was with Photoshop, nothing else. While I got pretty good results, it required a LOT of effort to obtain them (that's still with 15 years of prior PS experience). I had to learn a lot of new applications and concepts to improve my methods. Much of that learning was around 3D applications and the inner workings of SL it's self. Now, I spend most of my time working out details on a complete skin, not much fussing with seams, consulting "templates" or patching together textures for alignment because I have leveraged what I have learned with one application and applied it to another, and so on, and so on. I think we should be encouraging skinners to use Photoshop, 3D apps, spit, chewing gum, and the kitchen sink for skinning. Not just ONE tool, no matter how good the results are.

Hey Nam. I'm glad you brought this up. I tried the chewing gum and now it's stuck in my avatar's hair. Do you have any realistic 3d techniques for removing it?

On a more serious note, here's what I found helpful in a 3d app. The basic bake got me rough outlines for things that actually do appear on the 3d avatar such as breasts. It was of no help at all for things that do not appear on the 3d avatar such as toes. Note that I still had to tweak those areas significantly, but I at least got accurate ideas of where the shading should appear. A different bake got me a fine-grained skin texture that mapped properly across the mesh -- in most places. in some areas, the mesh is just so awful that nothing can help it. I found those two things very useful. The second of them added significantly to the "realism" of my skin. But the heavy lifting of actually drawing the human body contours was still done the old fashioned way.

I also appreciate AVpainter for fine seaming correctings. Being able to paint right across the seam is a god-send. Of course, given how primitive those paint tools are, I still need to go into photoshop and fix what I just painted. AVPaint is also useful for getting precision on things like muscle shadows and finger/toe nails. But again, I could only really use it to sketch in things. It all had to be done "properly" in photoshop to get a good effect. So despite using two different 3d tools, photoshop remains the workhorse of my production workflow.

There is at least my view of how 3 different tools have provided value to me.

Sssssssshhhhhhh!!!! Don't tell 'em where that button is at!!!!

*laughs* Given the obscurity of the blender user interface, for all I know there IS such a button buried in there somewhere. It might well take me years to find it though.

Funny you should ask - It's right above the "Generate Skin" filter in PS.

OMG....

*laughs out loud*
*laughs even louder*

I don`t think theres some magic button to make someone better. I`m skilled enough in what I do to understand that lol That`s like the people who think if they buy a graphic tablet they`ll suddenly be a skilled clothing maker- of course not! HOWEVER, using a graphic tablet alongside with photosop certainly has its advantages and it *does* help. But I`m sure there are people out there creating good clothing without a tablet.

I do think that 3d app programs must help, but to each their own. I guess it boils down into what youre comfortable working with and what procesures get along with your creating style.

Thing is, the few people I have spoken to have said they had used 3d program to help them achieve a more realistic skin. Does that mean I think that you can be talentless and magically have a realistic looking skin when using these apps? Of course not, thats absurd. But it does seem that using a 3d app as an asset to photoshop, is the way to go....atleast in some people`s case.

I personally would like to try a 3d app. Not JUST a 3d app, but like I said..use it as an asset. Play around with it, see what I can make better than maybe I just am not getting right with photoshop alone.

And that is where I was coming from with my post. Understanding myself, and how *i* work, and how *i* made skins, I do think that with the help of a 3d app, in accordance with PS, *i* could achieve a much more realistic looking skin.

Baking lighting in a 3D app is definitely not a panacea for skin making. In fact if you rely on it too heavily, or apply baked lighting directly without altering it substantially, you'll end up with skin that looks like plastic instead of skin. The reason is the way light interacts with human skin. It penetrates the skin and then scatters through the subsurface layers. That's what gives human skin its glow. The effect of subsurface scattering can be simulated quite realisticially in many 3D renderers, but it doesn't work when baking textures because the effect is dependent on the viewing angle. Since baking textures views the model from all directions at once, view dependent effects won't work. Instead you'll get lighting, shadow, and specularity as if the surface bounced all the light, the way solids do, which is never what you want for a realistic skin.

The other big drawback to baking lighting for a skin is that all of your highlights and shadows will be generated by the topology of the avatar model which lacks most of the important anatomical detail needed for a realistic skin. You won't get shadows for collar bones, shoulder blades, ribs, stomach muscles, or much of anything else, because those things aren't part of the polygonal structure of the model.

The most baked lighting is useful for in terms of skin making is seeing where hightlights and shadows should be in a general sense - creating a reference for use in Photoshop where you can repaint it by hand to mimic subsurface scattering and add in the musculature and bone structure. Once you're familiar with the templates it's generally not necessary. I never bake lighting for skins unless I'm doing non-human skins that are supposed to look solid, or metalic, or whatever.

I'm not saying that baking lighting isn't or can't be useful for skin making, but it's by no means a big advantage, and used poorly has a high probability of making a skin look worse, not better.

When it comes to baking, a general solution like what Chip is talking about, there is a little thing I've been playing with. Kind of like averaging a bunch of different renders. Rather than do just ambient occlusion or masking a bunch of renders, a slightly different approach.

Do several real quick renders using really basic lighting. Say, maybe six lights. Bake it out. Rearrange lights some, bake out another. Rearrange again and bake.

Now, rather than masking them in your 2d program, just average them.

top layer set to 33% opacity
middle layer set to 50% opacity
bottom layer set to 100% opacity

And the series continues as you add more renders to your 2d layers.
1/5 = 20%
1/4 = 25%
1/3 = 33%
1/2 = 50%
1/1 = 100%

Once you have that, regular masking techniques should go fairly quickly.

Now, I haven't given this approach a complete work-out, but what I have done is very promising. (I actually kind of stumbled upon this idea while mixing similiar face shots.)

To comment further on Abu's technique - This can be fun stuff, especially when playing with layering effects, like difference, color burn, embossing, etc.. I did the Evie Nexus skin this way (a layering of my photo sourced skin over 3 other rendered avatar skin textures) to get the final look.

My friend told me about a program called bodypaint 3d. Looks like it could be promising to help with skin creation.(And many other things)

Has anyone used this program?

in several different programs,,

in zbrush the button is under the "shoebox full of money in the backyard" button
in blender the button is to the right of the "have my breakfast ready when i wake up" button

in maya pretty much any button you touch will lay golden eggs, along with perfect skin
if your midichlorians are high enough to reach level 30 in one turn.

start chopping kiddies lots of leveling to do!

Great stuff, people! I laughed a bunch.

Stephania, to answer your original question, if what you want to know is how to bake a texture in LW, it's fairly simple. These directions are for LW 8.x and earlier, because I didn't work on LW 9, so I never got the upgrade.

In earlier versions, however, baking is done with a Surface Shader.

Build your models, etc., and then in the Surface Editor panel, click the Shader Tab.

Choose Surface Baker from the Add Shader drop down menu.

Double click on the word Surface Baker, to open the Surface Baker options panel.

There, you can choose what you would like to bake (color, diffuse, illumination, other shaders.) and which UV Map you would like to bake it to. (Use the one provided by the Lindens. It will probably be called "OBJ-UVTextureMap" unless you've changed it.)

Also, choose your Image Resolution, which should probably be 1024 (you will want to shrink it, later, when you upload; but it's best to work larger.)

Choose the Image Type (.psd, .tga, or whatever) from the drop down menu there.

Click on the Image Base Name button, browse to wherever you want to save the file, and give it a name.

Finally, decide if you want to have AntiAliasing or Shading Noise Reduction. (Both add a bit of time, but are highly recommended if you're baking light, especially if you're using any form of Radiosity.)

You will have to do this for each Material, of course, and save them with different names or they'll overwrite each other. If you've added any other Surfaces, you'll have to do it with them, too.

When it's all set up, and you're in Layout in the scene you want to have, just tap F9, and render. The program will bake whatever you've specified to wherever you told it to save the images, and then show you a finished render, which you can discard.

And that's all there is to it.

Hope this helps!

Although rather new to SL, I have been using LW since release 6.0. The most current version is 9.3 and it would seem to have a fair amount to offer an SL texture artist in this area.
1) Surfaces can now be textured through a "node" based methodology rather than the old click "T" beside everything you want to change. NewTek has included a rather nice pre-built skin node. This can save a vast amount of time and help, not eliminate, the need to UV map.
2) The method, as described in LW-8, was completely correct. In LW-9 there is another option which allows you to surface bake a little faster. Within the camera properties under Current Camera there is the option for a “surface baking camera”. You still need a UV Map, but, you save the time of having to set a shader option for each surface. It is also a very fast render even with diffusion lighting options on. What I like is that this can be done from an “F9” render, and then saved in all the usual formats.

You can get a trail version of LW9.2 at
http://www.newtek.com/lightwave/lwtrial/
Also you may want to look at a product called rendition. It is a LW plug-in for interfacing with CS3
http://www.newtek.com/rendition/index.php

Also, do the LW users have a specific thread? If not, maybe one should be started. I have a fair number of really simple questions relating to moving objects back and forth between LW and SL.
Hope this helps. Back to animating for print.

LightWave users don't have a specific thread, nor do any other 3D programs; mostly because, except for burning textures and (more recently) making Sculpties, you really can't move things from any 3D program into LW. The programs that say they allow it use a prim per face, in SL.

You really, really, really don't want to do that. You'll be much better off simply using the tools in world, since every prim counts, here.

Sculpties weren't introduced until the Lindens had already "cut back" on the forums. (Being new, you missed all of this, Jidooga. But we used to have lots more forums, including the whole bank at the top, where Lindens would actually respond to in-world issues. We even had BBCode. It was turned off last May, theoretically because the Lindens were going to have some kind of upgrade. But very few of us still believe that is ever going to happen.)

The Lindens have said, repeatedly, that they would prefer to move entirely to Blogs, claiming that forums are "obsolete technology."

So I would be shocked and amazed if they increased any of the forums here. All the Sculptie discussion is on the scattered blog posts. You can find them if you Google for them. (The Search on the Blog is pretty much totally useless.)

LW9 sounds like it might be useful for a few things. I'm still not sure I want to spend the money to upgrade, though. I'm getting to like Modo more and more, and might drift away from LW altogether. (I started to use LW with version 6, as well. By 8 I was doing so much, with LW books and so on, that I wrote and illustrated the "map tab" portion of the manual, and worked on quite a bit of the rest of it. But I wasn't able to work on 9, so I wasn't given a complementary upgrade.)

Oh, by the way, we can order the UVs of the avatars all we want for our own use. But the only one we can use in-world is the Linden one, which gives us one arm, one foot, and one eye, and seams in all the wrong places. We're stuck with it, sadly, until the Lindens decide to change it. So if the skin shader you mention is a procedural shader, you don't need to make a UV Map to burn it to. You will have to use the Linden one, and it's already provided on the Avatars.

Anyway, welcome to SL!

Robin Wood
http://www.robinwood.com

get used to the tools I am given to work with. Rather reminds me of the military. Thank you for the very kind reply. prehaps, someday, we will meet.