LIGHTWAVE AND TERRAIN
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Lightwave is a ridiculously expensive and godlike 3D drawing and animation program. Remember all the effects in Babylon 5? Well, that was all done in Lightwave. As a film student, it is obvious that I need Lightwave. A pirated copy of course... Now,
I know what your thinking: What the hell has a 3D animation program
got to do with terrain? Well, it's simple really. I use it to roughly
plan anything I intend to make. I used to draw rough sketches on
bits of paper, but the problem with them was that they where usually
inaccurate. I could have drawn accurate plans, but they take to
long and get boring. |
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couple of cubes representing the approximate volume of a building
that sort of thing. Then
you can view it from any angle! It's a great way to see how something
will look (or at least how big, and what shape, because there's no
point adding details; that would take as long as building the piece!)
before you make it. I've used this method to design several pieces,
including the Temple of Haxor, the Tomb, and the proposed Pyramid
of P'host Maanpat. The
other advantage is that you can get your buildings and try placing
them next to each other to get an idea of scale and how they look
together, before you've even built them! And, since you can move things and change sizes in lightwave, where as you can't on a plan (without redrawing, anyway), you can easily change features and sizes to suit. For instance, on the pyramid, I had expected to use 3cm thick polystyrene sheets. |
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A 3cm step didn't seem enough, so I decided to double layer them, giving 6cm steps. This made for a huge pyramid, requiring FOUR sheets of styrene! Fortunately, I realized that polystyrene is also available in 4cm thickness, and modified the plans accordingly. This gave a pyramid with nicer proportions, and only needed 2 sheets (well, one and a half, really). If I had drawn up real plans for this, I'd have had to redraw the lot. With lightwave, I just grabbed some nodes, and moved the all down 2cm.There is one further advantage to Lightwave which I think should be mentioned: Once you have planned your buildings, you will have some nice 3-D CG replicas of them. You can then use these to make godlike maps for battle reports! |
Of course, lightwave isn't the only program you could use. There's all the other 3D programs (some of which are even affordable!), like 3D Studio Max, Raydream, Maya etc. And if you have a little more time, and crave absolute accuracy, CAD programs are also available, like AutoCAD.