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LW²TG Documentation

 

 

 

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LW²TG Tutorials
Basic Setup & Camera Matching
  Adding LightWave Objects to the Scene
  Casting Shadows from LightWave Objects onto the Terrain
  Animating with Motion Blur
  Matching a Terragen Scene in Layout
 

 

Animating with Motion Blur

If you want to use shadow casting objects and motion blur in your scenes then a slightly different method needs to be used to create the final animation...

Render all the scripts (5) output by LW²TG_ScriptExport, combine them into motion blurred frames with LW²TG_Blur.

Set the colour of the terrain models to black, 100% Luminosity, 0% Diffuse, 0% Specular. Set the alpha value to 'Constant Value', amount 0.

Check that all other surfaces in the scene have the alpha channel set to 'Surface Opacity'.

Set the background colour to black.

In the 'Render Options' panel turn on 'Save RGB' and choose a 32 bit file format so that the alpha channel information is saved.

Render the scene. This will give you a sequence of images containing only the Lightwave models.

Next is the shadow pass, set the terrain alpha channel value back to 'Shadow Density', leave the surface colour black but return the Luminosity to 0% and Diffuse to 100%.

For every other surface in the scene set the alpha channel value to 'Constant Value' and the amount to 0.

In the 'Render Options' panel turn off 'Save RGB' and turn on 'Save Alpha', set a new filename.

Render the scene again.

You should now have three sets of images for your animation - the motion blurred Terragen frames, the Lightwave rendered RGB frames with alpha channel mask and the shadow pass.

All that's needed now is to composite them all together...

Compositing

The following steps will vary depending on which compositing program you use so I have tried to be as general as possible.

Load the image sequences into your compositing program.

Set the Terragen images as the base track.

Layer the Lightwave RGB images on top specifying the alpha channel as the mask.

Layer the shadow pass images on the top of the RGB images, apply a negative filter to the track along with a slight Gaussian blur. Set the layer to 40-50% opacity.

Render out a short sequence to check the shadow density, adjust if neccessary and then render out the final animation in the format of your choice.

   

 

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