Quick 'n Dirty Logos in Lightwave
13 July 2008
Posted in
Lightwave
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For the sake of my tutorial I'm going to take an existing logo, this one. (click to download)
This was given to me in AI format. Load it into lightwave and you'll get a big error.
Why? It hasn't been saved in the right format and even if it did most of the time the paths are very 3D unfriendly you'll need to clean them up anyway.
Load it in Photoshop and define a really big size to rasterise, like 350 DPI or something. This is important for one of the steps later on.
Select the magic wand tool, set tolerance to one. Click on the brown contour and. Bam ! half of your work in photoshop is done. Shift click on all the letters to get those as well.
If you haven't fiddled too much with the photoshop settings you'll see in the bottom right corner of your screen the layers panel and 2 other tabs, select the paths tab. and click the 'make work path from selection. This is why you need a large version of your logo. The larger your canvas size, the better this feature works!
Select file, export, paths to illustrator and save it in a sensible place.
That's it for photoshop.
In Lightwave Modeler select file, epsfloader and select the path you saved from photoshop.
Like this.
Now in the back view, in the second layer (with the fist one as a background template) draw a plane (key : X) surrounding the logo.
do this (key : R), template drill on the Z axis to print the points through on the plane you made.
flip the polygons so they face the right way (f)
Now comes one of the tricky parts : go to the perspective view (and use full screen if feasible) in polygon mode, select the outer polygon and delete (key : z), select the parts that represent the black contour and cut them (see pic)
All that's left is the background parts. delete them (key: del)
Paste back the logo
extrude (key : E) the logo like the pic here. And move it a little to the front (key : t - hold down ctrl whilst dragging to constrain motion to 1 axis)
select the front polygons, zoom in on the star and bevel (key : b) .
The reason we zoomed in on the star is because that is one area where the most detail is and most likely bevelling errors occur. Press a to view all. You might see some fuky things in the perpective view. That's because some points have crossed each other and confuse LW. With the beveled polygon selected use the drag tool to clean up any possible problems.
Optionally you can select the bevel and/or front polygons, cut and past them back to create sharper edges when rendering.
Surface the object to your taste and clean up, leaving nothing but the finished logo layer.
This is a render of the final logo we created. There is a basic 3-light studio setup and some antialiasing to get those edges to show beautifully. Although quite pleasing, this render can be enhanced even more by adding the right backdrop, animation, etc...