14 July 2008
Posted in Lightwave

If you have larger objects or want to control when an object gets smoothed and when you want sharp edges, there is a way to adjust them using nodal.

Warning : this method is not for every situation. If you use it in combination with big smoothing angles (ie 89.9 ° smoothing angle) then you will create wrong vectors.  This is a hack, not a solution.

Newtek is currently in the process of preparing the 4th update to lightwave 9, the press release states that obj import and export is one of the improved features.  People qualified for the upgrade can join the Open Beta.

create a ball

add a weight map and add some weight to a few points

go to layout, load the ball you saved from modeler

go to surface properties (key: F5)

activate smoothing

go to nodal surface editor

add a spot info node and a weight map node (point it to the weight map you created)

what we do now is basically create 2 normal maps, one unsmoothed and one smoothed

then we multiply those with the weight map, basically fading the geometric unsmoothed normals
and using the inverse of the weight map for the smoothed normals

then we add up those normals to obtain the mixed result

an example :

• on one spot the weight map is 60%
• the smoothed normal gets multiplied by 60%
• the unsmoothed normal gets multiplied by 40%
• then we add up those two normals (thus getting back 100%)
• the mixed result of smoothed and unsmoothed geometry gets rendered

This technique is particulary interesting for larger objects with certain polygons needing to be rendered perfectly flat (unsmoothed)