3D World’s question of the month

As we’re sure you’re aware, 3D World has gone to great lengths to find suitable questions for LightWave 3D Q&As, so it should come as no surprise to our regular readers that we’ve finally decided to quiz the spirit world. Weeks of bending over a Ouija Board watching a planchette quiver over the letters finally revealed what we long suspected: even those LightWavers who have passed beyond the veil don’t know how to spell ‘emitter’ and ‘collision’.

Just when we’d given up all hope, a quill I had lying around suddenly jumped into the air and spookily sketched the words ‘3D World’ across a scrap of parchment. No sooner had I reported this to the editor that I found the rates for freelance articles were slashed, as management cottoned on to the idea that journalists in the spirit world could pen articles cheaper than their living counterparts (probably because they don’t require life insurance).

The resulting Q&A hinges around a remarkable new procedural texture plug-in written by LightWaver Denis Pontonnier. Marker Pen allows you to use an object in the scene to literally write across the surface of another, and features advanced settings to duplicate calligraphy effects to accurately simulate writing. Check out Denis’ web page at http://perso.orange.fr/dpont/plugins/Textures.htm, where you’ll find a host of other amazing procedural textures that will considerably expand your texturing toolkit. And hats off to Denis for making all of them available for free!

In this Q&A, we’ll show you how to make good use of the plug-in to generate automatic writing. We’ll create the writing itself by modelling the lettering as a curve in Modeler, so in Layout we can use this both as the cue for the Marker Pen plug-in to draw on the surface, and to give us the motion of the pen. Because it’s simple to swap one curve for another, this method makes it very easy to tweak the look of the lettering or to generate entirely different text. We’ll also add some extra detail to the scene so that the writing takes place on an aged scrap of parchment.

Finally, we’ll show you how to create a simple IK set-up to keep the pen fixed to the paper as it sketches over the surface with a realistic writing action, as if held by some spectral scribe. To get started, just load the ‘ghost_writing_start.lws’ LightWave 3D scene from the support files.

Click here to download the support files (~10MB)