Template, Mirroring and Symetry questions

[Tim Deneau]

Yeah, you mean like have one half of the object act as a mirror but not have editable points/polys in the way like symmetry? I never figured out how to do this either...

[Facial Deluxe]

When mirroring, just uncheck the "merge points" option, then you have 2 separated half mesh.

But keep in mind that Modeler deals with points, faces and Layers _ No real objects (with it's own pivots and properties) nor instances. Different from other apps....

[sqitso]

Darn.. I haven't been able to try that yet. This would still make two seperate editable objects though right? I know I would just have to be careful but is there are way to make the mirrored refference object un-editable. In Maya you could just make it a template and then you can't accidently select it.

[Rei Ayanami]

could you mirror the object across, then transfer the new mirror to another layer, select this layer as a background so you can see it in black, but you cannot move it and continue working on the one you mirrored from or whatever in the forground.

[Ayreon]

Unfortunately you can't do want you want in Lightwave. I wish it was possible, that would save a lot of headaches!! I reaaly wish modeler would have symmetry along all axis, not just the x- en x+ sides. And a proper implementation of the symmetry function. Half the time I seem to lose the symmetry, having to cut half, and mirror again. Also the merge points function in the mirror panel should only work on points along the mirror axis, not the whole model. I can't remeber how often I messed up a model because of this!
Oh well, I personaly still think it's the best en fastest modeler on the market, but it could use some improvements!


Ayreon

[sqitso]

Well for organic poly modeling I absolutly love it, but I am still have to use Maya for my game models. I love LW for my shorts stills, I just can't use it for my game modeling. Man I really wish more games out there would support it, or that some of the fine plug programmers would help us lwers out. Wouldn't it be sweet if recent games came with plenty of resources for modeling in LW? I would so much rather model in LWand export straight to Quake 3 or Unreal. I know there is a tutorial on Newtek on getting statics into UT2K3, but there is nothing out there on getting character models from LW to it..

Oh well.

[Nemoid]

Its just a matter of habits getting used with simmetry in Lw. The one lack is that it works only in one axis Its very efficient for organic modelling.

you have no instances, but i think that for modelling they are not so useful, while they are for large amounts of shapes with the same shape to be edited alltogether. in Lw simmetry works good, when your object is setted properly in your viewport, for example making a box and hitting F2 to center it on axes especially x axis. then you can select polys and points also in the perspective view in only one side and Lw will automatically select the simmetric ones on the other side. this helps alot , especially working with move, scale and also stretch tool, not talking about drag tools woth wich you can clickdrag with mouse points directly very rapidly.
another good thing you have i Lw is that everything is considered selected, if nothing appears selected, while if you select only a bunch of points or polys you obviously work only on them.

but another cool feature Maya misses (while it has great features of other kind indeed) are the great phantom points wich allows you to work directly in subpatch mode, without cages or low mesh visible and tweak the mesh clicking where "edges" of polys cross each other. this is very rapid and efficient you can forget about polys and focus on the final mesh keeping the visualization of your mode very clean.

So you see, except for particular issues you don't need to work with an half of a model in Lw, especially for oganics.

The trick in Maya, is a workaround for a thing it misses without plugins or MEL scripts.a real built in simmetry for poly modeling. Lw simmetry is far to be perfect, but at least is there from the start.

[wgreenlee1]

what about cps? (http://www.noir.org/tutorials/Xen%20Wildman/Modeling%20Using%20CPS/modelcpstut.html) or cps? (http://www.lightstorm3d.com/download/html_en/cps.htm)
am i missing something here?
even tho you are working with a cage it gives very fluid results like lightwave subpatches and being real time you can concentrate on ur lowpoly cage and see the the results of it on the subpatched version

[sqitso]

Well I do agree that Symetry is a really nice thing. I love it. I also love working directly on my subpatch model without a cage. That is wonderful too. What I don't like is working on a model for days, only to find out that somewhere down the line some of your verts/cps got out of symetry on one side. Now you are screwed with no way of getting them back into symetry. This has been the cause of many hours of lost time for me. If you could template instanace the other half, then this would never be a problem. Hell if there was a way to simply lock one half of the model I would be happy too.

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