LOL!
Teehehee.
This is the kind of stuff I am able to do with my minimal knowledge of Lightwave 3D. Mind you, this is pretty easy – a bottle is not hard to do as it is based on a very simple form, the cylinder.
I have been learning 3D on and off at work for the past year or so. Because we’re quite busy most of the time, I very rarely get to sit down and just play for any long period of time. But the past couple of days I did get a bit bored and started this model. My workmate who has been trained properly with Lightwave helped me out. I wanted this done not just for my folio, but for my parents and also just because! 
I completely fudged the actual design of the bottle so it’s not quite in proportion in this render – I changed that just today. The next step will be creating a very fancy, expensive looking wine glass to go with it.
Yessss I know it’s not perfect – there are so many factors you have to think about when working with 3D. I really should focus more on scale (Mum do you still have those dimensions for the bottles we use?). Also, I think I will try to make the Zork cap a bit better. Right now it’s just a different texture on the main model of the bottle…I should give it its own separate layer and modify the shape so it looks more like a proper Zork.
As for filling the bottles with wine???? Eeep…that could be tricky! I’ll let you know on that one.
Should I explain the 3D process? It is quite involved! What I said about the basic shapes before – well, everything can be broken down into what in 3D lingo is called primitives. Balls, cubes, prisms, cylinders etc. Lightwave provides these for you and you can start your model by modifying one or more of them. Once you have figured out the basic shapes you need it’s a matter of extruding, beveling and tweaking the object until you have what you want. This might sound easy right? The biggest problem I have found is that there are many different ways you can create the same thing. You might be halfway through a model when all of a sudden you realise that there is a better way to do it. But it’s not like Illustrator or Photoshop where you just Undo or Erase….Noooo….often you have to start again from scratch. For example…I started this model by using the Lathe tool – where you draw out the cross section of half of the model and apply the Lathe setting to it and it makes it 3D. This wasn’t working as I was getting way too many polygons and the model wasn’t smooth.
So I scrapped that after spending more than a couple of hours on it and used the cylinder primitive to bevel it out.
Once you have your model, you then take it into the Layout part of Lightwave. This is the 3D environment you place one or more models in to do your animation and rendering.
I laid out my bottle and added a floor, plus cloned a couple of more bottles. Also, tweaking of the texture is done here as you can get more real-time results. I was able to use some standard textures that come with the program for the glass.
THEN you add your lights (3 point lighting just like in ‘real’ photography) and set your camera.
Hit RENDER and hope for the best!
Now I haven’t even gone into animating or the finer details of texturing. I could write an essay just on how you do the easy stuff (which is all I know) but I don’t want to bore you further.
Right now my skills are very minimal. I have the relationship with Lightwave that I am only scratching the surface of what it can do. If I come across a problem I don’t have the knowledge to find a different way to do it. It’s like swimming in a murky pond – you know there’s so much stuff out there, you just can’t reach it. I guess it’s just being only a part of the way there – I am used to being pretty good at using any graphic software – but 3D is very different and you do need to put in a lot of hours. It’s that much more involved in comparison to 2D.
It’s also a very niche market. Not many people in Australia do it. More people use Maya and 3D Studio Max. I don’t have experience with these. But I find Lightwave fun! I’ve got the hang of the interface and the 3D environment. Of all the programs out there, Lightwave is one of the most affordable (around $1700 which isn’t too much more than some parts of Adobe Creative Suite)…There are free ones out there like Blender which I tried and found terrible.
The technical aspects – yes you do need a slightly more powerful than average computer and a decent graphics card…but it’s not unreasonable. My work Mac has 4GB or RAM and a dual core 2.66Ghz processor and it does pretty good. Render times are the killer – if you’re animating and have a few objects in there, it could take days (yes, DAYS)…but for stills it’s not long at all. This image took about 20 minutes at a pretty high resolution and 7 passes. It’s definitely fun and very very rewarding! Creating stuff in 3D is SO COOL! Hehehee.
Phew – that was a long post. I hope you don’t mind my rambles. Please let me know what you think of the image and any thoughts on 3D! 
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