Graphics Programs Reference
In-Depth Information
only
those pixels, letting everything else
stay as it is.
Using Adaptive Sampling, you can get a
very good-looking image in a fraction of the
time it would take to render and antialias on
most other rendering engines. Without
Adaptive Sampling, LightWave re-renders
everything in the entire frame for each
pass. This is good for when you have tiny
surfacing details or intricate texturing with
detail smaller than a single pixel of the ren-
dered image. Rendering without Adaptive
Sampling helps keep these “sub-pixel” tex-
tures from “crawling” during an animation.
the precise effect of your object's motion
that would be too quick for LightWave's
“shutter” to “freeze.”
Because of the way this motion blur is
calculated, factoring in a minutely different
point on LightWave's timeline for each
antialiasing pass, the more passes, the
smoother and more “realistic” the render
will be. So, the higher the level of anti-
aliasing, the better your rendered image;
this is why you'd want to use High or
Extreme levels of antialiasing when render-
ing Motion Blur (or Depth of Field).
•
The
Particle Blur
check box tells
LightWave whether or not you want to blur
single-point polys (particles) as well as
“regular” objects.
•
Blur Length
is linked to the
Shutter
Angle
and
Exposure Time
readouts,
which tell you about your Blur Length set-
ting in terms a cinematographer is familiar
with. The higher the number, the longer the
blur. (You can get some neat effects by hav-
ing a Blur Length well over 100% or well
under -100%.)
Note
Adaptive Sampling tends not to do so well
when rendering text that is just a set of flat
polygons. When rendering text, it is best to
deactivate Adaptive Sampling and switch to
an Enhanced level of antialiasing, which fig-
ures in almost twice as many samples per
pixel.
•
Soft Filter
renders the objects in your
scene with the “softness” of film (the back-
ground isn't affected by Soft Filter). This
setting doesn't seem to be a “blur” of a kind
that post-processing can mimic; it appears
to actually change the way LightWave ren-
ders. If you're looking for a more “filmic”
render, as opposed to something more
“video-like,” this, in conjunction with a Film
Grain image filter, is your key to getting
that look.
•
Motion Blur
becomes an option when
you activate Antialiasing. With Motion Blur
on, each antialiasing pass is not only ren-
dered in its entirety, but each pass is also
rendered from a slightly different point on
LightWave's timeline. (Adaptive Sampling
is
not
active when rendering with Motion
Blur or Depth of Field,
even though the
Adaptive Sampling box may remain checked
.)
The result of this is an image that shows
Note
The Motion Blur settings in the Camera
Properties window give you the most accu-
rate kind of motion blur, but they aren't the
only way to have your objects blur in rela-
tion to their change in position over time. A
huge factor in creating any art is to “give the
illusion of” rather than “exactly recreating.”
Clever artists/programmers found out that
they could “smudge” the pixels of an object
based on its motion data available for that
particular frame. And so came about a neat
little plug-in called Vector Blur. You can find
it under Scene | Effects | Image Processing |
Add Image Filter. You can find out more
about this plug-in in the LightWave manual,
but in short, it is a way of quickly giving the
illusion of motion blur without LightWave
having to go through all the steps necessary
to create good-looking
exact
motion blur.
