Create Animating background in LightWave 3D

The purpose of this tutorial is to make an animating background, something that you'd likely make in Adobe After Effects. Lightwave's flexibility allows you to complete various types of projects, some that you might not have dreamed of! While AE is definitely a excellent program not everyone has it. Hopefully you'll find something useful in this tutorial that you'll be able to implement in your workflow.

Once you've completed this project you'll have a really useful background that can be used for everything from power-points to rolling credits. If you've discovered some unique way of using this project, let us know! We'd love to hear what you come up with.

The first step.

Create a plane in Modeler...

1. Open modeler
2. Select the “Box” tool and in a top view draw out a 2d box. 
3. Name the surface using the “q” key on the keyboard. ("Bkg" is the name I chose) 
4. Save your object and send it over to Layout.

In Layout...

1. Add a null. 
2. Move camera so that its directly above the plane and facing down. 
3. At this point it will be helpful to open up VIPER, Lightwave’s native previewer. So switch to the “Render” tab and click “Enable VIPER”. Now to give VIPER some data do a render by clicking on “Render Frame” or using the F9 key on your keyboard.
4. The image that is rendered should be just a solid gray, if you have black areas adjust the position of the camera so the gray solid fills the frame. 
5. Open the Surface Editor and select the material name(in my case “Bkg”). 
6. Now click on the VIPER button or press the F7 key. 
7. In the Surface Editor click on the “T” button next to the color options. This will open the Texture Editor for the Color channel. 
8. Change the “Layer Type” from “Image Map” to “Procedural Texture”. Now change the “Procedural Type” from “Turbulence” to “Crumple”(you can use this technique with other textures, but for this example I’ll be using the “Crumple” texture). Change the “Texture Color” to a blue. At this point you should be able to see the the changes updating in the VIPER window, if you don’t click on the “Render” button in the VIPER window. Lower the “Frequencies” to 1. Now change the “Reference Object” from “None” to the null object that we created earlier. 
9. Move back to the Surface Editor window and change the Color to black. 
10. Now back in the Texture Editor adjust the “Scale” so that you get an image in the VIPER window similar to mine. 
11. We’re done with texturing at this point, you can close the Texture Editor by clicking on the “Use Texture” button, the Surface Editor can also be closed.
12. Now we just need to animate the null object. Select the null and set a keyframe at frame 0(if you have “Auto Key” on keyframes are automatically set). Now move to the last frame in your animation and move the null. The amount you’ll need to move the null will depend on the type of look you’re after, this will be something you’ll have to play with to get it just the way that you want. I’m going to move the null in all 3 axis to get the look that I want. 
13. If you wanted to add the blur in LightWave you could, using the Depth of Field option. I would recommend using some other program because adding the DOF in LightWave isn’t really that efficient(most video editing programs an option to blur and I would recommend accomplishing the blur this way).
14. Choose your render options via the aptly named “Render Options” buttons. 
15. Render out your scene, with the “Render Scene” button.
16. Open you favorite video software apply a blur to your animation, then save out the blurred video for use in your projects.

After you’ve rendered out the animation and blurred it, you might decide that you want it to move faster or slower or have different colors. Since the animation renders so fast in LightWave it’s easy to make changes, render then out and see how it looks. I would suggest trying it out by adjusting the colors and textures to get the look that you want. You can even add multiple texture layer in the Texture Editor and give them different properties(Procedural Type, Color, Frequencies, Scale, Position, etc.) to add interest to you background.