We’re not looking for great art, just trying to get you used to how things work. You’ll find all these tools on the Modify Tab or you can just roll the mousewheel. Don’t forget that in addition to the Move tool you used to reposition the null, you also have the Rotate tool (keyboard shortcut: Y ) and the Size and Stretch tools (keyboard shortcuts: Shift +H and H). Go back to our short tutorial and get everything - and I mean everything: cube, camera, light - moving.Even better, just because you’ve keyframed an object’s heading, there’s nothing to say that you can’t keyframe its pitch and bank on different frames. All items in a LightWave scene can have independent keyframes - while your cube is getting sick on its roller-coaster ride, you can have the light in the scene changing direction and the camera following it around to make it even more disoriented.See something you don’t like? Press pause, move the timeline slider to the frame you want to change and move the cube.

When your viewport is in Perspective mode, if you use the navigation controls at the top right of the viewport, you can see how the animation looks from any angle. When you want to check the null’s motion path, press play.Create a real roller-coaster ride for the Cube to take. Stop playback by hitting the Pause button and go through your scene adding more keys as you go.Now when you press play again, you can see that LightWave has taken note of your changes and made the appropriate in-between frames for the motion to proceed smoothly. You will see the motion path change to match the new keyframe. You can do this by grabbing the green arrow pointing upwards from the null, or by using the right mouse button anywhere in the viewport. Move the null up to the top of the viewport.Move the timeline slider to the middle of the timeline. To make it slightly more interesting, stop the playback by hitting the pause button.It’s not exactly Disney caliber, but it is an animation. Congratulations! You’ve made an animation. If you hit the play button just under the right-hand side of the Layout viewport you will now see your cube moving across the screen and starting again when the slider reaches the end of the timeline.If you were to count the dots when the cube is at frame 60 by hand, you would see that there were 120 dots - 60 in front, 60 behind, but just take our word for it.

The first is that there’s a yellow line on frame 0 in the timeline under the Layout viewport (there’s also one under the slider at frame 120 now, but it won’t be as visible), the second is that there’s a gray dotted line marking some of the path that the cube is taking.

Move the cube over to the right edge of the viewport, either by the X axis arrow or just freehand in the viewport.

You can also do this by clicking on the rightmost button of the transport controls under the viewport.

Move the slider at the bottom of the Layout viewport to the end of the slider range - it will be at frame 120 by default.Drag the cube over to the left side of the screen. If you wish to restrict movement to an axis, hit Ctrl Z to undo your move and click and hold on the red arrow indicating the X axis. You will see the cube moves since it is the selected object. Click in an empty part of the viewport and move the mouse.Add a cube by clicking on the Modeler Tools > Create > Geometry > Cube button and accept the default entries by hitting the OK button. Start Layout and check to see if Auto Key: All Channels is enabled at the bottom of the interface window.To get you started, let’s create a piece of the easiest animation possible. In fact it will create these in-between frames, called tweens, between every keyframe resulting in a fluid animation. Setting one at the start of your animation and one at the end means that LightWave will automatically interpolate between them for the duration of the animation. Keyframes fix an object’s location, rotation and scale for a given moment in time. The way to tell the computer where an object - be it camera, models or lights - is at any given point is to use keyframes. Now that you have reviewed cameras, lights and objects in the Layout section, it’s time to discuss animation.

Lightwave 3d animation