Basic stuff Lightwave users should know, but are not-so-obvious

In Modeler, you can assign various viewport attributes using "Save View Preset" to the NUMPAD numeric keys. I'm using this mostly to be able to switch between what it calls "Rendering Style" (Color Wireframe, Texture, Textured Wire, etc.) using the numpad keys, but reserve a few for switching between Quad, 1+3 vert, and 2-side-by-side layouts. See "Save view Presets" in the 2015 manual for how to do the assignments.

But an undocumented tip is, for example, if you have the 1 key assigned to just switching the current viewport to Textured Wire, if your pointer device is hovering over a "neutral" part of the interface (where you can click to deselect all) rather than a specific viewport and you hit that key, all of the viewports will be set to Textured Wire. This can be very handy when you just want to quickly switch all viewports between a wireframe view then back to a solid shaded view.
 
tburbage said:
In Modeler, you can assign various viewport attributes using "Save View Preset" to the NUMPAD numeric keys. I'm using this mostly to be able to switch between what it calls "Rendering Style" (Color Wireframe, Texture, Textured Wire, etc.) using the numpad keys, but reserve a few for switching between Quad, 1+3 vert, and 2-side-by-side layouts. See "Save view Presets" in the 2015 manual for how to do the assignments.

But an undocumented tip is, for example, if you have the 1 key assigned to just switching the current viewport to Textured Wire, if your pointer device is hovering over a "neutral" part of the interface (where you can click to deselect all) rather than a specific viewport and you hit that key, all of the viewports will be set to Textured Wire. This can be very handy when you just want to quickly switch all viewports between a wireframe view then back to a solid shaded view.
Click to expand...

Testing it! Thanks!
 
Selection reminders: subtracting selections using the STATS window

SELECTION: sometimes it's easier to Select the INVERSE of a given property, than to select for a property itself , such as "# of points".

see this thread for an example: http://forums.newtek.com/showthread.php?153606-How-to-convert-selected-edges-into-selected-polygons

Remember you can UNSelect (Subtract From Selection) in the STATS window.

Remember you can select polys by SKETCH COLOR-- assigning a different Sketch Color to specific polys may make your life easier, and that's more flexible than...

PARTS: remember PARTS exist, but a polygon can only be a member of one (or zero) Part.

That "(or zero)" can be useful too: basically it's "Select everything that ISN'T Assigned to a Part".

Remember INVERT SELECTION exists.

Polygon Selection in the STATS window can be by COLOR, PART, SURF, # OF VERTICES.
 
But an undocumented tip is, for example, if you have the 1 key assigned to just switching the current viewport to Textured Wire, if your pointer device is hovering over a "neutral" part of the interface (where you can click to deselect all) rather than a specific viewport and you hit that key, all of the viewports will be set to Textured Wire. This can be very handy when you just want to quickly switch all viewports between a wireframe view then back to a solid shaded view.
Click to expand...

or in plain English/American (take you pick) a bug, and a very annoying bug at that, catches me out every so often

And the keyboard shortcut to assign windows is CTRL+ALT (at least on a Mac) and standard convention is to assign Five to TOP, Two to Front, Eight to Back, Four to Left and so on with Nine being Bottom, but its up to your personal taste really
 
gerry_g said:
or in plain English/American (take you pick) a bug, and a very annoying bug at that, catches me out every so often
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Given that it follows the LW "dogma" that "when nothing is selected, everything is selected" (in this case, w.r.t. viewports), what makes you so sure it's a bug?
 
I always use 1 for Wireframe, 2 for Texture, 3 for Texture wire and 4 for weight. I don't change anything else since you can use Display Options to change the Layout if you need to.

B
 
BeeVee said:
I always use 1 for Wireframe, 2 for Texture, 3 for Texture wire and 4 for weight. I don't change anything else since you can use Display Options to change the Layout if you need to.
B
Click to expand...
I never use the keypad for the display properties, except for "5", which is "center the quad". I do use them for quad positioning, tantamount to "Landscape" and "Portrait" modes.

::checking:: Apparently whatever other presets I may have had got lost in some *.cfg catastrophe (why are *.cfgs so fragile???).
 
Just spotted this gem in the LW manual..

In Layout, to select an item, press ' and a popup appears in which you can type the name of the item you want (or the first letter or two..) Press enter, item selected.

For items with similar names (Null1, Null2, Null3, etc) It'd be great if some sort of filtering/predictive text was added...
 
kyuzo said:
Just spotted this gem in the LW manual..

In Layout, to select an item, press ' and a popup appears in which you can type the name of the item you want (or the first letter or two..) Press enter, item selected.

For items with similar names (Null1, Null2, Null3, etc) It'd be great if some sort of filtering/predictive text was added...
Click to expand...

That is awesome. Item selection by name.

Predictive text for item selection would be rad. And I hope a similar feature for Tool selection which uses more than just the tool's name because some of the tool names in Lightwave are not intuitive to their behavior so maybe there could be some search-keywords associated with Layout (and Modeler) Tool plugins to support predictive tool discovery.
 
ncr100 said:
And I hope a similar feature for Tool selection which uses more than just the tool's name because some of the tool names in Lightwave are not intuitive to their behavior so maybe there could be some search-keywords associated with Layout (and Modeler) Tool plugins to support predictive tool discovery.
Click to expand...

Let's extend that feature request: allow user to TAG tools with keywords that make more sense to the users than the programmers. This would especially be good because it builds in an extensible capability for 3rd party plugins.
 
ncr100 said:
That is awesome. Item selection by name.

Predictive text for item selection would be rad. And I hope a similar feature for Tool selection which uses more than just the tool's name because some of the tool names in Lightwave are not intuitive to their behavior so maybe there could be some search-keywords associated with Layout (and Modeler) Tool plugins to support predictive tool discovery.
Click to expand...

The problem with that from a UX standpoint, is what it should do when the tool's name is specified? Activate it? For quite a few LW tools that's the only (and terminal) action in the workflow, so you don't want that until everything's selected and configured. For others, it only begins the operation, and requires further configuration/adjustment actions, and then a separate action to actually take effect/finalize. Oh, and there's no easy or clear indication by name which tools behave which way either.

The reason stuff like this works in other systems is because their tools in such systems all have uniform action models, such that they can always be selected, then adjusted, then finalized. Since LW tools' activation conventions are all over the map, such a system won't work nearly as well in LW, at least without some major rework of (many) tools' behaviors.

It'd be very nice to have, if the workflow discrepancy issue could also be addressed. Without addressing the workflow issues, it'd be an unpredictable mess.
 
I've added this to list from memory, I did it ages ago, but it's a nice workflow to try and experiment.

Just a quicky. I did a test, created one concert/arena seat.

I used LWCAD vector clones to quickly create a point source for instancing.

Inside of layout, create a null. Positioned the null and when created instances told the instance generator to use the null as a look at target. All the seats aligned to point towards the null centre, multiple nulls can be used, but you could create banks or groups of instances each with a different look at target.

Have fun, no more painful placing and orientation for stadium or theatre seats using instances and a point source for generation.
 
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Luc_Feri said:
I've added this to list from memory, I did it ages ago, but it's a nice workflow to try and experiment.

Just a quicky. I did a test, created one concert/arena seat.

I used LWCAD vector clones to quickly create a point source for instancing.

Inside of layout, create a null. Positioned the null and when created instances told the instance generator to use the null as a look at target. All the seats aligned to point towards the null centre, multiple nulls can be used, but you could create banks or groups of instances each with a different look at target.

Have fun, no more painful placing and orientation for stadium or theatre seats using instances and a point source for generation.
Click to expand...

Brilliant! Thanks.
 
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