Planetary Rings

Planetary Rings in Lightwave 3D
This is a basic tutorial on how to make some cool Planetary Rings using Hypervoxels in Lightwave 7. I am not going to go into great detail on this tute as I am assuming that most people doing this tutorial are familiar with Lightwave. Note* In this tutorial I will be using Feet as the unit of measurement . . . . I am from the U.S. and that is what I use, you tell me something is a mile long and I know how far that is . . . .
You tell me something is 1 kilometer long, then I have to go "ok 1 kilometer is less than a Mile so . . ." or " 1 meter is almost 3 feet ".
I meant what's the point . . . ? We'll use the good ol' fashion foot for measurements . . . . .

~gp~

Asteroids . . . . .

Ok, this is part three of the tutorial Planetary Rings in Lightwave 7. If by chance you came to this page by way of an outside link, You can find the first part of this Tutorial . . . . HERE

For those continuing on . .We begin the Layout Portion of this tutorial. . .

Step 13: Now load your planet_rings.lwo into layout and let's work . . . At this time you should open up viper as well, because we are going to need this in order to apply texture to the Voxels. . . . Speaking of Voxels, go to Scene Tab\ Effects \ Volumetrics, and in the dropdown menu saying "Add Volumetric" select HyperVoxelsFilter, then double click on the HyperVoxels 3.0.
When the menu launches you will see all your layers stacked neatly on the left-hand side . . .

Fig 13

Step 14: With Viper open place your HyperVoxel control panel right along side of it so we can see what we are doing.
Ok, . . the first thing we need to do is to convert all of our points to HyperVoxels. We do this by selecting the first layer of our object in the Object Name window, planet_rings: layer1.
Highlight this by clicking on it, and activate it with the button above that says Activate :D . . . . . . . Look
. . . round things . . How cool is that . . .

Fig 14

Step 15: Now we get to do our magic here . . And the first order of business is these blobs are way too big . . We need to make them smaller. In the HyperVoxel panel Geometry Tab you will see Particle Size, let's decrease the value here. The idea is that we want the objects not to blob into each other too too much.
Of course there will be some that blob together because " asteroids are anything but uniform ", However let's try to keep particales that join together down to about 5% to10%. To do this you should choose about 60 feet for the particle size, and because we want our 'roids to be different sizes, set the Size Variation to 250% . . .
Now you may not like this size, you may like something different. Be your own judge; remember this tutorial is just a guideline for you to follow.

Fig 15

Step 16: Now let us work on the texturing of our asteroids . . . On the viper window top right corner, change the Preview Options to Particle preview. This should load a single particle for us to work on. I usually set my viper out of Draft mode so I can see the surfaces better it is slower to render but the image is cleaner. Just uncheck the Draft Mode box in the lower left-hand corner.

Fig 16

Step 17: Now what we need to do is break up the smoothness of our asteroids, so under the HyperTexture Tab In the Texture menu, . . . pick one of the 8 selections there. I choose Smoky 1 and adjusted the settings, you can use these settings if you like, but search for something that suites you best. We don't want to make our asteroids too bumpy because in a far shot they will look too lumpy with too much texture, so pick something with a slight surface distortion.

Fig 17

Continue to part 4 .... here