Betterspace Lightwave Tutorials

Betterspace was a series of tutorials that originally appeared on the site ap3d.com. Unfortunately they disappeared from the Net sometime in the last 5 years. What is presented here are the tutorials that I was able to resurrect thanks to a program called Warrick that is able to use sites like the Wayback machine and the Google cache.

Originally these tutorials were written with Newtek's Lightwave 3D 5.6 or 6 in mind (and presented with instructions for either when needed). I've played around with most of these tutorials and found that the tools needed to do the work are still fully present in LW9 through LW11. I'm still trying to find the tutorials that covered recreating the Babylon 5 Whitestar vessel, but that object seems to have fully vanished from the Net.

The ideas behind these tutorials will probably work with other 3D applications (Blender, Autodesk's 3DStudio Max, Autodesk's Maya, etc...), but don't provide the actual instructions for working in those applications.

The tutorials cover a variety of topics from creating nebulas to adding surface detail to spacecraft.

I used the tutorials to create my own Babylon 5 Earthforce shuttle. While it was a relatively low poly count model, it did help to see how the various tools worked together to work up from simple shapes to make something more complex.

This model could easily be expanded on to give it more surface detail by improving the textures and some other subtle changes.

Enjoy the tutorials and Happy Lightwaving.