Brushwave - Painterly Rendering for Lightwave 3D

Overview

Brushwave is a painterly rendering plugin for the 3D modeling and rendering software "Lightwave 3D". It applies thousands of individual brush strokes to a scene, and can be used for still images as well as animations.

Project Website: http://www.incognitek.com/redge/projects/brushwave

The project was started in 2007 as a proof of concept for a German media company. It is currently fully usable and quite stable, while some features are missing. I plan to enhance the plugin step by step in the future.

Brushwave is licensed under the LGPL. You can use it for any purpose you want. However, if you create some nice images or videos, I would be very pleased if you could send me some material to put on my webpage.

Installation

Brushwave does not have any dependencies besides an OpenGL capable graphics driver.

You can install Brushwave in Layout Mode via "Utilities/Add Plugins". You will find that Brushwave consists of 2 plugins. One of them controls the settings of the rendering process, the other does the rendering. Both plugins are included in the brushwave plugin binary.

Usage

To render an object with Brushwave, you have to take 2 steps:

a) Per-object settings

Select the object you want to apply the painterly filter to, then open the properties dialog. In the "Geometry"-Tab, add the custom object "Brushwave Object". Double-click it to manipulate its settings.

b) Global settings

If you rendered the scene now, nothing would happen. You first need to activate the Brushwave image filter. This can be done under "Windows / Image Processing / Add image filter". Choose the filter "Brushwave".

That's it! If you render the scene now, the model will be rendered in a painterly style. If you save the scene, Lightwave will remember the settings for the next time.

Further information

If you want more information about Brushwave, visit the project's homepage.