VistaPro and Lightwave Integration Special Note: These plugins are created and tested for LightWave 5.5. Lightwave is a general-purpose 3D modeling and rendering application. Vistapro is a fractal landscape generator. This document describes how to integrate the two to allow photo-realistic terrain to be included in Lightwave animations, including casting shadows onto the Vistapro terrain. Two Lightwave plug-ins are used to transfer camera or other object motion back and forth between Vistapro and Lightwave. Throughout this document, the abbreviation VP will be used for Vistapro V4.0 and LW for Lightwave V5.5. Vistapro generates photo-realistic terrain using various forms of elevation data. VP has a published Digital Elevation Model (DEM) file format, can use USGS DEM files (through conversion), import binary data, and convert PCX grayscale images to elevation data. It has numerous controls for terrain coloration, trees, sky (including sun, moon, clouds and stars), water (including lakes, rivers and sea-level), and terrain manipulation. These controls allow almost complete control over the presentation of the terrain. VP has a path generating function, based upon spline curves, which is very good at building "fly-through" type animations. These paths avoid the terrain, and are banked, pitched and smoothed according to the "vehicle type". There are several predefined vehicle types, and custom vehicle types can be defined. VP has numerous controls for modifying the path. VP can be integrated with LW is two basic ways: Simple integration, where VP is used to generate background images for a LW animation, but lighting on LW objects is consistent with the VP backgrounds, and Shadow integration, where LW casts shadows onto the VP terrain, substantially increasing the realism of the produced images.