1. I have a feeling that most people are familiar with the Smooth Shift tool in Lightwave Molder but for those of you ( like myself) that are not I would like to briefly review it. The Smooth shift tools allows you to make new geometry during modeling with ease. This can be useful because it will allow you to move points and polygons without affecting the current shape. Lets begin

2. Smooth Shift is located in modeler under Multiply/Extend/Smooth Shift. The hot key for it is “SHIFT + F”. So lets try it out. I’m going to first just make a regular box, the exact size is not important.

3. As you can see I divided the box into a few different section. I am going to now take two of those sections and pull on then. First I will NOT use the Smooth Shift and then I WLL use the tool and show you the difference. In this picture you can see how I selected two poly’s and then used the MOVE tool to pull the two outward away from the box. By doing this I have changed the original shape.

4. Next I will use the Smooth Shift tool and do the same step. You will notice that the box shape stays the same and there are two new poly’s created. To use the smooth shift tool you first need to select the poly’s, Place the curser over the two and Left Click the mouse. It will seem as nothing happened but something did. What happened was that there were two new poly’s created. Now Right Click and pull the selected poly’s out. Do you see the difference from the step before ?..you should.

5. This tool will become very handy as you try to build parts of a character such as the chin on a face model. You can select the chin poly’s and pull out a nice square chin to start your build from. You can also use this tool for pulling out branches of a tree out of the trunk. In this image I have used the Smooth Shift too to pull out two branch like shapes that I can now go back and tweak some more if I wish. If you notice there are several segments that I have made in the branches.

6. So can be a huge help in your modeling. Remember that you must first press the Left mouse button then pull with the Right Mouse button. Afterwards you can use any tool you wish. I find myself going back to this tool almost on every build simply because its just so handy. I wish you luck with you models. I hope this gives you a little idea what the shift smooth tool is about and how to use it. I have a feeling if you have never used this tool before that you will start using it now because it.