Layout Front/Top/Side View

    The RealiTools Front/Top/Side View plug-in (from here on out, referred to as FTSView) is a Shader plug-in, and can be activated from the Surfaces panel.  This plug-in lets you render an image of the front, top, or side view of an object.  Whereas LightWave will only let you render from the camera viewport, this will let you render the isometric front / top / side views, as well.  To use it, you apply it to a surface (usually a single polygon) that is visible to the camera.  Then, you choose which object to use for controlling the position of the rendered viewport.  This is a good and bad thing. It's bad because you don't automatically get the same view as the viewport you'd like.   It's good, however, in that you can scale the viewport individually on particular axes, and animate the view.  Not only that, but because the viewport exists in 3D space, you can actually animate objects coming into view!
    The set-up is a bit complex, but not too bad.  The first thing you need to get used to is the way it calculates the viewport.  It goes from -1 to 1 on each axis of the control object, multiplied by the scale, then added to the position.

    Look at this object.  It's the right size such that whatever is inside it will be what you see in your rendered view.  To estimate the size, rotate the object so it's visible in the view you want, then position and scale it to represent the view you want.  You can use a null, but you'll probably end up doing a lot more guesswork.  Once you've figured out how the control objects work, it'll be easier to use this.  Once you've selected a control object, select the view you want that object to represent, and you're set!
    One thing to keep in mind is that when the viewport is calculated, it's calculated across the width and height of the screen.  That means two things.  First, you should have the polygon with the view fully covering the camera's viewpoint.  In practice, you can get around this by moving the reference objects, though.  Second, since the viewpoint is also partly based on the reference object's size, you may see stretching of the image if your reference object isn't scaled to the same aspect ratio (3:4) as your camera.  This can be solved either by rendering a square image, or scaling the reference object.

Tutorial
    In this tutorial, we'll use FTSView to render an image of a building that would be suitable for use as a texture map, say on a low-polygon object.

1.  Open Layout and load building.lwo.
2.  Load FTSVproj.lwo and FTSVview.lwo.  Just for good measure, turn off the shadow options on both objects, and turn on Unseen by Camera for FTSVproj.lwo.
3.  Move FTSVproj.lwo up on the Y axis so that it sits above the building model.  Scale it down so that, from the top view, the building just fits inside it.
4.  Move FTSVview.lwo so that it's completely covering the camera's view, and is in front of the building model (wouldn't do much good behind the building, would it?)
5.  Go into the Surfaces panel, and activate RT_FTSView.  Click Options and choose FTSVproj.lwo as the control object, and Front for the view.
6.  Render away!

    Now you should have a bit of an idea how FTSView works.  My scene looked like this.  A handy way to use this plug-in is by parenting FTSVview.lwo to the camera (using the plug-in that comes with LightWave), then turning on Unseen by Camera.   Go about your business as usual, and when you need a view from one of those directions, you can just turn off the option and render!