- Kiss M&Ms
- Picture of the Month
- User groups
- vRoom 1.1
- Halo Legends Trailer
- LightWave webinar
- Lightwave jobs
NewTek spoke to William Vaughan, Animator Director at Splashlight (and former LightWave 3D Evangelist) about his recent work on the Kiss M&Ms campaign:
NewTek: Who was this image created for?
William Vaughan: The illustration was created for BBDO Worldwide’s Inner M&M campaign, which runs in magazines worldwide. In the past, Splashlight created M&M characters of sportscasters Howie Long and Jimmy Johnson for a Super Bowl-themed advertisement. They also created M&M characters of country music stars Brooks and Dunn.
NewTek: How long did it take to create the artwork?
William Vaughan: It took about a week to model the characters and their props, and another week for lighting and surfacing. The details in the boots and guitars took the longest to model, as it was important to capture every detail. As usual, we used subdivision modeling to keep the polygon count as low as possible, both for rendering speed and maximum flexibility. We used another month for revisions involving both LightWave and Photoshop.
NewTek: How long was the approval process?
William Vaughan: There were probably two dozen rounds of revisions, which is fairly common for assignments like this one. We worked from a sketch provided by the agency that showed each character’s general pose and position, but many elements changed along the way. There were differing opinions about whether a vertical or horizontal orientation would work best, so we created both. There was uncertainty about which band members should be represented, as two of the original band members had been replaced over the years. After several rounds of modifications, there was the last-minute addition of a stage, to make the image more vertical. The art directors at BBDO scrutinized every detail, magnified well beyond the intended print size before the image was shown to the band for final approval.
NewTek: Did the band see the image?
William Vaughan: They certainly did. Paul Stanley, in particular, was quite involved, going as far as to provide art direction faxed from his hotel room in South America. To explain further, he was displeased with the way that his hair was originally created, and sent along his own sketch showing a fluffier hairstyle. It turns out that he draws very well, and his input helped us considerably.
NewTek: Did you use FiberFX for the hair?
William Vaughan: The specificity of the client’s demands required a level of control that worked best using Photoshop. We photographed a dark-haired coworker with a very high-resolution camera to capture baseline images that we heavily manipulated in Photoshop. Because the work was print-oriented, we were able to combine Photoshop and LightWave to make changes on the fly.
NewTek: Are the guitars accurate to what they use?
William Vaughan: Everything is accurate, based on Web research, Ed Gabel’s lifelong fascination with KISS and a close review by the band members and their management. We knew the KISS army would be watching closely, and we were very careful not to cut any corners.
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NewTek: Who was responsible for this image?
William Vaughan: It was a team effort, like everything we do at Splashlight. In particular, I led the character modeling, including the [fantastic] boots, Chris O’Riley did a lot of the lighting and surfacing and Ed Gabel added the Photoshop work that brought the image over the top. Joe Zeff supervised every aspect of the project. On the agency side, we worked with creative director Tim Bayne, art director Bryan Wilson and art buyer Betsy Jablow. We’re looking forward to working with them on future installments of the M&M campaign.
NewTek: What else are you working on at Splashlight?
William Vaughan: We recently finished several print renders for Porsche, showing their new Panamera sedan in different locations around the world. Our magazine covers for Fortune and Los Angeles are currently on newsstands, and we’ve been doing a considerable amount of character work. We’re in the middle of a courtroom animation for a prominent law firm as well. That’s what is fun about Splashlight - you never know what you’ll be doing next!
Visit the Splashlight site.
Forum artist Mancubus told us how he made this phenomenal image, and gave us insight on the story behind it:
Mancubus: This image was created for the Polish CG Forum Contest. I wanted an illustrated look. The story behind it is cheesy, like a Z-grade Sci-Fi movie:
While inventing a new bioweapon in the desert laboratory something goes terribly wrong. A squad of special forces soldiers is sent in to rescue the surviving scientists and to retrieve the research data. However, because the biomass is spreading at high speed, this plan fails and evacuation is no longer an option. It is time for the backup plan - an Atom bomb drop to clean up the mess.
I used LightWave, ZBrush, Photoshop and Fusion to create the image. Most of the objects are 3D. Some of them are quite low poly (like the characters or containers). This is because of the small amount of time I had for this contest, and the fact that the objects are visible mostly from a long distance. I tried to put as much into the textures as possible, and do as little modeling as possible to cut down on time taken and lighten the scene.
Mancubus: The part that took the longest in creating this image was getting the right composition. I'm a modeler so that was the hardest part for me. Luckily for me, Lightwave advanced camera system allowed me to force the angle of the lens and bend the geometry so I could show all key elements of the scene in one shot.
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Mancubus: The creature itself was modeled in LightWave. After getting proper position in Layout, I used ZBrush to add more geometry and details. To texture the creature, I used shader based on the Sigma2 node. I really like this SSS shader - results are quite strong although it seems to be slower than FastSkin. |
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Mancubus: To get the right poses and textures for the soldiers I took a lot of photos. I was working on this project mostly at night after work, so my amateur photo sessions took place in one room without proper lighting, etc., which resulted in most of the pictures being unusable. Those that I did use needed quite a lot of work in Photoshop, but it still saved a lot of time when modeling all the details. |
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Mancubus: For the red flare smoke, I used standard LightWave particles and HyperVoxels, in case the scene was going to be animated later. I added some smudging to the bottom of the smoke afterwards. |
Mancubus: For the composition/post I split the render into a few passes (beauty, depth and occlusion) and rendered out the smoke, sky and creature separately. I put them all together in Fusion. That allowed me to render out parts of the final picture and make test renders faster without rendering the whole thing in one go. As for post work, I didn’t do much, just some color correction/chromatic aberration at the end. For the time I spend on this project, I'm pretty happy with the results. It was really nice study for composition and color mood.
NewTek spoke to Kevin "kevman" Phillips about KiWavers, a LightWave 3D user group in New Zealand that has been running since 1998. NewTek wanted to find out what makes the user group tick.
NewTek: Why did you start KiWavers?
kevman: Originally I just wanted to hang out with people who loved using LightWave as much as I did. Also, during this early time there was a number of people who would tell me that they were looking at LightWave for commercial use. However, there was no support in New Zealand to help people pick up the tools and get started. New Zealand had a big Autodesk community because of the architecture business here, so there were always 3DS people around. I saw plenty of ship-jumping to another application that people felt was more 'supported'. Since I used LightWave for a few years before the group, I could help with most of the problems that people were having with LightWave, which usually involved a simple misunderstanding of a tool or task. I also felt LightWave generally didn't get the kudos it deserved. However, there was enough praise for LightWave to help me steer my direction with the user group into not only a networking environment for CG artists, but as a support network that encouraged people to start discovering what they could really do with this tool.
NewTek: What keeps the user group going?
kevman: Well, first and foremost its free to the general community at large. It always has been, and I even offer drinks and snacks each meeting (some people also occasionally contribute to the mix of munchies). Though I don't believe that too many people come along just for the free Coca-Cola. Tutorials are a usual part of the meetings, and are the aspect that kick-started the first couple of years' worth of meetings. I think now for many, it’s the chance to socially catch up with people once a month, and definitely having an opportunity to talk LightWave and 3D all night long. I encourage people to show their work off whenever possible - it gets really interesting hearing about what went into a project when people bring in work for a bit of show-n-tell. These also tend to trigger questions, and then most likely that results into me running a demonstration or tutorial for about an hour. It is a valuable resource for many who come along to learn, share and be inspired by others. For me, it is something I've worked hard to build, and I've done it for so long now it is part of my lifestyle.
NewTek: Is there anything else that you'd like to add?
kevman: After a twelve year wait, I've finally created a proper Web site for KiWavers. I'm pleased as I've talked about it for close to five to six years but never really bothered to put time into it. Instead, I used the free (but limiting) geocities.com. Then I opted for a mailing list at yahoo instead to manage the online presence for the group. I'm hoping, like the meetings, this site can be an additional way to bond the users across the rest of the country together.
Don't forget: if you have a usergroup, make sure the newsletter knows about it.
NewTek saw that a new version of vRoom was out so quickly after 1.0 was released. NewTek asked author Luke Whitehorn what prompted the new release:
I was knocking up a render and I noticed that other buildings in the plate were pretty dark inside and you couldn't actually see anything. Thus, I have made it so that if vRoom fails to find any interior images to look up, it will just render a color that the user specifies. The user can also apply a random +/- hue and brightness variance.
The results are impressive. (The real building is the fake-looking one on the left). vRoom is available here.
Stephen "Monovich" Fitzgerald recently told us about one of his latest jobs:
My job was to create monolithic HALO letters and then animate fly-throughs through them. The letters were supposed to be metallic, but beat up from years of being out in space. Once I got the base meshes done in Modeler, I took them to 3D Coat and sculpted a bunch of damage onto the forms.
After that, I brought them back into LightWave where I lit, animated and rendered them. One interesting aspect to this project was that I handled the initial work in my office on XP64, then FTP'ed it up to Seattle where I used WebEx to remotely set up a nine Octo-Mac LWSN render farm on OSX. It was a bit of a crazy pipeline, but the rendering was done much faster by using their CPU muscle, and it saved upload and download times for the rendered frames, which were at least 20 MB each.All of the passes were output with EXR Trader and edited/comped by Loaded up in Seattle.
It's always good to know about new job opportunities and as a service to the hardest-working bunch of freelance artists out there, here are a few that might interest people seeking more stable employment:
SENIOR TEXTURE ARTIST - WARDEVIL PROJECT Digi-Guys (London, UK)
LightWave animators and generalists at LittleLoud.com (Brighton, UK)
VSP (very special person) wanted by ClockworkVFX (Dubai, UAE)
Technical artist at IGT (Reno, USA)
If you are looking for work, make sure you post to the Resume section on the NewTek forum.
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