LightWave™ NEWSLETTER
ONLINE EDITION
March - 2010
In this edition:
- Update from Jay Roth
- VES Awards
- "Avatar," VAD and LightWave
- 3D World issue 128
- Plugin news: HOT Ocean Toolkit
- Picture of the Month
- Tutorial: Stereoscopic 3D in OpenGL in Layout
- Project news: "Blue hippy cat" Avatar review
- Plugin news: Volumedic 2
March 30, 2010
Dear LightWave® Community:
It's been a banner month for high-profile projects using LightWave 3D®. Since my last update, LightWave® artists at Zoic received numerous awards from the Visual Effects Society for the creation of visual effects for the television series, "V," which airs March 30 on ABC. "Avatar," the highest grossing film of all time and winner of several Academy Awards®, including "Best Art Direction" and "Best Visual Effects," relied on LightWave 3D to create the 3D assets in the Virtual Art Department (VAD) for the virtual world of Pandora.
We are pleased that Rob Powers, creator and supervisor of the VAD for "Avatar," has joined the NewTek team, bringing his comprehensive experience with real-world professional production and LightWave knowledge to the company. One of Rob's many roles moving forward, will be to work closely with me and the LightWave development team to help guide and influence the future development of LightWave 3D.
LightWave with CORE Technology continues to evolve. Listening to the community is central to our development success. This month, the HardCORE community had many great suggestions on selection workflow. As a result, we are changing how we approach selection functionality within LightWave with CORE Technology. Our ongoing interchange with the HardCORE community remains invaluable to LightWave development. We appreciate the community's passion and commitment to this process.
Speaking of the HardCORE community, our members have been very active behind the scenes, delivering impressive images using LightWave with CORE Technology. The images below highlight some of the projects being created by HardCORE members using LightWave with CORE Technology.
 |
 |
|
| Alien leg with transparency and refraction. Created in LightWave Modeler, detailed in ZBrush and rendered in VPR by Boris Goreta. | Instanced Jotero Ajax mesh with radiosity in VPR rendered by Boris Goreta. | |
 |
 |
|
| Maserati modeled by Elvis Blazencic in LightWave Modeler and rendered with the car paint node in VPR by Boris Goreta. | Maserati modeled by Elvis Blazencic, node flow with geometry in LightWave with CORE Technology interface by Boris Goreta. |
Are you interested in becoming a member of the HardCORE Community? By joining today, you can receive substantial savings on software and be a key influence in the development of LightWave 3D technology, now and in the future.
We remain focused on delivering a solid, tested, and stable new version of LightWave — one that continues to offer you improved features and functionality in the familiar LightWave UI, plus workflow you count on to get the job done. As always, we appreciate your continued support and commitment to the next-generation LightWave 3D with CORE Technology, as we continue to strengthen LightWave's Emmy® Award-winning features and functionality.
Jay Roth
President, 3D Division
NewTek, Inc.
On February, 28, 2010, the eighth annual Visual Effects Society awards took place at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles, California. The VES is an organization representing visual effects artists in all branches of the entertainment industry. NewTek congratulates Zoic Studios and NBC/Universal who took home awards for the following projects:
Zoic created the fantastic opener for CSI series 10 that rightly won an award:
Outstanding Supporting Visual Effects in a Broadcast Program
CSI Crime Scene Investigation - Ep. 1001 Opening Sequence
While the excellence of this piece is mainly due to the superb compositing work under a severe deadline, the 3D in the opening sequence is LightWave. Have a look:
Zoic also won for their beautiful work on the remake of "V".
Outstanding Created Environment in a Broadcast Program or Commercial
V – Pilot "Atrium and Ship Interiors"
Chris Zapara, Chris Irving, David Morton, Trevor Adams
NBC/Universal received a VES award for outstanding work on the multi-award winning series Battlestar Galactica:
Outstanding Visual Effects in a Broadcast Series
Battlestar Galactica Season 4 -Ep. 421 "Daybreak"
Michael Gibson, Gary Hutzel, Jesse Toves, Dave Morton
Avatar VAD Viperwolf Trail Environment modeled and textured in LightWave 3D and displayed in a real-time OpenGL pipeline using Motionbuilder. Images © Twentieth Century Fox
"Avatar" captured the attention of the world and The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences with multiple Oscar® wins, and is the highest grossing film of all time. Of course, building the worlds of Pandora required a new way of working in Hollywood - and the creation of a completely new system called a Virtual Art Department (VAD). Devised by Rob Powers and his team of artists, VAD is a real-time, interactive workflow that harmoniously integrated NewTek LightWave 3D® with other software tools, such as MotionBuilder and Vue, to deliver assets that would become the virtual world of Pandora. "LightWave's integration with programs like Vue and Motionbuilder worked so seamlessly for me, that is was a no brainer - I had everything I needed at my fingertips," explained Powers.
"Directors are really good at live-action shooting, because they can see the actors' performance in the environment in real-time," said Powers. "With effects-heavy and animated films, all that goes out the window, because they are in an unnatural workspace, where they have to wait months or years to see the final shots. When decisions are deferred for months at a time, as part of the post-production process, it becomes a filmmaking process that is not only alien and disenfranchising to their creativity, but also expensive and time-consuming."
Avatar VAD Hometree ground level Environment modeled and textured in LightWave 3D and displayed in a real-time OpenGL pipeline using Motionbuilder. Images © Twentieth Century Fox
The Virtual Art Department for "Avatar" was a complex pipeline, where almost all the assets were created in LightWave® using polygonal geometry, and textures baked in LightWave's renderer. Powers chose LightWave because as the initial artist on James Cameron's team at LightStorm, it was the smartest choice for him. "LightWave has advanced radiosity, high dynamic range, ambient occlusion, soft shadows, and beautiful lighting that we baked into the textures," explained Powers. "We were able to incorporate LightWave's renderer by baking its beautiful lighting into the texture maps used on our 3D models. This made the MotionBuilder real-time display look much more appealing for production. The efficient workflow in VAD gave Cameron a real-time workspace, and the flexibility to make changes on the fly - a process that was previously unheard of in the creation of CG-laden movies. As live characters on the motion-capture stage were being shot, Cameron could see CG representations of the aliens and environments in real-time, in-camera. He used these CG assets for composition and blocking.
Using the environments created in the VAD, Cameron and his team delivered to Weta Digital, a detailed template that invoked all the art direction, lighting, composition, camera motions and placement, plus performances that Cameron wanted. Recently, Powers joined NewTek as director of entertainment and media development. Acting as a liaison between studios, 3D artists and NewTek, Powers will be sharing the benefits of LightWave with the visual effects community, as well as communicating the studios' and artists' needs to the NewTek LightWave 3D development team.
See Rob Powers' interview on "Good Morning San Antonio", where he discusses his role in the creation of "Avatar" and the use of LightWave 3D in the Virtual Art Department.
Avatar VAD Biolum Falls Environment modeled and textured in LightWave 3D and displayed in a real-time OpenGL pipeline using Motionbuilder. Images © Twentieth Century Fox
NewTek spoke to 3D World magazine editor, Steve Jarratt, about the lead feature in the current issue of the magazine, covering Andrew Comb (forum name "Tobian") and his five-year project to build a space station inside and out:"I'd been watching the progress of the Pluto Station for some time and figured it would make a great tutorial/"making of" feature in the magazine. As the images came in we realised that it would also make a great cover too! Andrew has worked tirelessly to get us the right images and text, and I think it's really turned out brilliantly. It's a real testament to Andrew's skill and patience, and I hope we've done it some justice in the mag." - Steve Jarratt
The issue also has great articles on color theory and linear workflow and is well worth getting. 3D World issue 128 has been on UK newsstands since 10th March. International dates vary.
NewTek found a new plugin to create the swell of the ocean in LightWave and wanted to know more, so we asked the author David Ballesteros about it:
| What drove you to write this plugin? We needed it for a project. At the studio where I work, Somnis Animation, we needed something to generate realistic oceans easily. Searching on the web, I found the Houdini Ocean Toolkit. A couple of days after I found it, another user on the forums posted a request for a LightWave version, so I downloaded it and had a look at the code. It looked simple enough to port it to LightWave. Appearances can be a little deceiving. Drew Whitehouse the original author of Houdini Ocean Toolkit made his code independent of Houdini, and therefore it can be easily used on other 3D programs. More than an experiment it has been fun to port, really. Especially when I first saw the waves displacing in Layout after a few hours of coding. How easy has it been to port? Well less difficult than I expected. I had a lot of help from Mike Wolf when I found a problem, especially with how LightWave likes to do certain things internally. I found some caveats on the porting, like multithreading problems, so I needed to solve those in the "fastest" way possibleperhaps not the most "elegant" or correct way. An Open Source plugin for LightWave is quite unusual. How's that going to work? While it's not the first Open Source plugin for LightWave, I think it's the first one with a complete manual, content and its own forums, so people can start working with it and contribute to its development. |
|
||||
| Open source projects usually have a group of people working on them. Did anyone else help you with HOT ocean aside from Michael Wolf? Yes, in particular Mikael Burman (Cageman) and Lino Grandi (lino.grandi) were testing the plugin, doing renders and scenes for the content. My boss Jesus Martinez Tormo was testing as well and providing help with the surfacing of some of the examples. David Forstenlechner from the LightWave Development team was really helpful in answering a couple of questions about LightWave multithreading. Last, but not least, Jameel Halabi (JAY3D) was kind enough to answer a couple of questions about multithreading as well, and making a few suggestions for future improvements. http://code.google.com/p/hotocean4lw/ |
|
This month's Picture of the Month award goes to a still by LightWave artist Iain Collins, however, if you check the thread URL, you'll see that from the offset this image would be disqualified since while the modeling was in LightWave, the final render was Maxwell. A couple of the posters on the thread wondered if Iain could work his magic with the LightWave renderer as a comparison and it's this LightWave version we celebrate. Have a look at the thread and see how you think the two versions compare.
LightWave's ability to preview Motion Blur/Depth of Field in OpenGL is a pretty cool tool. Sven (Red Oddity on the forum) takes it even further by using this ability to create toe-in anaglyphic stereo in OpenGL. Make sure you read the forum thread to get additional info about this great technique. Only the first part is included in the newsletter, so make sure you watch both.
|
For three weeks, mystery surrounded just who had made the YouTube sensation of Gregmutt and his views on Avatar. All that was known was that the character was rigged in XSI and the rendering was all LightWave. Finally, forum user Pooby - the prime suspect for having done this - 'fessed up and we got him to tell us the whole story: Paul (Pooby) Smith: I have recently been doing a lot of work in facial rigging for games, TV and film, etc. I work with the Audiomotion mocap guys a lot. Audiomotion had a couple of free days with everything set up for full performance work and they asked me if I wanted to do something. I was going to do a test from my film, but I couldn't get everything ready in time. Instead I suggested doing this Na'vi-style Dog who liked "Avatar" but hated the Na'vi 'cats' to Mick, Audiomotion's Boss. It was one of those ideas that I'd usually just laugh at, then not do because it's too 'throwaway'. But Mick found it hilarious and said,"You HAVE to do this" and I thought - why not? I realized that its "throwawayness" was also what would make it surprising and fresh.
I set out to make it shoddy-looking. In other words, it had to look badly shot, no real lighting. Not rehearsed or slick, etc. Equally, I had to make Greg as realistic as I could in terms of performance and look. It wasn't really meant as a comedy, as such. Greg makes jokes, but they are a bit rubbish and immature. It was designed solely to make people freak out when they randomly stumbled across him. I had seen lots of amateur reviews of "Avatar" on YouTube so there was a lot of reference - I like that idea of just causing mischief on YouTube.
On the day of motion capture, I met the actor, Dawson James, who I'd found through a friend of a friend. I only got in contact with Dawson two days previously - it could have all gone horribly wrong, but he was brilliant. He came up with loads of alternate versions of Greg, from Keanu Reeves types to super-dorks. I picked one and we just spent the afternoon capturing take after take, using my script that I'd written on the train on the way up. We added and edited bits and arrived at the final you see.
Back in my studio, I awaited the data. I butchered one of my models of Audrey Hepburn to make Greg's head. Grabbed the arms and teeth from one of Lee Perry Smith's models. I spent a couple of days getting all the shading working on Greg in LightWave.
Then once I had the c3d mocap data I built a rig in XSI that would read it all. The body was easy; the fingers quite tricky and the face was where I dedicated the most time - the face rig took about six days and is relatively sophisticated.
Basically, I see it that I engineer a machine (rig) that takes Dawson's input and converts it visually to Greg as the output. The trick is to lose none of the performance. I wanted to make it as automatic as possible. The only thing keyed is the eyes and basic extra contact on the lips, here and there.
Once all the animation was done, I exported the parts of Greg out as MDD - face, eyes, teeth, shirt, arms, etc., and also exported moving nulls that record skin stretching on the face in their channels.
In LightWave, I use Denis Pontonnier's plugin, MDD Pointer, to read the MDD files. I then have normal displacement that has layers whose opacities are linked to channels of the nulls that are exported from XSI. This drives creases and wrinkles in the skin.
Those wrinkles were painted in Photoshop! (I just find it faster than ZBrush) The Simple Skin node is used for surfacing Greg's face and arms.
Fprime was used for rendering with three GI bounces.
The whole project took about four weeks for the first one, with the subsequent ones taking about two days each.
You haven't heard the last from Gregmutt... |
There are no polygons in the beetle, it's a purely volumetric object.
NewTek spoke to Elmar Moelzer, from Media Studio Graz in Austria, about the latest version of their superb volumetric object plugin for LightWave 3D:
How has VoluMedic 2 been improved over the previous release?
The changes we made for version 2.0 of VoluMedic were massive. If I was to list all of them, it would probably burst the scope of this interview, since we really covered every aspect of the application. Here are just a few: we added a Wizard to make the application easier for beginners to use; we added new segmentation functionality - imagine the Photoshop Magic Wand tool working in 3D; 3D filtering for Volume data; we have added measurement tools, with measurement results that can be saved into a database and exported to a CSV Table; and there are tons of smaller improvements like better memory management (some datasets now use 75% less memory than they did before).
Is VoluMedic just for medical imagery?VoluMedic is not just for medical imaging. We've got a growing client base in non-destructive testing and material sciences because micro- and even nano- CTs are standard tools for this, nowadays. You can do reverse engineering that way, as well. We have biologists, who use data from micro CT scans of insects and series of laser microscopic or confocal microscopic images with VoluMedic to create stunning images of small and even microscopic things. Geologists also use micro CT scanners today. They also have seismic and drilling data as well as ground radar and even ultrasound devices that can result in volumetric data sets for use with VoluMedic.
On the medical side, there is a university that uses VoluMedic with a series of histological cuts. These are then scanned and VoluMedic is used to reassemble the whole bodypart again out of the resulting series of images. The organ can then be resliced from any axis using VoluMedic. This technique is also used by geologists and biologists. It is a rather inexpensive and straight forward method to create high resolution volume data in color. The process is quite slow, though. A quite famous example of a large project that used this very technique was the Visible Human project.
VoluMedic v2.0 can be purchased here.
Discussion thread for this edition of the newsletter on the NewTek forum
Tell us about your projects
We welcome all feedback to help improve this newsletter. We would love to include your story in the next one. If you came to this page by word of mouth and would like to receive notification of future newsletters, visit your account and check the "NewTek's monthly newsletter" box.
