The film’s creator, Brendan Bellomo, age 24, has been working with LightWave for twelve years. Bohemibot took Bellomo two years to create, including five months of pre-production and CGI R&D. It took two weeks to shoot the live action on a Panavision F900 CineAlta, provided by a grant from Panavision. Then it took 18 months to complete post-production. It involved nearly 80 artists working on a total of 450 VFX shots, with Brendan doing approximately half of the work for each of the 450 VFX shots himself. In addition to executing his own shots, he supervised editorial, the other FX artists and the sound designers and composers. The Panavision F900 CineAlta allowed the Bohemibot team to shoot uncompressed 1920x1080 24P footage straight into a Mac Pro running a RAID on set. This was the same camera/lens system used for “Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones” and “Battlestar Galactica.”

95 percent of Bohemibot's VFX were made with LightWave, primarily v9. FPrime 2 and then 3 was used for rendering. Some of the 80 artists working on the project around the world used other 3D packages for some of the animation, which were then shaded, lit and rendered in LightWave 3D.

NewTek asked Brendan what the process was to get to the Oscars: "First, I had to submit it to the regional coordinator. Then, they pick up to three regional winners per category. After that, winners from the regional finalists go on to become the national winners (one from each of three regions). Finally, the national winners are ranked gold, silver and bronze. We won bronze on Saturday!  Members of A.M.P.A.S.®, who also vote on the Oscars, vote on the Student Oscars.  So, it is a great honor and I am so excited.  Actor Gary Oldman presented the awards for the narrative category.  It was amazing to meet him, as he is one of my favorite actors." 

• Support for HyperVoxels in interactive preview mode (requires LightWave v9.6)
• Support for LW's new light types. FPrime now renders Dome, Spherical and Photometric lights in both interactive and render modes. Fourth party light types are not officially supported
• Support for Unpremultiplied RGB output in FPrime Render mode. Alpha Format must be set to Umpremultiply Alpha in the Render Globals->Output panel
• Support for surface and object picking in the FPrime Preview window (requires LightWave v9.5 or greater)
• Improved Node support for latest versions of LightWave

NewTek spoke to Craig 'RebelHill' Monins about his outstanding rigging work - the source of much discussion on the forums.

NewTek: There is an opinion that says LightWave can't do Character Animation, yet your rig is a thing of beauty. What is the disconnect between these two versions of reality?
 

Craig: Without wishing to sound too harsh... ignorance. No tool is capable of anything unless you know how to use it. Really, I think it is simply that character rigging can be mired pretty deep in complexity and technicality. Once you get into doing more than simple IK setup, and begin to do things like space switching, dynamic reparenting and stuff, you need to understand the system underneath the co-ordinate system. This gets a little techy/math geeky in its nature. LightWave is very much a point and click/menu drop down interface, which doesn't immediately lend itself to thinking in that fashion. I imagine in another 3D application, with its scripting, CA has taken off because fellas who know a lot about math would find ways to do all these things in an instant with that interface. However, everyone caught in between starts to see a disconnect between the two ways of working, and the myth evolves from there. But, once you take a look under LightWave's hood, and find out how it handles all of this technical backend, it actually becomes a very accessible package for doing character setup, precisely because of the simpler (and very consistent) interface.

Once you have a good enough rig for the work at hand... CA is just translate/rotate/tweak graphs/... and LightWave does that just as well as any other package. Frankly, you can do CA with a pen and paper if you wanted... I think LightWave is MORE than capable.

NewTek: How long have you been using LightWave?

Craig: Umm... since V6... 2001, I think. I started out with an "unofficial" copy. After about three months of clicking buttons at random, and figuring out nothing other than how to deform a sphere to make something that could conceivably be a potato, I thought "gah, I can’t figure this out.” I bought a legit copy for no other reason than to get my hands on the manual. I became much better after that. Remember kids... buy your software, it comes with instructions!

NewTek: Where do you work?

Craig: I work freelance, usually remote, sometimes on-site, mainly doing character rigging and anim. (Always looking for new gigs too, by the way, nudge, nudge, wink, wink). I've done two gigs for video games, which were fun, because the technical requirements are different. There are no whacky compensation morphs allowed, and you have to keep things light. The gig in the reel, the games engine loaded LWS files natively... so LightWave is out there in the games world. To be honest, with scene description formats being what they are now, I think that the 3D package is a little bit irrelevant (at least for some pipelines) as all you need to give the game is pre-made anims on bones, and there are a couple of ways to throw that kind of info between packages.

NewTek: How are the training videos coming along?

Craig: They're coming on great. I'm just finishing off the last sections on advanced skinning (not as hard as you think) and facial setup, which I'm having to make the morphs for. I really HATE modeling, it does my head in. But I should be finished this weekend(ish). I was also a product trainer for a few years on home electronics for retail staff, so I have a pretty good understanding of how to teach concepts rather than just specific tasks/features. Thus, the training is coming in two parts: a concepts section, that explores and explains all the controllers and options available in LightWave; and then a walk-through that puts them all into practice. Concepts, plus two character rigs: one cartoon, one human, plus skinning, plus facial setup. It's HUGE. Folks I know/have worked with have been asking me to do something like this for a few years now, I've just always been more of a tortoise than a hare.

Craig's LightWave rigging training videos will be on his site at http://www.rebelhill.net/ when they are ready and be sure to watch the YouTube video that started all the discussion.