• Marc Ecko Unltd sneaker commercial
• Plugin news: shaderMeister
• Cut&Paste
• Picture of the Month
• Speed animation challenge
• SPECapc for LightWave 3D 

NewTek spoke with Los Angeles-based LightWave artist David C. Bryant who has created effects for dozens of big blockbuster Hollywood films. He recently completed a smaller but no less heavy project as the sole 3D artist - the creation of a full herd of stampeding rhinos for the new "Marc Ecko:Unltd" sneaker television ad for X1FX in less than a month.

"When I heard that the client wanted a herd of fully photoreal CG rhinos for a TV spot in such a short period of time, I almost said no, you'll need more resources and more time.  But I've found that projects can often be simpler once you find out the details.  The fact that the ad was 30 seconds and would need three short shots of rhinos sounded do-able.  They would give us full access to the set to gather HDRI photography, and supervision of the shoot with regard for 3D tracking and greenscreen work.  And to be honest, I'd been looking for a project that would expand my skills in a new area.  For me, most of the fun in vfx work  is the continual learning.  Every project is somewhat unique and provides its own challenges.  I'd done some character animation before, but wanted to really dig in.  This seemed like a fun candidate.

I've used LightWave enough now as a generalist that I feel I can get to the finish line on time for any project, even if there's a lack of experience in one area.  I knew from helping to pre-vis Underdog that the Maestro plugin was a great choice for help with rigging, especially tricky rigs like quadrupeds.  And FPrime is fantastic at helping you find good radiosity settings in real-time. I think that I was able to dial in the HDRI lighting setup in under an hour and never really had to go back over it, allowing me to spend more time on motion cycles.  The final render was through FPrime as well.

Most of my time was spent tweaking the model to work best with weight maps and subd surfaces, creating morph targets for ear flops, body jiggle, tail bounces, and creating variations to size and weight for individual rhinos.  Oh and modeling the two versions of the sneaker for the end card."

David  Bryant is the founder of HeroVFX and is curently a Technical  Director  at  Scanline L.A. on  the movie 2012.

Frontface wireframe of the bone rig		Early LW comp for lighting/texturing tests

NewTek spoke to db&w's Michael Wolf about his new, essential tool for people who have a LightWave compositing pipeline: How did shaderMeister start? "Well, it started out as an addition I had planned for exrTrader V2.0 but during development I found out how versatile it would be." Who is your target audience? "Anybody who composites who needs passes that go beyond what LW provides natively. Or needs finer control." How does it simplify a compositing pipeline? "One thing that makes it stand out is that there is no need to save different objects just to switch its surfaces. As long as the shader plugin is applied, the surface can be modified using a global shading graph. And that is being saved with the scene. So you can set-up multiple scenes that all use the same objects, but shade them differently. Let me add that I'm amazed by the uses our beta testers have come up with. That has been a fun and interesting ride for us as well." shaderMeister

shaderMeister's shading overrides can be used to quickly create an ambient occlusion pass. Filtering options can isolate surfaces, in this example creating an RGB matte.

Cut&Paste is a marathon event organized around the world for artists to show their skills. At the Portland, Oregon event on March 9 2009, Stephen "monovich" Fitzgerald competed against three other contestants in the "Motion Design" category to create a 15-second animation from scratch - modeling, animating, rendering - in just eight hours. He won the grand prize for his excellent animation on the proposed theme "Reflections". Stephen was allowed to bring audio and four pre-made assets: "I brought a video clip, a picture of Portland, and a picture of Mount Hood. The theme was "reflections" and my idea was a set of hypothetical "what ifs", which of course happened to be true about Portland. The what ifs are: the rain; Powell's City Of Books; Stumptown Coffee; Zoobombing; Mount Hood; and Keep Portland Weird."

Stephen posted his thoughts on the event to NewTek's forum:

Shrox is a well-respected professional member of the NewTek forum, always ready with helpful advice. When he lamented that he was no longer excited by pedestrian CG and wanted to be excited again, this provoked another forum member, Ernest, to start a speed animation challenge to provide that excitement. I asked Ernest if he was inspired by forum user Iain's speed modelling challenges? "Haha! I wouldn't say 'inspired', I shamelessly copied Iain's speed modelling challenge and only altered a few things so it would fit an animation challenge." Ernest replied. "In that sense, and for many other reasons, I would not say that I started this. This was started by the community. The thread was already there in spirit. It just needed someone to push 'submit' and actually 'physicalize' it there but it could have been anyone. I'm sure that if it hadn't been me, it would have still appeared within a week's time. The critical mass was there."

I asked shrox how he felt about being the cause for this challenge? He replied: "I had no idea I was so influential, I shall try to use my power only for the good of mankind...all in all I think this should be pretty fun. I hope it really does inspire some great work from my fellow Lightwavers."

The deadline for the Speed animation challenge is July 20, so gentlefolk, start your engines!

This month's picture of the month is awarded on its technical merits. The honor goes to NewTek forum's Weepul - Bryce Taenzer - for his excellent rendition of a morel mushroom, and for his explanation of how the model was achieved: First make your general shape. The density and direction of your polygons will influence the density and direction of the resulting cells, so try to keep your mesh relatively uniform. Make it more dense than you want the cells to be. For this mushroom, I squished around a regular globe-type sphere using Drag Net, then used point merge with a small radius to get rid of the clumping at the poles. Then, apply point jitter with a small scale, just enough to break up the smoothness. This will help the next step produce more even polygons. Apply Reduce Polys +, with whatever goal value will make a mesh with as many points as you want cells. You will probably have to try multiple times. If you want, go through and clean up any resulting points that are too close to a polygon edge using Dissolve. Triple the mesh afterward. Select all points, then switch back to poly mode. Subdivide in Metaform mode. Switch back to point mode, invert selection, and in the point statistics panel, deselect any points except those connected to three polygons. (This is only necessary if your mesh is not watertight, otherwise you can just select all three poly points.) Unweld them. Back in poly mode, select all polys, and Merge Polys. Deselect all, and merge points. Delete any 0-poly points. You should now have a mesh of n-gons in a cellular pattern. Some might be flipped or deformed, so check for those. You might want to apply some point smoothing, or if you want a less dense mesh, you can delete any points connected to only two polygons (unless your mesh is not watertight, in which case exclude any open edges.) Then bevel or otherwise edit the mesh however you want (Catmull-Clark subdivisions will work well with the n-gons). The internal folds are created with nodal displacements controlled by weight maps.

SPECapc is a globally-respected benchmark for computing performance. Now there is a native LightWave 3D plug-in that reads a text file containing a series of instructions; executes them within LightWave 3D and records the timing of each command sent to LightWave 3D. It is available on our site and is designed to work with the release build of 9.6 (also available on the page). SPECapc for LightWave

"NewTek is proud to have LightWave included in the respected SPECapc suite of benchmarking tools for computationally-intensive applications. LightWave is a very computationally-intensive application, and using LightWave illustrates a real world use case that is about as accurate as can be to determine the actual performance of any hardware system.  Congratulations to db&w GBR for the creation of aspects of this benchmark - this was great work indeed." Jay Roth, president 3D division, NewTek Inc.

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