• LightWave CORE
• Project News: Animal Armageddon
• Python and Qt resources
• Picture of the Month
• Project news: World Builder
• Plugins: Jovian
• Project news
• It's Art contest
   

A crazy couple of weeks in February led up to NewTek revealing LightWave CORE, a new version of LightWave 3D. With clues and puzzles scattered over several days, the speculation was rampant in NewTek forums (the NewTek Core? thread has 9,231 posts and 392,933 views as of Friday March 6th), and in 3D forums around the world. NewTek forum members even took to redesigning their avatars by adding the pertinent elements of the CORE teaser page, namely the "under construction" yellow and black stripes and a big red button. This process became known as "hazarding" and those that did it became "the hazarders". This painstakingly-assembled collage of avatars by forum member LAV (Gianandrea Ghirri) shows 306 hazarders: CORE is a completely new 3D platform that aims to completely change 3D. Have a look at the CORE site for more information and video.




One of the shots that really stood out was the Acanthodian fish swimming around an underwater mount (last image above). NewTek asked Jennifer how such a shot was made:

Just look at clips from the show


If you've read a bit on the NewTek forums about CORE, and you've scanned the CORE Web site youl know that Python and Qt (pronounced "cute") have a big future in the LightWave world. Check out the threads on these topics:

HardCORE members only:

• Jay Roth Q&A: Tools.
• Qt Designer / CSS / Core Theming
• I want to share what I know about Python... :^D
  

And here's an introductory video by Matt Gorner about using Qt Designer to create interfaces:
Video Tutorial: Getting Ready to Theme Core (QT H.264 47MB RAR Achive)

This month's picture is Muriel, here's Mauro telling us the origins of the picture:

Her name is Muriel. She passed away last year and she was a great person, that kind of person who knows to take advantage of life has the best. Always with a supportive word and always with a beautiful story of life as example to help people... I miss her... About the work... A lot of LightWave modeling and skin detailing generated in ZBrush. There is a displacement map used only like bump and another one of Tangent to work as details. Simple Skin for Skin (of course) and FiberFX to the cloth. A directional light and an area light and a gradient texture used like ambient light and some radiosity. [editor's note: Muriel is not a real person, but Mauro talks about her like this to "bring her to life"]

World Builder is a fantastic short film by Bruce '405' Branit. NewTek spoke to him about the project: [It] was a personal project. For me and also for my company BranitVFX. I had not shot anything or done anything creative on my own for a while. This idea had been manifesting in my head for a few years. I did a little bit of freelance work on Sin City for CafeFX and it occurred to me that we were all using the same software and skills for this feature, so the time seemed right to shoot this myself. We shot it all in one long day because that's all I could afford, and even that was using favors and free time of a lot of awesome crew. Was the reference to Sin City about the fact that it was a 'virtual' film, all on greenscreen? Yes the reference to Sin City is that it was almost entirely a green screen shoot with everything else being CGI. World Builder only the actors are real. There is no location, it was entirely greenscreen. Even the room at the end is all CGI down to the bedside table. The street scene looks very European? The location is sort of a mix of Italy and Paris. I built buildings off of lots of reference including pictures my wife and I took in Paris and some more off of a friend's Italy pics. How long did it take to make? I worked on it for about two years on and off mostly by myself. When work would get too much, it would sit abandoned for three to five months at a time. In the end I had two guys help with some building modeling and one shot I didn't get that I decided I needed was mo-caped by the Dave School. I did all the editing, compositing, shot design, animation and TD. It was shot in spring of 05 and it was basically finished in late summer of 07. It did a few festivals before that date. You never finish something like this, you just keep tinkering with it. But I eventually got permanently too busy with real work, so I called it done.

You can watch World Builder at both Vimeo and YouTube. At Vimeo you can download a 960*540 version that is even higher in detail. The New York Times covered the story too

Ken Nign's excellent replacement colour picker for Windows LightWave (referenced in our January newsletter) is now available from www.joviancolorpicker.com/. Jovian is free of charge for the basic version for Windows 32/64-bit, but the licensed version gives access to additional features (Zooming in the Image Picker (shown); Multi-Click Sampling in the Image Picker; The Swatch Library and Gamma Correction).

February Projects*
Hotel for Dogs (film)
Chuck in 3D (TV series)
Animal Armageddon (TV series)
Deadliest Warriors (TV series)
World in Conflict: Soviet Assault (game cinematic)
Buratino nuotykiai (short animation)
Freixenet commercial (CLIO winner)
Marc Ecko Unltd sneaker commercial
*If we don't know about it we can't put it in here, so let us know

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