- LightWave development news
- Project news: Fishdog
- Project news: Seether - Breakdown
- Web news: PSC competition
- Web news: LWplugindb
- Picture of the month
- Plugin news: VeggiPaint
- LWO Importer for Adobe Photoshop®
- Plugin news: Brushwave
- Web news: LightWiki
Happy Holiday 3D News from NewTek. Learn what's new in the upcoming of release of LightWave. Jay Roth, president 3D division, talks about the latest developments here.
Project news: Fishdog for Volkswagen Spacefox
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Fishdog – Volkswagen Spacefox
- Post Production & CGI: Bitt animation + VFX
- VFX Supervisors: Franco Bittolo-Cristian Morales
- VFX Executive Producers: Mariana Motta - Fernando Rey Goyena
- VFX Production Coordinator: Maite Colombatto
- CG Director: Cristian Morales
- CG Artists: Mauro Corveloni, Leo Dobbins, Ariel García, Ignacio Ochoa, Juan José Sánchez
- Compositing: Pablo Zamparini
- Additional Compositing: Juan Rainieri, Santiago Caffarena
- Matte Painting: Pablo Kousovitis
This amazing ad was put together in LightWave. NewTek asked Maurocor Corveloni, one of the lead CG artists on the production about his production company's work on the piece.
How long did the project take?
The project took about five weeks to be done.
What tools were used?
The fishdog was modeled directly in Modeler, inspired by a sketch previously approved by the client. For surfacing we started using nodes to achieve the best results but as we didn't have much time to finish the project we changed to classic surfaces and got similar results with faster render time. For lighting and rendering we used Radiosity – Final Gather with two indirect bounces and always a directional or area light as the main light in the scene. We also used a polygon plane with the live action projected as ground for each shot.
For deformations in general we used classic rigging tools like bones combined to good weight map setups and endomorphs.
The tracking of the camera was made directly in Layout during the rotoscoping process using the live action footage as background.
Which, was the most difficult shot to work on?
Actually we had two difficult shots in this work. The first one was an animation issue, specifically in the shot where the dog takes the tennis ball from the mouth of the guy. The dog neck is higher and the fish doesn’t have any neck so we had a interesting problem to solve in this case. But at the end we were pleased with the final result.
The other challenge was with the lighting of the close-up shot where the fish is “barking”. It was a complex lighting scene because it is really close to the camera. It took a long time and many lighting tests were done but we finally got it and it looked amazingly real.
What sort of fish was the fishdog based on?
It is based on a fish called Tarpon ( Sábalo in spanish ). It is a big fish with huge scales and a large mouth.
How did you achieve the graduation from fish scales into dog fur?
A UV map was created for the model and the textures were based in photos from the dog and fish. That was the first step to achieve the right texture transition between both. But the compositing team certainly made the transition work.
Were the underwater shots completely LightWave?
Yes, the underwater shots were created completely in Lightwave. There are two shots where the fishdog is entirely 3D: the one where he takes a pee and the scene where he swims by are completely CG. In the first case background is a matte painting and in the second one all background is 3D, including water, rocks and the extra fish.
Will the ad be shown outside Brazil?
Unfortunately it will be not. This ad was created specially to the Brazilian marketing. But it is becoming very popular and we are sure it will be seen for a lot of people around the world via the Internet.
Project news: Seether - Breakdown music video
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Seether - Breakdown
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A Rubik's cube is traditionally regarded as really hard to rig in 3D, so how was it done here? Some of the shots required the cube to track to the actor's head (using Synth Eyes). Because these shots almost always involved spinning a face on only one axis, we reverted to normal parent-based, HPB rotations, which freed the cube to move and rotate freely in space while still having the rows spin as needed. There was one long shot that required moving/rotating the cube in space, multiple axis rotations, and some spins more than 360 degrees. In that case, we had to be very careful with the keyframes, and by the end of the shot, we were severely battling gimbal lock on some of the faces. As I said before, the surfacing was usually reset for every shot, as each cut usually used different footage. The base rig had cubic mapping for each face, which allowed us to quickly apply a pre cropped sequence to a 3x3 array of faces, or realistically chop that image up if applied to a subset of faces. We used Worley's trusty Taft plugin for the parts that magically lined up to the camera. Sticky Front Projection was especially helpful on the shots where the face had to align to the screen while spanning different sides of the cube. There were over 15,000 frames of greenscreen that needed to be precomped and cropped to fit onto the cube, all of which had to be done before we could render a single frame. How long did the whole job take? |
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Web news: presetcentral competition
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NewTek talked to Ben Haines, the founder of psc (presetcentral) to find out how the new site has been going: New psc features include:
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NewTek spoke to Ken Nign about his site:
"I started the LWPluginDB after hearing from other LightWave users that they would like to have a plugin repository. I also wanted to create a site that would provide many search options and would have RSS feeds that would let users know about new plugins. I've also prided myself on being responsive to users' input, most recently by adding a Categories page and by implementing a plugin rating system.
"After registering an account, anyone can add a new plugin entry. The entry can be for their plugin or someone else's. In addition to the plugin details the entry can also contain up to two images in .jpeg, .png or .gif format. These images can help show what the plugin does. An author can choose to upload their plugins and have them hosted on the site. Or if they have their own site for hosting they can instead put a link to their page in the entry. At the moment, the most prolific plugin author is D-Storm with 73 entries."
Pumpkinhead by Lino Grandi (Lino Grandi)
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http://www.newtek.com/forums/showthread.php?t=92516
Lino says: “I did the low-poly modeling, rigging and surfacing in about four days of work. Fabrizio Bortolussi worked on the sculpting in ZBrush, applied in LightWave using nodal displacement. The Simple Skin material node and some procedurals were used for texturing, and for the rigging I used the new bone muscles from the open beta of 9.5.1.”
As a special treat we have not one, but two pictures of the month this month if the last one wasn't festive enough for you. Otacon is well-known to LightWave forum goers everywhere with his dedication to brilliance in his artwork, so it's no surprise that his Santa should be our second image:
Santa by Jason Lee (Otacon)
http://www.newtek.com/forums/showthread.php?t=92550
Jason says: “I used regular layer surfaces, I still haven't really gotten into nodes that much. The Santa and sleigh sides are UV mapped. I wanted the Santa to have a painted look, sort of imperfect edges, so I kept that in mind when painting the UV.
“I used the perspective camera with a zoom of 40mm, fstop 2.0. AA was 5 passes, adaptive sampling was .03. There still is a little noise in the blurry areas, but I don't think it's possible to get it perfectly smooth.”
NewTek spoke to the author of this plugin, Johan Walfridson.
VeggiPaint is designed to make large-scale outdoor scenes feasible by “instancing” foliage or other repeating elements.
Why did you write VeggiPaint?
I started working on it after I investigated what options users had when creating geometry for instancing with HDinstance or Kray. Spraying points, emitting points to a collision object, using BG conform and so on. I wanted something where you could see directly how the finished result would look like. For this I needed a very fast 3D engine and that's where PIM came into the picture.
Is there a Mac version planned?
Currently there's no Mac version planned.
How does the KRay/HDInstancing work?
VeggiPaint writes HDInstance and Kray settings when writing the scene file used by Layout. You can get a Windows 32/64-bit demo or purchase it from here: http://veggipaint.walen.se/
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VeggiPaint was used for the vegetation, cars and people in the scene
Sebastian Smolak www.atlantis-arts.com
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If you have Adobe Photoshop CS3 extended or CS4 extended, you can go to your user account at My Downloads and get yourself a plugin for Photoshop that will allow you to directly load a LightWave LWO object into Photoshop without needing to convert to OBJ or another format. Subpatches are not supported, so freeze geometry before use in Photoshop, but multiple UV maps are making LWO a better choice for texturing than OBJ.
Brushwave is a NPR plugin written by a German max user called Daniel Sperl.
NewTek asked him why exactly a max user was writing great LightWave plugins?
You are right, it does not seem quite logical that I am listing max instead of Lightwave in my list of applications ;)
Well, the reason is that my LightWave knowledge is indeed very limited; I know LightWave more "from the inside" (from a developer's perspective) than from a user's / graphic designer's perspective. The reason is that the company that asked me to implement the plugin needed it for LightWave. To develop the plugin, I acquired some basic knowledge about how to work with LightWave and collaborated tightly with graphic designers who work day-in day-out with LightWave, so that the interface would fit their needs. As a developer, I concentrated on learning the API I needed for the plugin.
My max knowledge, however, is the other way round: I have worked with it as a user, but do not know its internals; I have not written a plugin for max (and as far as I know, it's more complicated than writing one for LightWave).
There are Windows 32 and 64-bit versions, available but are you planning a Mac version?
That depends on the feedback I get from the windows version – as I have switched to an iMac recently, it's not that unrealistic ;)
http://www.incognitek.com/redge/projects/brushwave
Check out, www.lightwiki.com, a community collaborative effort to gather written LightWave tutorials and history from the very first versions of LightWave back in 1990 to the latest release in 2008. Editing is open to anyone and gallery pages are available to LightWave users without a website of their own. Tutorials range from nuts and bolts ways to install and use LightWave, to more complex treaties on using Screamernet on the UB Mac version or learning how to use images in LightWave effectively.
Is this newsletter missing something for you? All feedback gratefully received to make it better or 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. Which way is up? Current version: LightWave v9.5 (Windows), LightWave 9.3.1 (OS X)
