Messiah:Studio Notes for LW users

Messiah notes/tutes, "quickstart" for LW users

UV Grid Generator

Direct link to Kvaalen's UV grid generator from his resource page.

Kvaalen's resource page

- Pure DFX+ Explosion/Shockwave
- UV grid generator
- Hypervoxel presets
Includes: magic particles, electric ball, explosion, fire and bubbles.
- Muzzle flashes - using HVs
- Wood and Metal procedural surfaces

Liughting discussion - LOR chimes in

MK12 "Need for Speed" spots - article

With links to awesome quicktime clips for Need for Speed 2
and also links at bottom of article to the collaborator's sites, with more wicked demos well worth a look

Interview: MuscleTK and the Making of Leon

Also CGtalk thread for any questions - one of the guys in the thread worked on it.

CGtoolkit site for more info

Blender 2.36 is out

Taken from DLF email:

"version 2.36 blender is now out, its a free modeling/animation package,
and also open souce. this release was mainly a bug fix, trying to get
rid of all now bugs, even managed to fix one that has been there sence
version 1.48 :D a few new things have been included as well, such as
proper normal maps, now using 3 axis to calculate the normal map rather
thne just the hight map that it used to use.

the installer/zips can be downloaded here
http://www.blender3d.org/cms/Blender.31.0.html for the following platforms:
Windows Installer 98/ME/2000/XP
Windows Zipfile 98/ME/2000/XP
Mac OS X 10.2
Mac OS X 10.3
Linux i386 2.2.5
Linux i386 static 2.2.5
Solaris 2.8 sparc
Irix 6.5 mips3
FreeBSD 5.3
and full release log can be found here
http://www.blender3d.org/cms/Blender_2_36.384.0.html

also 2.2.0 of the gimp is out now too, i havent had a chance to use it
much, but apparently you can now use the pressure for your tablet in it."

Ultra Violet lights

Moho

Cheap but rad 2D animation app.
Draw character once at start of process, then animnate with bones etc.

Shifter

LW displacement plugin

TA's Facial Animation

And indepth look at it on KURV forum

Updated latest info - looks great

SR_Mirror (& SR_Savetransformed)

"SR_Mirror:
SR_Mirror is a mirror tools that mirrors the position/rotation of the selected objects. It handles hierarchies including bones.

it uses Euler rotation to mirror rotation so is might not alwasy be in accurate. When I master matrixes I’ll rebuild this. But it’s better than nothing.

Ps: Fi copyselected works well for cloning multi selections and handles bones as well.

AND

SR_Savetransformed:
SR_Savetransformed is a multi select version of savetransformed that allows you to save to a folder, and add prefix and suffix to the names.

Use it with "object collapser" in modeler to convert the folder to one object. So you can now convert a whole scene to one object much easier. It can be converted to just save the model without transformations. I might add that option later.
"

Surpasses

Newtek thread
CGTalk thread

LW to Shockwave tute - part 1

Part 1 is here

HERE is CGTalk thread

Morph Brush and Preview Render - video tutes

More shorties but goodies from Proton

LW8 dynamics kurv videos - video demos

..and discussion on this newtek thread

Smartskin sans weightmaps

HRGiger pointed me to this Newtek forum thread, simply because he is a legend.

"... If you want some more helpful advice on smartskinning, look at this thread here where I show how to setup a smartskin that doesn't require you to setup your weight maps like Joel dryer had in the video. In fact, it doesn't matter if you have weight maps or not. Applying them with the expressions (or jointmorph) is still the same. ..."

Normal Mapping video tute

Normal mapping

Modo tips

Allegorithmic's (FREE) PhotoShop Plugin

FXLinker and MD Scan in action

The Newtek forum thread for Proton's tute - some interesting relevant discussion and ideas, and one guys had problems which might shed more ideas and insight ... or, not

MGthicken

ANOTHER thickener

Steel Ronin

Rigging tools etc, noice

HL2 exporter scripts - the flay page

Messiah tutes for LW users

Update bones by skelegons

"Well here's another one. This will modify an existing skeleton of an object in Layout with the positions of skelegons within that object. So if you've converted your skelegons to bones, added your setup stuff like IK etc and then found your knees aren't quite in the right place, but don't want to use the bone tools in layout, you can modify the skelegons in modeler and then run this Generic Layout plugin with your object selected and it will (hopefully!) move the bones to the new positions.

It will:
MAKE A BACK UP scene in your LW content directory just in case! (this will be overwritten each time you run this plugin so as not to fill your harddrive!)
Match old bones BY NAME(this is the only way to do it) !!! to the skelegons, and use these to layout the skeleton.
Add new bones to the skeleton.
Delete old obsolete bones (if the user requires)
Parent any orphan bones to higher up the chain.
Record pivot rotations if desired (apart from on targeted bones as these seem to get screwed up with RPR)
Keep any reparenting you did in layout (say if you had isolated bones which you parented to the main group)

It doesn't delete the old bones (unless you want them to!) just moves them around, so they will keep their old settings. These of course may need adjusting (rotation limits for example if you make the bones a little more bent) because of distortion of the skeleton.

This is a complex plugin, so I make no warranty (it's free!) but as it makes a backup, there shouldn't be any undoable mishaps."

Also discussed HERE

Rim Lighting

T4D tools updated

LW - Zbrush - LW

Some workflow advice

LW - HL2 scripts

This mod forum has the updates on these scripts.
The author will continue to post updates here to make things easier.
(Not on newtek forums anymore, so look here.)

Low poly models - cars people etc

Check this Newtek thread out - discussing buying low poly models for backgrounds (background vehicles etc) etc
- some places listed, some have free models

Zbrush 2 review

VFX world

Latest, greatest LW to Zbrush thread

Points to a lot of resources and work done

Digital Ninja - Awesome Illustration

(Found it in this THREAD from CGtalk, Game Character design challenge)

Texture Refresh

Assign to a hotkey for refreshing textures once you've updated them in an Image Editor App

Gyre - plugin

Interactive rotation about an arbitray axis

Will allow rotations in Modeler around an arbitrary axis dependent on a two point selection.

Gyre is an interactive rotation tool that allows you to snap the axis to points or edges. It also now has a mimic mode, in which modifications to one polygon are mimiced by the others.

Shave and Haircut discussion

In this old Newtek forum thread

Lighting Article

(From front page at CGtalk forums)

Itchy Animation

Breathtaking Xavier Marquis work

Low poly Maya -> Zbrush -> Max & Brazil

His Site with Gallery

ZBrush 1.55b Manual

Rope Editor

And Rope WIP thread

Eyes setup

Amazing Modo & Sas work

Spinquad thread

LW to HL2 Scripts

"Hey all thought i would just drop these here for now there not 100% complete as i still need to add the vertex aniamtion support for the output files

but they are working to export static props and animations


these are beta

there are 3 scripts 2 for modler and one for layout
simple to use
on everymodel before exporter you need to run hl2 prep
then you can export from modeler or lkayout if it is a model that has animation

also one small bug i forgot if you use skelegons in layout there will be a bone surface name just put any uv map and texture on this it wont accually get exported but teh scripts looks for uv data and texture data on every surface.

please send all bugs to e_fortress@hotmail.com
also i am releaseing these as compiled scripts once i get the rest of the vertex animations done ill let lose the source scripts have fun


also note that you can export physics models with this there is a tab for it in layout but i did not finsish that part yet ill add layer support for that soon"

More LW + Zbrush

XRAY thread - an even better one

Bone Alignment

Spinquad thread where Kretin has some good tips on Bone Alignment

The Arts Law Centre of Australia

Ball-tearingly cool showreel

Cel shading in LW

A Spinquad thread repository for Celshading tips
- great starting point with a lot of info from "Celshader"

Mirage 1.2 review

Kretin's - Character: Martin Bird

Cgtalk thread
Bird wings rigging
Awesome character from author of LW8 cartoon character creation

Collision obj and 2 point poly video tutes

2 point polys

Using collision objects in dynamics

Tute: copy and paste UVs

"Hi Guys, I´ve seen a couple of threads on various forums about copying and pasting UV´s from one object to the other, given both share the same pointorder. As example you want to texture your model with a UVmap you made in LightWave but want the displacementmap to have the cool but cryptic GUV Tiles from Zbrush. A lot of answeres on these threads where like: "It´s impossible, do it with maya" or something like that. I even saw people saying that who i thought should know better, but that´s ok. i looked in the doc´s and it is not mentioned there so i guess it´s ok not to know the way to do it. I found a way like i guess others too, so i will share it with those who didn´t."

The tute is on Spinquad
Here is the CGtalk thread which inspired the tute

LW -> Quake3

CGtalk thread

Morphtrack v1 released

Bundled with Joytrol

Street Texture & Striping

In depth very clear tute

DOOM type ref photos

Mayang Texture site

Streetwise Tute - Tesselator

Awesome tutorial for making roads (and it looks like a lot of other useful info as well)

Tadeo Jones

Lightwave short film

Jack the Worm

Downloadable cartoon worm model

Shaolin Monk - Pisong

Wow.
Great facial animation test there too, wires, body to come...

Alix - by Astro

Hot bondage sheninja - I'm blushing

New Motionbuilder Forums

Old Kaydara ones are still there, but there's these new ones at Alias

Eadweard Muybridge walk cycles

Carpaint

Layered specular+reflection plugin, called CarPaint.

MT timeline - free plugin

MT Timeline is an alternative to LightWave's internal timeline.
Its advantages are that it can be placed anywhere (even outside the LightWave window), it has an advanced zooming feature that allows you to zoom in on to a section of the timeline, and, you can add/remove markers and skip to the next or previous ones.

Character Studio tute

Wardevil

AWN Article: Adult Animation 2004

Talks about surge in adult animation, Adult Swim etc.

Cloth Bones

I think I already posted this but anyway...

I don't get what's good about it? You have to calculate first - what's the difference between this and ClothFX?

Lip Service

Demo

Release version

Motion Mixer video tutes

Wires depository

Model wires here
- PiSong stuff and more
- invaluable resource

Dynamite Job

Motion Mixer vid tutes

Melbourne P2P site is up

DStorm

Vid tutes: Flare2Alpha and Luxigons

Christophe Desse skin shader

Needs TD skin shader

Zbrush & Messiah work - amazing

FPrime Render - broadcast quality

Newtek Thread discussion

Plugins from Kevin Phillips

- weld pairs (select multiple pairs of points and weld them in 1 go)

and

- weld strip (select a row of points, then select the row to weld them to, and weld)

Instructions are in the ReadMe-file.

Modeler to Modo

CGtalk thread discussing the pros cons and speed bumps involved in moving from Lightwave's Modeler to Modo

Glowing texture discussion - newtek forum

FPrime & Sas

(FPrime and) Compositing

Kvaalen's Aquaman

Has a cool little reflection tute in this Spinquad model WIP thread

Rendering discussion

Mocap talk

Visual Marker - cheap Mocap solution which might be worth exploring

Making games with LW

Some relevant gems in there like discussion of game engines, texture and poly sizes/limits etc.

Aurora's diary for LW8 cartoon character books

Awesome "diary" by Aurora as he runs through the tutes in this book.

Also well worth a look when you get the book for the errata, tips and FAQ type info.

astro-sanchez - character: Nixx thread

Very cool model WIP thread, lots of great wires to study

Pisong BMX thread - insane level of coolness

- Wires to study
- scene to download and pick apart
- skin texture to look at
- insane coolness to bask in

Wires to study

More video tutes from Proton

Using Gradients and Particle Age

This demo shows one of the many uses of gradients when working with LightWave's particle system.

Particle Demo

Creating Custom Tabs

LightWave allows you to customize your interface in many ways. This demo walks you through setting up a custom tab to your interface.

Add Tabs Demo

SpinQuads Tool

This demo shows how easy it is to clean up polygon flow using this powerful tool.


Spinquads in Action

C-bend

Bend foreground geometry with spline in background layer

Stop Motion effect in LW

Effects on channels, and lots more tips on getting this looking right

UV map discussion

render targa sequence to video

Ultrapatcher

This lascript is just like autopatcher, but better in that you have splines in foreground layer, select a background layer as destination for patched geometry, and once you run it gives you the option to flip polys.

This will speed spline patching workflow - nice!

Decimate - better than Qemloss

Tool for reducing polys and keeping your UV and weight info

SSS thread - CG chat

This CGchat thread has some interesting SSS work done with incidence translucency layers (I think)

Modeling Tutes

Joan of Arc

Hand Tute

UV Chalk

UV Chalk allows you to sketch on an textured object in Lightwave's Modeler. After a uv map in created and a image loaded, UV Chalk will pop up it's own interface where you can sketch on a model and save the resulting image. Nice way to test UV maps and sketch out a rough texture with your UV's.

Silo 3 released

Topology pen sounds cool.
A little over $100 US, point upgrades free.
This might be worth looking into...

Proportions

justsopw.js

Use justsopw.js to display your larger images rather than an entire new window

The nice thing about justsopw.js is that the pop-up is the correct size
and closes at the next mouse/key click, thus making it harder for people
to save off your images.

3DA

Babelfish

Some tutes

Check these links out

Broadband

Toy designs for modeling inspiration

Courtesy Proton on Spinquad

Caricatures site

Courtesy Proton on Spinquad

Point Clone Extra 4 (flay page link)

Version 2 and 3 available HERE

Version 4 can be downloaded HERE

- Point Clone + on steroids. I'm bookmarking this here for use in cloning hair guides.

Joytrol is out

Joystick Facial Animation Setup Plugin

Spinquad forum Joytrol discussion thread HERE

Polygon Flow for Cloth Dynamics

You geometry can have a subtle effect on the cloth FX and how it settles...

LW CPU discussion

Interesting

Proton Mouth Tute

Quick and simple mouth video tute
Spinquad thread HERE

Also various tutes HERE :

Quick Spline Wing

Quick Thumb

Bridge Tool

Blend Groups

Unreal Cel Shader - helpful thread

Discussion by Cel guru Celshader, refers also to Shade01 thread

3D paint app within LW

Free, only v0.13 or something
Doesn't work on SubDs
Interesting though

Rain in LW

Simply LW TUTE
(videos to download)

Hair Shader

Armour moving on seperate layer

Some ideas in this thread

Low Poly Anime cel shaded work

Awesome work in MAX

Discussion of its application in LW

Concept art and model sheets

Steven E Gordon

Teen Titans

Hair technique idea to explore

Ribbon follow spline

Bleach Bypass:Minority report Look

Tute also Here

EXCERPT:

"Hi,
I figured out an easy way to do it without any plugins. Photoshop or any Compositing Tool will do. This is for Photoshop:

- select the layer with the image
- add a "channel mixer" adjustment layer
- set red, green and blue to somthing like +50%, +25% and +25% (you can tweak this later)
- check the monochrome box at the bottom and hit "Ok"
- Set the blending mode of the layer to "hard light"

Now you can tweak the channel mixer settings.

If you want more color in your image, use a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer and tweak the master Saturation level. Something between -60% - -80% is a good start."

Cloth discussion

Car animation rig setup - Tute

Stock Footage Explosions, muzzle flashes

Downloadable

Eye and face UV stuff ...

... in this MAX tute. Eye UV texture tips and more face stuff

Modeling eyelashes (MAX)

Self portrait tute

Has some UV texturing tips for human head on page 2

3D TOTAL

LW to Zbrush

HERE > Zbrush forum thread "What advice can you give for LIGHTWAVE?"
HERE > Newtek LW to Zbrush thread
HERE > Lynx's "Normal Displacement" & "16bit grayscale TIFF-loader" plugins
HERE > Steve Warners tute "There and Back Again"
"The tutorial is 6MB in size and is optimized for 1280x1024 resolution.
You will need the Flash player to view it."
HERE > further discussion of "There and back again"

See some of those threads for even more links to further discussion

PiSONG new direction

High level of detail on textures using photos etc.
See also THIS THREAD

Radial Background Lathe Clone

This script will, given an object in the background layer and a shape in the foreground, extrude and bevel the shape and then radial clone the resulting object around the centre point of that backround object. Whew. Good for "nurnies", "gak" and other "fiddly bits" on the outside of "stuff".

Straight LW Char anim - Tips and Tricks

See also
Speeding up Character Animation thread

Ogo Hikari documentation

"Akihiro Ogoshi has given me permission to put my translation of the Ogo Hikari documentation on my website."

Albee KAZE interview at VFX World

rigging tute

Notes not video, and downloadable mesh so you can follow along

quick way to create a cartoon ear

From Proton

Intro to Character Modelling Video Tutorial series

Wow, from the brief skim through I gave this site, it looks really comprehensive. Not just videos, it's html pages tutorial with video support material for parts. Also downloadable obj files etc, and a lot of ref pics illustrating poly flow etc.

T4D rigging tools UPDATE 2.5

And some more video tutes.

Fake Edge Shader

Fishing on the forums for advice re: my cloth issues (edge on cloth object which doesn't look paper-thin) Tudor pointed me to above shader, which I had seen before but assumed would not work on one poly edges.

Cloth Help

Excerpts:
Just make sure to make the first layer(body) a collision object, and that the cloth effects on layers 2 and 3 are set to detect layer 1 as the collision object.

In layer 1's properties, under dynamics, add "collision" and set it to bounce.

In the Cloth FX panels for layers 2 and 3 set collision detection to , or set the exclusive detection to layer 1.

Set layers 2 and 3 to follow the bones of layer one.

Also parent layers 2 and 3 to layer 1

Select the object;
B (shift-b);
At the top, tell it to use the bones from the object that has them.

It would be under the bone properties panel for that object (regardless if the object actually has any bones). So select that object THEN click on bones and then set it to "use bones from..." at the top of the popup panel.

Cloth Settings

Link to post with screen caps of cloth settings from the Newtek forum dress anim cloth thread - worth a look re: settings - a good starting place perhaps.

ClothFX discussion

"I see you need help check out this thread.

http://vbulletin.newtek.com/showthr...highlight=cloth

After you reveiw this one then move to this.

http://vbulletin.newtek.com/showthr...81&page=1&pp=15"

Scripts, Plugins and Macros for MODO

MB6 what's new (pdf)

PiSong Models for download

From INTERVIEW here

T4D new website design

Includes LW menu and Free plugin list

FREE PLUGIN LIST HERE (direct link)

Compositing Radiosity character/shadows

- Render your character only against black with alpha in one pass
- Render the floor shadow buffer of the render (with your character unseen by camera).

Combine in post.

Slinky Spine Rig

SQ thread with dloadable rig, tute to come

FPrime viewer

"FPrime Viewer is a Windows application that allows you to view FPrime final renders, which can look quite different than FPrime preview renders. It has the following features:

1. Images are automatically and seemlessly updated as they are refined by FPrime.
2. You can scrub through your frames and even play animations.
3. You can view images remotely across a network."

MODO forum cgtalk

MODO is out, the cgtalk forum may be worth lurking a little to see what people are doing with it and get an idea whether it's any good

Army of Darkness Animation Session on cgtalk

Dialogue 1:
Ash: "Now I swear, the next one of you primates who even touches me. I'll kill you!"

http://ali.cgcommunity.com/dark5.wav

Dialogue 2:
Ash: "Clatto! Verata! Nn(coughcough). Okay then - that's it."

http://ali.cgcommunity.com/dark11.wav

(and just quietly, looking at the filenames there could be more samples on that server, from that movie)

Walking Heel to Toe

This tutorial hosted on the Newtek site was brought up in the spinqaud "so you want to learn rigging thread." It looks like it takes you under the hood of a setup along the lines of what's good about the feet in the Simplerigger rig... but I haven't had a chance to check it out yet. Probably worth referring to when doing an advanced custom rig.

Action in Ambient Occlusion thread

OK, here is a quickly put together PDF - I apologise for any typos, bad advice, etc in advance!

Also included is a quicky Ambient Occlusion LScript shader I built as a way to come to grips with the concepts... Its pretty simple, though LScript is a little slow for shaders!

The source code is heavily commented - Hope everyone enjoys it...

Attachment: occlusion.zip

ResPower review

The online render service reviewed in this Spinquad forum thread

Jeanphi's Rigging notes UPDATED

Just a note to say that the zip download with this tutorial has been updated to include more rig variations and test cases.

And also has been updated from an HTML point of view, to make them more accesible to everyone.

http://www.puffandlarkin.com/lightw...racter_rigging/

Dependant Films

Resources

Low poly modeling tute (orc)

Great looking low poly modeling tute.

Kung Fu tools - David Ikeda

A whole lot of (FREE) plugs in this pack - rigging stuff and other workflow helpers:

"Find SGons - Finds and selects skelegons using a text-based search similar to what you'd find in a word processor.

Replace SGons - Finds and replaces the names of skelegons using a text-based search similar to what you'd find in a word processor.

Select Child/Parent - selects child/parent skelegons. Unlike Lightwave's 'select child/parent skelegon' tools, these display a quick dialogue box when multiple children/parents exist with hotkeys to let you quickly choose which child/parent to move to next. The plugin will also activate the skelegon's associated weight map as you traverse down the skelegon tree if the weight map exists.

Make Symm - makes pairs of points symmetrical.

Symm Manager - a tool for automatically repairing symmetry in your model in a way that's more accurate than SymmRepair. Instead of just using a threshold, it finds the closest match on both sides and performs some additional operations to make sure that points aren't mismatched. It also allows you to view and select which points are asymmetrical and need repair.

SGon Manager - a tool that lets you select, find, replace, delete, and mirror groups of skelegons. When mirroring skelegons, the plugin will also flip their bank handles properly across the X axis, something which Lightwave's native mirror tool fails to do (leading to rotational inconsistencies on opposite sides). It also renames the mirrored skelegons and associated weight maps properly based on your preferred naming style which you can specify.

Weight Manager - this is a tool that lets you select, find, view, mirror, and delete groups of weight maps. It also lets you preview what points are affected by specific weight maps within varying thresholds and also allows you to view how the vertices on the opposite side will be influenced by the mirrored weight map."

TA facial tool discussion

Forthcoming Facial Anim tool from Tim Albee discussed in this Spinquad thread.
Due for release by Xmas (2004) from Kurv studios - price not announced yet.
Looks like a great intuitive tool for (NON-automated) facial anim

More details as they come to hand.

Boolean clip maps

Ambient occlusion ('dirt shader') example

AmbOcclusion (SG_AmbOcc.p) used in this thread

Apparently a tute is on the way...

ZBrush/Lightwave workflow

The TUTE (flash)

Spinquad Thread

And mentioned in this spinquad thread also

interior lighting discussion

CLOTH

Colin's FAST CLOTH plugin

Newtek forum thread (definitive)

Spinquad thread

C2P-Curve to Plate

(modeler plugin)
Turn splines into poly ribbons - for manga hair

Make antennas swing when ant moving

Add softfx to the body with a weightmap for the antennae. When the object moves, so will the antennae.

PTailor

Will create simple clothing for characters by selecting the skin polygons and activating the plug-in.

"Simply select polygons on a character that define the area for which you are tailoring and run the plug-in.


The panel for surface naming and color selection will remember values between uses in the same session of modeler."

FPrime Viewer

"FPrime Viewer is a Windows application that allows you to view FPrime final renders, which can look quite different than FPrime preview renders. It has the following features:

1. Images are automatically and seemlessly updated as they are refined by FPrime.
2. You can scrub through your frames and even play animations.
3. You can view images remotely across a network."

Smartskin, knees and JointMorphPlus

Discussion about joint morph setup, stemming from someone's problems with their knee setup - leads to discussion of various methods, opinions on whether jointmorphplus is necessary or are weightmaps enough, and so on...

Electricity Effect

Tute and files

FWAK blog

The FWAK BLOG is the links site/weblog of Eddie and Lili, creative directors of FWAK! ANIMATION, a Sydney-based animation studio. In 2004, Eddie and Lili are in Los Angeles, working on Mucha Lucha, which they created.

SPLINECAGE forum

Lscript coding forum

Ambient Whisper's site

Some interesting stuff here

Cabbage Patch Forums

Tutes, Interviews but most importantly
Lightwave and Motionbuilder monthly competition forums

Car modeling vid tutes

A series of vids, spline modeling a car then detail. Total over 3 gigs (!)

Neurons

Model, Texture and Animate

Sweat

TUTE

The Greatest Story Never Told

Animation comp

Springy Plugin

"Springythingy plugin, it does a kind of follower effect, but with proper springsand whatnot. It also has channel stuff implemented for those interested in how to go about those.

Check it out and let me know if this is useful to you.

The source is of course copyright me, but I'll give it away under a gnu license, as I would appreciate it that if someone does find a way to improve on it (Which I expect a blind monkey could do!) that they post the revised copy here..."

mgspring.zip

Polygon Hair

Saslite Long Hair Guide Modeling

PLUGIN
"Been a while, but here's a new finished lscript. This one automates the long hair sas-lite guide making tutorial I wrote for the tutorial section, plus does a few other little automations. This should make it a doddle to make long hair guides for your creatures. Let me know if there are any bugs, I think I've taken them all out but you never know!"

MGWizzywig.zip

FX Linker

Unroll a roll of parchment

Hand Held Camera

FBX conversation

"what follows is an edited conversation i had with a MB guru on msn

its interesting to see, and after the conversation, a light of understanding turned on so loudly, that i heard it

*3D-Mike ~**and you guys just have to press MERGE
***or rather, animate first, PLOT, SAVE and press MERGE
***it works

jayreef, says: (9:49:46 pm)
***but if i rigg a model in maya, export as an fbx, animate it, save that as fbx
***can a LW guy open it , and run with it

3D-Mike ~
***you should NOT OPEN an FBX
***use the FBX as a shadowfile that holds your rig so you can import (merge) motion data from it
***just set up the ready-for-render-file in any package
***then create the FBX
***setup the rig, animate
***then go back to the final file
***NOT the FBX
***the final file
***then MERGE the FBX
***only the motion data will be imported
***thats the beauty
***people often mistake FBX for a multe platform format and in a way it is
***but NOT if you want to use it as a motion carrier"

Re: Financing

Motivation Thoughts

Culled from the DLF email list

Muscle study

Focuse Critique thread HERE

Animation Site

Check out this French bloke's animation site.

DR & Quinch

Some good tips from Kretin on cartoon character modeling in LW, UVs etc

Great Hair

Done in Max, but it's pretty cool.
Not Sas type hair but modeled shape cartoony hair.
There's wires too in the thread, and hi-res pics, so check it out.

ABC robots in LW

Joe Pineapples
Blackblood

Spline modeled by Fallenswordsman
Great stuff.

Rigging - Larry Splinegod hints

Character animation is broken up into stages. The blocking out stage can be done with versions of the characterst that are like chess pieces. Theyre moved around to get a feel for the overall timing.

When the actual character animation starts the character animators typically arent concerned about deformations. Animation is about timing, weight, acting etc etc rather then focusing on technical issues like deformations. This requires that the rig be animatable, that it gives fast feedback and can be posed quickly and easily. You dont care about deformations at this stage and in fact the animating and deforming aspects should be separated. The rig shouldnt require a lot of reposing once parts are posed. The rig should also be stable in between poses. Once the character animator is done animating the character technical animators take over and apply the motions to a more complex rig that has higher poly counts, cloth, skin, muscle and other dynamics. They insure that the character deforms properly and they do whatever it takes to make sure it does this. Sometimes that means creating morphs or even tweaking points by hand. They will add other types of deformers to help out as well. At this point you definately wont see realtime feedback on the rig. If animation changes need to be done the character animators will do it on the chopped up rig. The motions will again be applied to the more complex rigs. Sometimes there may be multiple rigs, with the data from the previous rigs being applied to even more complex ones. If it sounds tedius its because it is. This is also why that large Maya based studios have lots of speclists. Lightwave people tend to be their own TDs.

Rather then have multiple rigs in LW I tend to have a hybrid rig. My chopped up rig and my high rez rig share the same bones. I have some scripts that allow me to change my rig between an Animate Mode and a Deform Mode.
When I run my script for Animate mode, the high rez mesh is hidden, subpatch levels are dropped to 0, subdivision order is set to first, bounding box threshold is set to a lower value and I may also opt to disable all deformations. At the same time all the chopped up pieces which are invisible and parented to the proper bones are made visible. When I do this my rig animates very quickly in Layout.

When I wish to test deformations my Deform Mode script makes the chopped up pieces invisible, makes the high rez subpatched character visible, sets the subpatch level to 2 or 3, sets the subdivision order to last and enables deformations. I may choose to leave the bounding box threshold at a low value. In this mode I can see how my character is deforming. The feedback in this mode is not realtime but I can quickly switch between both modes to do what I need to do.

With that said, one thing nice about living in LA is getting to meet lots of cool people in this business. One of them is Colin Cohen. Colin does character work and is an awesome programmer. After some discussion a couple of weeks ago Colin wrote a new plugin that can copy motions from one rig to another. I would definately recommend his plugins, many of which really streamline the character rigging/animation process.
Heres a link to his site. http://cohen-plugs.tripod.com/

STRANGE ATTRACTORS

ABC animation initiative dudes, you can see their films, production info etc

REF Techniques page

Info on the various techniques he used on "REF"

(From his old web page.)

- interface customisation - changing menu contents and keyboard shortcuts,
- character modeling - modeling in SubPatch mode,
- character rigging - bskeleton setup, bone weighting, preparing a "base" scene with a character model ready to animate,
- IK/FK blending - advanced character rig which was built specially for fight sequences purposes,
- cloth animation with Soft Body Dynamics - objects supposed to be deformed with Soft Body Dynamics have to follow some rules,
- Setting - modeling and texturing a setting object,
- Texturing - description based on character's head texturing process,
- Rendering - rendering process of a sample animation frame,
- Screenshots - well, some screenshots of Lightwave3D interface.

Modeler Plugin - addPolyPoints

REF animation site

HERE is the spinquad where he talks about a new plugin, "Surpasses" (layers in layout:

(See also "ref" part of above site)

"Generally speaking Surpasses allow You to have multiple layout "layers", they are kind of scene morphs. You have Your basic scene called "base" and layers (morphs) are applied over it. Layer can include any set of items and various properties like antialiasing level, ray trace flags, etc.

Let me give You an example. You are working on a scene in which You set some high quality render settings. That is fine, but You need to fine tune some part of scene. Typically You would need to hide parts that You don't need and change render settings to preview quality to see results faster. Then, You would need to set settings back to high quality for final render.

With Surpasses, You just create a separate "preview" layer, with only those parts of scene You want to see and with low quality settings in it. Whenever You switch to this layer You will be able to test right away and then simply switch back to base when You're done.

Another example could be working with rigs, You can have different set of controls as separate layers and switch between them as needed, this way You don't have to see all controls at once cluttering view.

Surpasses are interactive and integrated within LW which means the effects of switching layers are visible both in openGL and in render. It also works with plugins like FPrime.

There are many more features in progress and You can be sure I'll tell You about them when whey are working as expected. I'm pretty excited with development of Surpasses and I hope to deliver a good tool to You, however the tool is still in development phase so some things may change."

IK rig stuff

Check this rig out. T4D raves about it.

ANTICZ - great tutes here

In Learn section.
Animation tutes but also drawing tutes.

Animation tutes page

- Taking the computer out of computer animation
- IK and FK
- Weight Shifts
- Understanding curves
- Figure 8 - arm swings

and more coming

Rigging a hand

In the thread, Dan Ablan suggests:

"Start at the wrist. Then, place one for the base of the hand, another for the palm. From the palm, branch out to the first finger. Build each finger hierarchy from the palm bone.

If you're using LW8, run IK Boost to animate the fingers. Lock the base wrist bone.

The other thing you might want to check is weighting on the fingers. Since the fingers are close together, the bones can influence geometry near them. Weighting controls the bone's influence to what you specify."

CarPaint2 plugin

"Features 2 layers of speculars, and 2 layers of reflections, where 1 of the reflections is diffuse (soft).

Here's the UI...




A WMV of Meni's A5 rendered with it...

Here is the plugin!"

(See thread for more pics and further info in full)

PiSong waxes lyrical about character design

Unreal Cell Shader updated

3D BUZZ forum thread HERE

Random Select lscript

Random Select



This modeler script selects points or polygons randomly. You can
adjust the amount with a percent value.

Download: RandomSelect.lsc
9 KB

After installing, you find this script under
"Additional/RobZ_RandomSelect"

Legoizer

Smartmorph 1.0 Released

And here's a newtek forum thread singing it's praises and inviting questions

How to make Lightwave DVDs

Tips from people who have done the trial and error for you already...

Color theory & how to use a color wheel

Color Theory - Some Basic Primer

Subdivision Surfaces - Some basics

Tentacle Modeling

SasLiteSplotchyGrassTutorial

Scene and Object files

Modeling Landing Gear for Animation

Radiant level editing tools

Dunno if you've seen this, if it's useful, or if you even care.
But I've been using it a fair bit of late for my gaming and thought I would share.

Building a City

Squash and stretch rigs in LW

Q-"How do I get my hierarchy to squash and strech correctly?"
A-"Painful but what you can do is parent an intermediate bone at every joint which has an expression of the form (1/['parent_bone_name'.Scale.Z]) then parent your child bone to that. then as the parent bone squashes and stretches, the intermidiate bone compensates.
Look at the scene below." NOTE rig file attached

"How simple!!! Thanks!!! (my attempts where much more complicated)
You forgot to turn off IK on the intermediate bone though. After I did that it worked like a charm. I just copied the scale of the root bone to the child using another expression and now I have a fully functional squash stretch IK rig :)"

T4D "problem page"

A site with "how to" info on T4D rigging tools V2.
NOTE that this site is not by T4D, but kevinmcpoland, who is just trying to fill in some of the gaps in T4D's documentation.

Covers setup in Layout (T4D covered modeler only) and animation.
It covers kevinmcpoland's way of doing things - which may change when the next lot of T4D tute vids come out.

Concept artist site - awesome

JB Plug-in Collection

CenterView centers the Layout viewport on the current item.
Points Distance measure the exact distance between two points.
Y.A.P.M. creates default project folders and scene.
Save Scene & Objects does exactly that, all at once.
RT SplineRols creates spiral splines in real-time.
RT LatheDraw creates real-time lathed shapes.
Clear Scene Plus does that and sets up various attributes.
Add Nulls adds any number of nulls to your scene.
Add Goals is a simple script for IK chain construction.

South Park style replacement mouth discussion

"I would have used the object replacement plugin "Object List". It needs a textfile to work. and if you make the vocal dopesheet in the way the plugin needs its textfile, you have 2 thngs done at once. other advantages are that the objects don´t have to have the same name, nor the same point count."

align to rail

"Change the attached file's suffix to .ls and it will work.

A cheapo site will soon exist to house the scripts..."

Skwigly Animation Magazine

MOTIONBUILDER 6

and screenshots

MB animate extra limbs with a little bit of dynamics

Here is an extract from the thread:
**note there is an fbx example file for download there also**

"The simplest way to animate extra limbs like tails, wings and hair that are supposed to move with a little bit of dynamics is to use a trusty combination of IK and Relation (damping) constraints.

1. Create a couple of additional markers on the skelton nodes.

Double click in Asset Browser>Elements>Marker and click on the node. Normally the markers should be spaced 1-3 nodes apart if it's a long tail. These will serve as IK Effectors. You'll also need to create IK Hints, generally half way between the markers away from the chain. Right click when you're done.

2. Parent the markers to a node above the first joint you're planning to affect with the Effector. Ex: for hair, you're likely to choose the head node, for a tail> hips, etc.

3. Create an IK constraint for each IK effector you created.

Drop the First and last bone to be affected by the marker, the Effector, the Hint and Optionally the Floor level marker for detection. Snap the constraint.

4. Create a Relation constraint for damping.

Drop each Effector and Hint inside once as a Sender and once as a reciever. Between the two add a 3D damping operator (Other> Damping 3D) and connect the Translation chanel through it. Set the damping value for each effector/hint. The general rule is the further the effector is down the chain the bigger the value and the hints have less damping than the efectors, but all of this depends on the desired result. Play around.

Tips.

You can add a feeling of weight on a tail for example by moving the Effectors below the floor level once you set the constraints.

The IK chains can be broken down to short 1-limb sections for more control.

The limb nodes can be dropped into the Props section of the character mapping list (assuming you have less than 5). This will plot the animation to them along with the main bones when you select Plot Character.

You can use the setup for a base animation, plot to all the IK Effectors/Hints and then keyframe on top for more control.

Included is a simple file of the basic setup.

The damping can be expanded to include gravity and collision "simulation" by adding some additional markers and constraints to the hierarchy. It is only a simulation, but works well in many cases. I'll try to post more on that in the thread on cloth simulation soon."
**note there is an fbx file for download there also

Download an animation I did in MB

HERE

It is compressed in the RAR format. This is not meant as a demo of what I can do in Motionbuilder (those are coming next) it's just a render out of work I did while learning the Motionbuilder workflow.

Boring details:
The model is the surfer dude who comes in the tutorial files from the Kaydara website. The audio is from the 10 second club archives (April 04).

I'll save a thorough breakdown of the process, with how long each stage took, for the first proper demo/study .... coming soon !

Spinning Lights discussion (cgtalk)

Seems to be explained how to use it very well here. Well worth a look.

Links also to this one:
Spinning Light Rig v1.1 on Newtek forum:

"Well, skylight rigs are the "next best thing" to rendering with global illumination (A.K.A. Radiosity). It simulates the effect of light coming from the atmosphere. The sun will give you direct lighting, but the sun also illuminates all the particles in the atmosphere, and this light bounces back to us, giving us higly diffused (un-focused) shadows. So if you have a blue sky, set your sky lights to be the same colour then add a sun (key) light and you got a quickly-lit outdoor scene. Radiosity gives you the effect of bounced lights, so that will have a quality edge over this rig. But the render speed more than makes up for it. Radiosity is many times slower."

Texture refreshing plugin

Assign it to a hotkey and it will update all your textures. Make a change in photoshop, save, back to LW (modeler OR layout) and refresh the textures, there's your update. This will take a lot of the tedium out of texturing.

UPDATE: be aware of some (as yet unconfirmed) concerns raised on FLAY

"There's a bug with replace image. And this plugin becomes a dangerous thing because of that bug. When you do replace image (or use this plugin) to refresh textures few times, surfaces which have different textures on different channels get these textures replaced randomly. It's known LW bug and it wasn't fixed in LW8."

Arealight based spotlight

And the other method they talk about is
HERE

BBC animation initiative

CAN YOU CREATE CULT ANIMATED CHARACTERS THAT WILL WOW BBC THREE VIEWERS?

If you've always had a burning desire to see your animation on screen then now's the time to act.

We're on the look out for short animated films that have the potential to grow into successful series.

They'll have a distinctive visual style, strong stories and appeal to BBC Three's 24-35 year old audience.

The overall winner will get their film screened on BBC Three and funding to develop a series of their animation.

MB 5 to MB 6 upgrade around $250 US

Michel Besner of Kaydara says in this 3DBuzz thread:

"Upgrade price from MB5 STD to MB6 STD should be around $250USD. This will be officially announced when we are closer to shipping MB6 ..."

Lipsync MB 5.5 <-> LW 8 - part 3

Today I found that automating with the voice device and then going in to key expressions, offsets and general tweaking over the top is tricky, so I made up step by step instructions and a troubleshooting list for Motionbuilder lip sync workflow, including a naming convention (yes another one) for Motionbuilder files to indicate where they are in the pipeline so you know what can be done with them, what is established and what still needs to be done to make use of the file in any particular way. The workflow is a little convoluted but if you keep track of everything there are no hiccups.

If you need to use a character with a different audio file, you grab the version with the appropriate letter in the file name, and away you go. Need to pick up where you left off with a character who's been through the voice device, tweaked, plotted and keyframing was begun, but you're dissatisfied with the Voice device, go back a step according to the filenames and run it back through the tweaking process, and plot again. Sweet. This should save a lot of headaches, you know the ones, it's 2am, you've done 6 hours work, and the model's stopped talking...

Pose Controller v0.9

Pose Controller is a master plug-in that allows you to load, blend and save poses from a library to any skeletal structure. Includes mirroring and blending functions in a non-modal interface.

UPDATE
Poses help thread:
Further Pose discussion
- negative frames storage discussion
- lscript pose retrieval automation

Lipsync MB 5.5 <-> LW 8 - part 2

Digging deeper I've learnt how to do the next stage: after tweaking the automated pass, tidying that and then manually keyframing on a seperate layer.

Immediately after the auto Lipsync you can plot it (dropping the frames onto the character) and then Edit those keyframes in the Fcurves window (deleting anomolies caused by pops in the audio, etc.) And THEN, start keyframing in a separate layer. The layers are merged at the end of the process, before exporting to another app, but the layer feature is awesome for obvious reasons.

It would be great if you could send the plotted animation from the Voice device (automated lipsync) to the Story window (big workflow enhancement new to Motionbuilder 5) but on the forums the Kaydara app monkeys are saying facial animation is something they recognise as needing work, and MB6 is launching at the Sigraph or Seinfield or Sigmund the Sea Monster or something, so that's good news assuming they do an upgrade deal. Which I'd assume they will the way they market MB.

Audio offset is a great tweak tool, doesn't seem to work in render from MB for me, posed question on the Kaydara forums, stay tuned...

Lipsync MB 5.5 <-> LW 8 - part 1

I spent all yesterday doing a tute for Motionbuilder automated lip sync with the Voice Device, and took a lot of notes on the workflow to make sure I can do it again without any hiccups. The automation is pretty amazing, you can tweak it in many different ways to an extrodinary level of detail. Then once you're happy with the automation, plot it to the character and keyframe over the top in a different layer for expressions and offset.

Started a workflow sheet for modelers preparing character models in Lightwave for this pipeline. It will outline:

Phonemes and Expressions
- a minimum, then expanding on that for characters requiring more expressive face animation, more dialogue intensive, bigger parts etc
- clear description of phonemes using examples

Naming Convention
- so the models can be plugged into Motionbuilder and work, also saving time trying to track down oddly-named morphs

Also going to work up some demos/studies, logging hours to each stage
- setup
- first pass automated
- second pass keyframed
- final

I was blown away by Motionbuilder's power. In the last hour of a long day I worked out how go into a scene already set up with automated lip sync, replace the audio file with a different one, and tweak the settings to suit that file. 10 second audio files (from 10 second club archives.) So with a saved Motionbuilder file with the character model set up with phonemes etc all rigged up, we're talking about the first automated pass for a new audio take taking less than an hour. If it was the same actor and recording conditions for each piece of dialogue for a specific character, you could assume this time would be even less.

Character Modelling Vid Tute - Colin Larkin's

Step by step really well broker-down tute, starts with the very basics (like "move tool") but is worth checking out as he goes right into each relevant tool, then later poly flow and edge tools. Lots of little vids around 2 meg each.

Dinosaur rigging tute

Character rigging notes

List of must have plugin Free II

Spinquad thread with links to plugs

Low Poly Cars

I made these for Shirow Project. Looking at them full screen I found I was tweaking them endlessly, but they will be way in the background so look fine for that purpose. Still to do spec reflec and dirt maps.

When my 3 yr old got up today I said look I made you a car. He said thanks and made me "drive" it around on the monitor for 45 minutes until I wished I could just will myself to die.

MB pose to pose

if you go too animation>pose control

when the box opens, and you have the character posed, click the create button. the pose is stored, once you want to have the character in the pose again, hit the paste button in the pose control box. say you have 3 poses stored. make sure full body parts is selected in character controls > paste the first pose> key it>move the time slider a bit>paste pose 2>key it > time slider move it> paste pose 3> key it

play back the animation

Digital Fusion and DFX+ Resource Center

Rigging tute videos

Rigging the Clavicle, Shoulder and Upper Arm
and
Rigging the Spine

"These are not "beginner guides." These are for people who have done some rigging and want to learn some more advanced techniques."

Note also watch XP trying to rename the file to .mov when you download. The extensions should remain .mp4 or the video won't play. In download window set "file type" from quicktime to "all files" and add ".mp4" extension, then download and it will play fine.

Muscle Deformation

Some talk about muscle deformation

gameart tutes

And here is a gameart dude's cool SITE

EASY IK/FK blending

Check it out. He's talking about writing a tute, doesn't sound too hard though from the Newtek forum link.

UPDATE: Tudor has updated that Newtek thread, and also added to the Spinquad rigging thread

DOWNLOAD Tudor's example file HERE

"The only downside with this is that the hand deform bone and the arm deform bones are not connected, so you cannot get proper joint compensation or muscle bulging..

Forgot to mention this in the last post.
the FK (animation) chain should be set to 0% strenght exept for the hand.
the deform chain should be the deforming chain up to the hand.
Ofcourse the IK chain should not influence anything at all."

Normal Maps - Plugins

Newtek forum link
Normal Maps for Lightwave

Note that plugin page has links at bottom to discussions on various forums.

How to combine a photo and a cg object

And heres the Newtek forum link which got me there:
Why use skydomes, when you can just use a white backdrop?

Interesting HDRI stuff

Skelegon Editor

Comprised of two parts, Skelegon Editor for Modeler and Skelegon Reader for Layout. Can create and modify skelegons and set parent relationships which do not have to start with the items beginning/end positions. One can even use the knife tool on Skelegons and set goal objects automatically.

Plug-in panel is comprised of three sections: An itemtree which lets you select, rename, hide, display, set goals, set color or otherwise manipulate the skelegons. A GL display with various modes which can also display the background layer, use symmetry and the like and finally a operations area which allows the creation, destruction, operations, information displays and various other options.

Here's BABELFISH

Water Splash tute

Texture Guide 2

Improved version of Lightwave's own Texture Guide.
 

IK/FK hybrid system

NOTE: This IK/FK hybrid system is still a WIP. I will continue to develop it as I use it in practice (I'm an animator, too.) Here's an example on how to use it: assuming your character is in a T-pose and fully-rigged (I personally use Christopher Lutz's excellent SimpleRigger), turn off full-time IK and make sure the rig still works. Next, select the IK hand control and move the hand along the character's side. Run IK Key on the hand control. Next, select the forearm bone and rotate the forearm so that the hand is at chest level. Run FK Goals on the forearm bone. All the goals should snap back into place and you can continue to use either FK or IK.
 
IK Key v0.92IK Key, designed specifically for non-full-time IK usage, creates and deletes keys on IK goals and their corresponding IK chains, thus eliminating the need for full-time IK in many cases. To use, select the IK goal and activate the Create IK Key (or the Delete IK Key) generic. You can also use Select IK Chain to select an entire IK chain, which can be useful for editing keyframes in non-full-time IK mode.

FK Goals v0.9FK Goals, designed specifically for non-full-time IK usage, keys an FK rotation and snaps all goals of the IK chain back into place so that you can continue to use IK on the chain. When used in combination with IK Key, it becomes the foundation of a hybrid IK/FK system that will allow you to use IK and FK on the same set of bones on the same frame. To snap all the goals without creating an FK rotation key, turn off Key Current Object.

SILO

New modelling package
$109 US
Looks pretty groovey
- Downloadable demo with 17-day trial period.
- Also learning edition (now at version 1.22) is completely free and has full functionality, though saves are limited to meshes with 100 faces and plugins are disabled.

Normal Displacement v.1.2 out

Newtek forum thread:
http://vbulletin.newtek.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=25645

"Multiple texture layers with alpha did not work correctly, must have once again interpreted the SDK wrong...
I also could reduce memory requirements sigificantly and improve update performance a little.
A new option allows using the normals of the undisplaced mesh, i.e. previous displacement won't affect the normals (however this also includes bones from what i understand)"

LW 7 ragdoll thread at Cgtalk

"I was working on a way to simulate some rag doll dynamics in Lightwave without purchasing any plug-ins. We all know that out of the box Lightwave is very power full so I knew it could be done.
Basically it is body segments of a rigid material linked by segments of flexable cloth. It calculates pretty quick and my test dummy reacts well to most things I throw at it. Tell me what you guys think."

And the thread has the settings he used in motion designer

BOOLDOZER

BOOLDOZER
An "all in one" boolean operation plug-in. It supports all the normal boolean operations and adds functions like 2D booleans and knifing. It also works with objects residing on the same layer and supports boolean subpatch operations. Selection mode, continue, backup, auto-merge.

Background Plugins

WOW
Create point on background, move on background

Illustrator files into LW

Hmm

Soft Shadows / Lighting

This spinquad thread also links to 2 other threads

ANIMEFU

Anime site with reviews etc, has a good search function so you can suss out the titles you saw down at Blockbuster...

How to Finance Independent Animation

An article from AWN about funding and how the hell people manage to do it.

KVAALEN.com

His new site with plugs tutes etc

(The bloke who made Quick Picker PRO, the quick picker that comes with T4D, Expresso)

Texturing with weights

Graffiti on a Wall

Newtek forum thread
Worth reading re: alpha map layers and other tips

Procedual plasticene Tutorial

It's in MAX, but worth sussing out

TEXTURING threads

I never really looked at the CGtalk texturing forum until today. Oops.

The TEXTURE TUTORIALS and FREE TEXTURES Thread

Skin shading

Human Skin WIP

There's a whole lot more there, but those are a start...

Vertex Colour Maps

cyroz2000 speaks in a cgtalk thread

Vertxpaint allows you to add color weight to vertex and mix this with the standard color map.

"I used vertex paint to make a color map, it adds colors to the mode, you can also assign weight to blend textures (bump, spec, color...).
You can have a look at the vertex color map on the Lightwave3D website:"

"Vertex Color Maps" tute on newtek site

"A vertex color map is VMap type that lets you color the vertices (i.e., points) in your object mesh. The color for areas in between the vertices is averaged. (The Baker surface shader also uses vertex color maps.) You can see the effects of vertex color maps in Flat shade, Smooth shade, and Texture viewport modes. Vertex coloring is multiplied on top of the base surface color with its texture. "

Welcome AVRIGUS

My 3D Doommetal buddy from Sydney who has taught me a lot of LW stuff.
Hopefully I can gain some pearls of wisdom from any posts he makes here, and this blog will make it easy to show each other works-in-progress.

PS, get "Hello" thru www.blogger.com ("how to post pictures") it makes it easy - you dont have to resize etc in photoshop, just tell Hello to blog the picture, it makes a thumbnail with a link to the pic on its own page, and asks you what comments you want to add to the post - and you're done.

LW8 Manual PDF

Click the link above, sign in with your ID there to get to the "Register NewTek products" page. There are a few boxes running down the page, the top one where you register stuff and then one for each product you have registered online with Newtek. In the bottom left corner of the top box is a "download" link, click that to get to the "downloads" page. Click on the LW8 manual pdf link, **Not right-click save-as**. A little window will pop up telling you its about to download, then you'll get the save/open option window. Save away. It's slow, seems to be down sometimes probably due to bandwidth issues, every man and his dog is trying to download it RIGHT NOW and simultaneuosly whingeing on 4 different forums at once.

The printed manual is $100 US, I have a sinking feeling I will have to order it even though my reseller assumed I would get one mailed to me. I think he was overly optimistic. I gather from forum chatter that the pdf download is the manual only, pay $100 for the printed version and you get an "exclusive" printed "tutorial manual" as well.

EIGHTBALL's snowboard

Zbrush Insanity

Whoah. That guy needs to save some for later.
Zbrush is cool.

Zbrush->LW->Fprime

Zbrush->LW workflow threads are always an interesting read, this is no exception, and links to some insanely cool work rendered with Fprime, of HR Giger's Alien.

Painter tutes

Noice
has brushes etc too
Good for a no-talent beginner.... hmmm

Skulls N Snakes

This is as close to 3D as I get

SHREK 2

.. was pretty good. The kids loved it. I kept nodding off, after a long dayshift at work.

Anyway the animation was cool, especially the girl shrek. Some of the humans sometimes look a bit POSERy, like "CG human", but when they got the CARTOONY cg human look down it worked a treat. The script was cool, they tied in every fairytale cliche in a good way, and it is better and richer than the first film.

But there are a few things towards the end that feel tacked on scriptwise, and I still feel Dreamworks cant quite pull it off as well as PIXAR. The CG look they get doesnt quite pull you in enough, you're always thinking "Oh it's CG" instead of being immersed in the story, and you never forget it's a big name actor, so there's that making it hard to accept the characters 100%.

Great school holidays kids film, I can see why it's doing so well @ box office, but from 3D nerd standpoint comparing it to Nemo is like comparing Antz to Bugs Life. No contest.

Saw trailers for Shark Tale - REALLY the "Antz" to Pixars Nemo, but the kids will love it and Scorcese's scene with De Niro looked funny. Also THE INCREDIBLES which looks pretty bloody amazing in terms of character design, script, dialogue, performance - like everything that worked for me on Monsters Inc taken to the Nth degree, AND in the family lineup pose they look like the old Fantastic 4 - this one will really hit a chord with both generations, Saturday morning cartoon nostalgia here we come.

TEXTURE

Texturing thread on CGtalk worth checking out (step by step run through)

The SHIROW guys want me to get up to speed on texturing, which will do me good. Not as rock star as modelling or character animation, but I need to learn it for my own stuff so it's a good deal.

AND here's the Spinquad version of the same thread,
Has some texturing tute links worth looking into:

SKYDOME

A new sporting complex?
NO IT'S EVEN COOLER
Dunno how it'll go in FPrime....

X-RAY

X-RAY thread in SPINQUAD forums - Check it out yo

WOW

Emailing updates works

IT LIVES

The POTATOE was born today. Enigmatic in spelling and concept, 3D POTATOE will quickly transform my 3D notes into an exercise in futile tedium.