Soft shadows discussion

DIscussion of technique to render shadows seperately, blur in PS and bake onto texture - boosting render time phenomenally

Motion trails

Shift AfterImageFilter - flay entry

- website

Spinquad discussion of this and other techniques

Show Weights - new plugin

Spinquad thread here

Video Tutorial: Importing EPS to LightWave

Video Tutorial: Importing EPS to LightWave (Quicktime | 7MB)

Facial Animation article w/Tutorial

"1) A review of the book Stop Staring, by Jason Osipa
2) A review of Timothy Albee's Facial Animation (TAFA) software by Mac Reiter
3) A tutorial using the principles espoused in the book to animate a characters face"

Spinquad thread

His example

Cloth FX tutorial page

Zmapper

Spinquad thread here

2 robots

Great image, textured with procedurals and weight maps.
- I want to know how to do that!

Alien1452

Beautiful 2d artwork on this site - inspirational

UV pelting options for LW - discussion

- where they suggest using wings 3d, which is free

Wings3D UV mapping workflow and solutions CGtalk thread

Alternative Incremental Save

Original file keeps same name, older versions get numbered

Zbrush tute by Dodgy

- how to get multi displacement maps working with Lightwave

Newtek thread

Brushes for PS

Ultra VNC

How-to thread

Normal maps from High Poly Mesh

Predator invisibility effect

Moving water texture discussion

Softdistortion's thread on Spinquad

Gorillaz 3D live performance

Article about how they did it

3D Photo Browser Light

Freeware tool: Browse your LightWave scenes and meshes

Home page: http://www.mootools.com/plugins/3dphotobrowserlight.asp
Download page: http://www.mootools.com/plugins/download.asp
Free serial number: http://www.mootools.com/plugins/lightregister.asp

Newtek forum discussion

Hair guides

- a way of generating hair guides using clothFX
- quick, easy. The result isn't too tidy but
it's quick and will do for a lot of cases.

Make Human

- a free 3D humanoid character modeling program.


Deathfall article

Spinquad forum discussion thread

Great renders

- and how to get them

Blood

Ground Shatter

Like Dragonball Z and Kung Fu Hustle

Using ZAppLink during texturing in Zbrush

Tutorial

Awesome Zbrush character work

Artists in Action - Zbrush

- above link is to main "Artists in Action"

Artists In Action - Anh Nguyen: Ear, Eyes, Nose, Mouth
- this thread contains a link to Anh's Free Ztools,
and further discussion

xtrm3d 69 super deformed camaro

New Dodgy plugins

New simple to setup Parent Follower, visibilty, and children selection plugins

NEWTEK FORUM THREAD

"Quick ParentFollower.
This is for use for items which you wish to have follow their parent's rotation, such as joints of a finger.
Select your objects which you wish to follow their parents. Apply the Generic MGMakeItemsFollowTheirParents and each item will have the MGParentFollower.ls added to them, and will use the item's own channel locks to determine how much they can follow their parent's rotation. I use this for fingers where they want to rotate around their Pitch and the joints all curl at once. I apply it to the bottom two digits, with H and B locked, and use the rotation of the top joint of each finger to control them. It also has a delay setting, and a setup setting. The delay setting is for tail swishes etc. For bones, the rotation is AUTOMATICALLY offset from the rest position, so joints which are slightly bent in their rest state work correctly. For objects, their rotation at the Setup time is used instead. There is also Scaling and Offset vectors for complete control.

Visibility
Use this with hotkeys to quickly change the selected item's visibility to invisible, bounding box, frontface wireframe, polygons and textured.

Select Children(Recursive)
These allow you to select the children of the selected objects by type, either just their immediate children, or all their descendants."

Facial animation discussion

phonemes, expressions etc

Various UV methods

A Newtek forum thread discussing several UVing methods.
I linked it here just because the I'd read about the Menithings a long time ago, but that was before I'd tackled UVing. Now the idea of using the modeler tools to get a good UV rip seems so obvious.

Gungirl Returns

More info in this Spinquad thread showing the earlier gungirl work

Seamless texture tutorial

Dogbite's Procedural Motion Tutorial

Proton posted these video tutes on Spinquad:

"This 2 part video tutorials shows building a rig that has slider based animation.
making a fish swim on command. 10 MB in total and well worth the download!"

Colin Cohen

Apparently his site is down, but he's sharing some of his plugins in this thread if you're looking for them

Halloween ghost tutorial

Cheesy VHS look in after effects

Rigging tutorial by Kevman3d

On the newtek europe site.

Discussion of the tutorial in THIS newtek forum thread

New Match Perspective plugin

This one by Nitisara

probably much like THIS ONE (older)

Remove points plugin

Anatomy Ref links

http://www.fineart.sk/

http://vbulletin.newtek.com/showthread.php?p=294634

Xtrm3d's morback thread on spinquad

Page 2 has some awesome surfacing and render tips for great shiny sculpy-looking skin.

xtrm3d's 69 super deformed charger

New Copy/Paste UV plugin

Quoting Nitisara from this Newtek forum post:

"I made Copy/Paste UV plugin, as an alternative for standard Copy/Paste UV commands.

Advantages of new plugin:
- supports continuous and discontinuous UVs;
- does not depent on the object creation history (i.e. points numbers and their topological order);
- does not depend on the order of polygons selection;
- can paste UVs onto mirrored geometry (ex. you make UVs for right hand, copy them and paste onto left hand). "

Link to the plugin is in the original thread

Steve Warner's website

Compiling all his tutes here
including the "There and Back Again" Zbrush primer for Lightwave users

Zbrush 2 learning kit

- video tutes to get you up to speed with ZBrush2 fast

ZBrush2 demo download

Spinquad forum news post - possible future discussion here?

Morph and bone combo

- Newtek forum discussion with some tips

Deforming ribbon along path

- Spinquad forum discussion

ALSO
Mucking around with Bridge Tool with cool results

ClothFX collision using nulls - calculates fast

- results may vary

Also referred to in THIS newtek forum thread

Dodgy's plugin's website has AddCollisionNulls plugin to help with this process/method

*(Note that Dodgy has a lot of other INSANELY cool plugs insluding updated springy plug and many more)

"Automation" plugin

Spinquad discussion

English version of Automation page

(English) TUTORIAL on how to use it

Anatomy of an explosion

Plasticene procedural discussion

Some good results here

Remove Points - new plugin

Smellybugs Maquette Tutorial

Awesome Maquette tute covers everything from taking the 2D concept art, building armature, scultping, baking and painting, right to final painted model.

Heatseeker

Resize tool from Picatrix

Creates a bounding box around the object which allows resizing and scaling based on a movable axis.

Gromme

And VIDEO TUTE for Gromme texturing

Awesome Zbrush character work

Monkey Business

Great thread on spinquad talking about texture mapping coins

Bum map is 16 bit - "that way you can really crank up the bump without noise."

GOT3D

Had free Graffiti textures
and other free textures

3Dcreative mag

Downloadable mag for purchase. Lite version is 26 pages, free, to suss out.

Full is $4USD. Current issue is #1 Sept 05

Mesh Outfreakage and weight map issues

I've been thru this once before and then again recently, so here is the drill for my own reference and anyone else who might find this useful.

DO NOT SCALE BONES
Alter rest length to adjust bone length/size. Otherwise you will distort your mesh unpredictably.

To fix, revert scale to 1 in all 3 axis, and multiply the REST LENGTH by the inverse of the former scale to get the length you want.

Tiny bones and weight map issues:
I found tiny bones would drive weight maps fine, but other nearby bones seemed to effect the edges of that weightmapped area, as if the tiny bone could not maintain influence over its whole weightmap and was overridden by movement of the bigger bone nearby. Adjust rest length to something more in proportion and problem fixed. (We are talking about a bone which had been about a tenth or hundredth the size of the other bone.

Some Lscripts

Load & Save Camera
Make Ortho Camera
Previewmaker
QuickDissolve
Copy_Paste_Motion
Layout_Focus_Tools
Shadow lights

Demo Reel - how to

Newtek forum thread

Pet Alien article

Making of article worth a gander when you have time to kill. Each page pops up seperately, which is pretty annoying, but they talk about 3D squash and stretch (in brief) and some rigging discussion which looks kind of interesting at a glance.

Great head modeling tutorial

In Japanese
Use BABEL to translate

MGUVrelax

Specifically to fix the overlapping UVs. Try in conjunction with Lynx's Realx UV plugin (see below).

From the notes:
"Just add MGUVRelax.lsc like a normal plugin (press ctrl-F11 to bring up the plugin manager).
Usage:
THis will smooth the selected points UV values, for untangling overlapping uvs. It works exactly the same as LW's own mesh smoothing command, but with uvs.

NOTE: It makes a morph, so you'll need to deselect that to continue working :P I'll try and fix that when I figure out how :P "

Normal mapping : LW <-> ZBrush

Newtek thread

Amazing Zbrush work

Hand control with sliders

LW and Zbrush

More discussion of using both together

Unwrap II

"Unwrap II draws polygons in the UV coordinate space of an image-mapped texture layer. In other words, it "unwraps" the polygons so that you can see where they will fall in the texture image. You can paint on top of the image produced by Unwrap II to create polygon-accurate texture mapping, and when you're done, just substitute this image for whatever's currently in the layer."

Pisong - Character • Older Asian dude

Usual rule applies when looking at Pisong's new work - wear absorbant undergarments.

REF techniques - CLOTH

Renderfarm software

Discussion of renderfarm software

Wood texturing - surfacing wooden barrel

MODO scripts - Seneca's

Seneca's scripts for Modo
(also available scattered thru vertexmonkey, but here they are all in one place)
set them to hotkeys/pie menus and go nuts

Modo video tutorials

Rigging and Control resources

LW8 Newtek videos and other relevant resources

TAFA article

Article on Timothy Albee's Facial Animation
- the review is written by Timothy Albee, so it's not an outside reviewer, but there is a lot of good info. Interesting read. I want one.

Zbrush Material Baker by David Ikeda

From this Spinquad thread

Sp_Move - Modeler plugin

A really cool align-point plugin
Main Page Link for PICTRIX

More SSS discussion

With Thrij's fake SSS technique - works in FPrime apparently

Smurf house

Great textures. Procedural walls and roof, UV wood door.

Looks like a miniature set for stop motion.

Puffand LarkinRigging tute

I've plugged this before I think, but it's getting "mad props" today in a rigging thread. Meant to be an awesome rig.

LW most useful scripts

Another "best of LW plugs" thread - a good one

Anatomy Review 001: GESTURE

Anatomy Review 002

Unofficial Game Art (mini) Challenge

Ultimate crate/barrel

Soft shadows trick

"A simple setup to get correct soft shadows from lights. It's based on the spinning light trick, but a bit elaborated. Motion blur is required; it works great with Fprime, and it's good for animation....
....It gives a good circular soft shadow, like sun's one or even interior lamps.
It can be improved with sliders; you can get custom-shape shadows modifying target's path.
Just load the scene, put an object on a plane and play with it, it's fairly simple and can be improved... place here your ideas if you like."

Invert Morphs

Swap base with another morph, and so on.
(You could do this but applying morphs at -100% and so on but this might be a quick helper under the maps tab.)

stairs

Morph mixing in Modeler

Emix and Morphmap mixer

Nice modeling reel

Modeling video tutes

Lipsync Master

SkinDeep

For wrinkles
Fron Tuff Little Unit

Theros

LW Zbrush displacement

Animatrix Model reference

More cloth discussion - stop jittering

Vehicle Rigging

Carnegie Mellon University - CMU Graphics Lab - motion capture library

Tips for Joytrol and Morphtrack with Smartmorph

Low poly "photorealistic human face" tute

CGtalk teturing tute thread re: texturing for a "photorealistic low poly human face."

Probably a good starting point for high-poly photoreal face texture in terms of blocking in base colours and so on...

Lightwave Google Group

NEW PRIEST

Whoah, I approached this album with a fair amount of scepticism, as most awesome metal bands end up recording urinal cake standard material after about 4 releases.

The new Judy album is fucking gold, riffs & drums are just modern enough to make them better than if they were thin & shitty 80's sounding.

But Halford is in fucking top form. The first track says it best

JUDAS IS RISING.

damn fucking right!!!

get this & play it for your signifigant other, all of a sudden you wont have to listen to something gay in the car, she'll let you play this as you charge down the highway. If you liked the Darkness in 2002 (& you fucking well better have) this is the next best thing.

Preset Central

Kolby Jukes

Lightwave modeling video tutes

Zwave for Lightwave8 -> Zbrush2

Spinquad forum

LW and After Effects - Newtek forum thread

Newtek thread regarding Unfold3D tutorial ...

The tute in question is HERE

On page 2 of the newtek thread (post #20) there are some tips about getting a perfectly symmetrical UV map with a few steps after those outlined in the Unfold3D tutorial.
- Mesh Reknitter plugin is used

There is also Lynx's Relax UV plugin, which, according to a post in THIS Spinquad thread,* "does a nice job with additional uv cleanup after unfolding"

*(also about using Unfold3D for ripping UV maps)

LW to Motionbuilder

Recent Newtek thread with some good tips

FI's Jointmorph

Be interested to see how this compares with JointMorph standard.

Hash Inc forums

Good low poly female character modeling tute

Relax UVs Modeler plugin

This plugin does NOT magically rip great UV maps.

BUT it is a good tool to use during manual "pelting" to minimise stretching.
I use it this way:

STEP 1 -
Manually rip a map, stretch tweak and tidy it a bit by hand, then run "relax UVs" to take out some of the distortion. (Check "Lock boundary" and "Quad Substructure")

Then manually fix any issues caused by "relax UV".
- it may have caused overlap around holes: eyes, mouth, ears

STEP 2 -
Set up dual window display, one side UV display and the other textured wire, perspective view.

In surface editor assign a checkered test texture to the surface using the new UV map. Select the polys where the texture has the most stretching, and run "relax UVs" again on those polys only. You may need to go back (undo) deselect some polys and rerun "relax UVs", to isolate the relax area of effect.

STEP 3 -
Now, instead of a mess of distortion, your checkered test texture is largely pretty cool, with some small areas of obvious stretching. On the textured wire perspective view you can select points where the texture is stretched, and move the points in the UV display window, to make your UV map rad in a relatively short space of time.

NOTE: when manipulating points in the UV window, transform UV map -50% on the U axis, then activate symmetry.
(Selecting a point and moving with the "T" move tool will move the other side in symmetry, the DRAG tool unfortunately doesn't work in symmetry yet in this particular context.)

LW plugins search resource

A faster lightdome

And HERE is the link to the newtek site tute for the original "clay render" method

Free BVH mocap data files

Syflex in XSI video tute

(no sound)

Having done some work in Lightwave with Cloth Dynamics, this video is pretty mind-blowing.

Genetica 2 - seamless texture editor

Easysplit

Random Allocator

"It will be useful to clone an object on a reference mesh in layout. (generic script)
It is similar to PointClonePlus for modeler.

It is available a documentation file .txt in the .zip file.
It has some limitations but it work quite well."

Ref pic sites

Bugs

Girls

Spaceships

Art Morgue
- huge photo ref site

Unfold 3D

Spinquad thread

Modeler Lscripts

Spinquad thread
-[Modeler] Discussion of must have plugin Free

More plugins

Cman scripts

LW Custom modeler Menus + Keypad tutorial

(zip file and 2 videos - I have it saved in LW8stuff/)

PiSong lighting tips

MB to LW discussion

Celshade discussion and links

Anime eyes spec highlights in LW

Tute

Interview with Blur's Jeff Fowler

Re: "Gopher Broke"
Includes teaser download

See also Jeff's Own Site
which has his film MONKEY PIT

Stash

Monthly video showcase of some pretty wicked stuff.
Around $25 US each

Simple IK chains - tute (newtek)

Matrix APU reference

Insanely cool model from McFarlaine toys, great ref photos

some Modo plugins

Modo modeling tute - cartoony character

Zbrush2 to LW plugins tute thread

Stranger's Wrath - the new Oddworld game

"Character Ammunition"
- This article is OK but check out some of the renders. Especially the ork guy at the bottom of the first page. Awesome. The penis/mushroom-headed things look a bit crap but the Orc gives Blizzard a run for their money.

Making Of Article - for the intro movie for the game Stranger's Wrath.
And there's a clip for it too, 23MB

Rendering to DVD - discussion

From Newtek board
- info about mpeg2, resolutions, file directory structure and audio settings for burning to DVD

CG India

Killer Blog

TAFA tutes

Both video and text
"Be sure to also explore the complete TAFA Tutorial within the program itself: Help -> Help... -> Getting Started"

ZBrush2 tute links

Meats Meyer's DVDs discussion - 3DBuzz
ZBrush Quicklinks - tutes and resources
ZBrush2 video tutorial - at 3DPalace

T-shirt simulation thread - CGTalk

"Soft" look - discussion

Swift 3D vs for LW

ChanLum - free SSS

Spinquad forum discussion THREAD

CGTalk THREAD (more info)

"Due to Lightwave SDK limitations, it is not possible to fully implement all of ChanLum's functions.
For now you can get some funky effects with it :)"

IKBooster save and load poses

Psyop

Stomp I know I've bent your ear on this shit a billion times, a 3D line that reveals itself over time. Well these guys are the fucking kings of that shit. take time to look through their impressive folio of adverts that all feature a similar style. a couple to look out for is the new EA Sports one, End to End Burners (I think it's listed as Company Flow).

A bit more research has revealed that they use Softimage/XSi so that works out nicely, now it's time to hit google & see if there are anyt appropriate tutes otu there.

Pixologic User Group Meeting

Antropus Picasso ZBrush2 tute

2 New Demos from Proton

Clip Map Reveal and Texture Ref Objects

RV_Rigtools

Spinquad discussion thread HERE

DivX in Lightwave discussion

Model in Layout

Video tute from Proton

Final Light stock footage

Check out the Atom Bomb mushroom cloud

Cloth wrinkles discussion

Morphs + ClothFX

ClothFX falloff discussion

Spline modeling discussion and troubleshooting

Sharp/Smooth Splines

Direct link to ZIP

"For those people doing work with splines, this plugin allows you to split multiple splines (make them have sharp corners) at wherever you have selected points, or, if the selection is multiple splines, it with smooth across their joins. This does away with the faffing of splitting splines using the standard LW method, and means you can put this dual sharpening/smoothing function on ctrl-s (the standard LW hotkey for just smoothing)"

Holy shit powered motor bikes

Has anyone seen this, I've spent exactly 4 seconds looking at this so I don't know if it's a published comic or online. if it IS online then I think it might be the best looking online comic I've ever seen.

edit: This was meant to go to TML, but problaby warrants a post here anyway

Fi's UvChalk is up to 0.8.1

Newtek THREAD

From the Newtek thread:
"It's really coming along. Tablet support, a tool brush menu and FREE!"

Looks great for blocking out textures on the WACOM

applyIKFK & poobySpine updated for LW8.2

"I added Match Goal Orientation to vFollowerPlus and also included a new plugin called ccLock that sets the incoming curve type for a keyframe. poobySpine has been changed to deal with a LW8.2 problem."

TequilaScream

TequilaScream

Network rendering, works with LW8.2

Handdrawn look with LW and Edges

Newtek forum thread with movie HERE

Tute HERE

Dexus's Modeler plugins

- Ultimate edge spin
- Switch active UV (continuous) for multi UV vertex**
- Splits edge on a half

** This one looks particularly handy to me at least - In UV work you can switch to the shared UV point

Tutes for particle FX etc

About $15US each - worth a look
Sandstorm, water etc
Fire coming soon

TWITCH

"A motion plugin that enhances and replaces noisy channel by adding the ability to envelope the speed and scale of the noise."

NOTE: Twitch apparently does not work over network rendering: Newtek Thread
you'd need to bake everything first

Plugin page also has:
SOLO - "A collections of six LScripts that add modeler like visibility functionality to layout."

Uv mapping in 8.2 - newtek forum discussion

Discussing some issues with 8.2 update UV mapping tools

Compositing Pass - Chinese Clay

Wow

Loads A Robots tute

COHEN's plugin site

Indispensible

Maestro -- Char Rig and Anim plugin for LW

Commercial plugin coming soon, demo vids at the link

Update -
More videos:
http://vbulletin.newtek.com/showthread.php?t=33383

MGMakeStretchy

Stretchy bones:
2 threads:-
available in this long thread: HERE
BUT also has own thread: HERE

This does as below, nothing you couldn't do in LW using expressions, but much easier to set up....

Usage:
Select any objects or bones which you may wish to make stretchy (able to scale them in the x/y/z whilst it's children remain the same size)
Apply the generic plugin MGMakeStretchyGN.Now you can use the Stretch tool on the items, without this affecting their children.

How it works:

This will add a child bone to the item, and apply the Motion plugin MGStretchCompIA to it, which compensates for any scale modifications done to
it's parent. It will also reparent the stretchy item's child to this new compensator bone, so they won't be affected by their parent. It also hides
the compensator bone and locks it from selection. If you want to adjust this bone, use the Scene editor to select it.

MGStretchCompIA has toggles for X/Y/Z channels,so you can switch them off individually if necessary.

Blade FX tutorial

Animanium

Info and free demo

UV chalk

Has been posted on the Potatoe before, but worth a respot as the
Flay page has some docs, also
This thread has discussion and info

T4D new FREE plugin - N Joynulls

Nulls Joystick Face Rig

CGTalk thread

Joytrol and MorphTrack work with SmartMorph

Joytrol has been updated to version 1.0.1 and both Joytrol and MorphTrack have been updated to work with SmartMorph.

ZBrush 2 Practical Guide

Zip download with pdf and resource files

Anasazi Stop Motion Animator

Free stop motion software (for use with digital camera)
Has onion skinning etc

MB6 - 30 day DEMO download

Thickeners

Pumpit

Blochi

DStorm

Thrij's fake SSS technique

Discussion on CGtalk

ApplyIKFK

Flay

Video tute

Faking volumetric lights in FPrime

Shibby

Zwave

Flay

CGtalk thread - bare currently but might pick up

Plug-in to help transfer data between Zbrush and Lightwave

A plug-in that is designed to assist in transferring data from Zbrush to Lightwave (usually an OBJ format object file and normal displacement map information).

Also relevant:
Normal mapping help thread on CGtalk

The Making of Appleseed

All characters in XSI
LW and Maya for backgrounds

Modo forum (luxology)

clothFX collision "explosion" discussion

Some ideas to address clothFX collision explosion issues and general zen-like peace of mind

MB6 w LW

CGtalk thread (MB section) re: MB6 fbx issues to LW, and some ideas and solution