LOCATION:
Auckland University of Technology (AUT)
State Building (corner of Wakefield and Queen streets)
13th floor (room 1307)
Auckland

DATE:
Saturday, 7th July 2001
4:30 to 8:30pm.

WHAT HAPPENED:
People were waiting at 4:30pm, on the dot outside the doors of AUT... After getting in, Stuart put on some light refreshments - Thanks again to Stuart for getting the refreshments and the Lab organised for our saturday effort!

First things first - Did anyone bring a demo reel? The answer was - Nope, nobody did (or wanted to own up to having one!).

I also had a spot prize to give away to a random person - How would I choose a random person? Well, no demo reels meant I couldn't award it to a demo reel bringer, so I quickly asked 'What is Lt. Razak's first name from RoughNecks?'... No, unfortunately it wasn't Bob (Sorry Jono!) but one person said 'Gene' and then got clobbered in the head and almost dropped his drink (Doh, sorry bout that!) when I threw them a brand new copy of the SST:RoughNecks DVD. I hope you'll enjoy that one...

We decided to take a quick watch of the DVD since it was there... So it got into the DVD player, and its really, really interesting how much fun a TV show can be when the only half the surround speakers are plugged in! (2 front speakers - All music and effects, but no voices! :)

I had a small collection of animation from the web, I used the very cool freeware image viewer irfanview to produce a bit of a slide show of work that had been posted to the Newtek discussion lists, as well as some pretty awesome screen shots from the upcoming Final Fantasy movie...

A BIT OF IK ON THE SIDE...
Ok, I said nobody had a demo reel - Well, I did bring in a small experimental collection of animations of a robot I've been playing with in my spare time. People seemed curious so that ended up getting dragged out into a demo of some IK, walk cycles and me talking through some of the things I had considered while animating such as secondary animation, emotion in character, weight, etc.

IS THERE A NEED TO REINVENT THE WHEEL?
Much later, we then took a look at some of the excellent tools from Erkki Halkka - SkyGen, RefGen and OverCaster! This also spurred a few people to ask me to place Erkki's web site online - Finally, I may be forced to get off my rear and around to making the resources section of the Kiwavers site! :)

WHY SKYTRACE WHEN YOU CAN SKYGEN!
Skytracer is a great system - I've managed to created many a cool sky with it, and its paid its dues in a few small projects... But unless you are using a Skywarp, then rendering times can start increasing somewhat.

Along comes SkyGen, a series of scene files that have LW_EnvironmentTexture maps set up to generate some very cool, and IMHO, more realistic looking skys then skytracer produces... Add to that the fact that these skys can be rendered in less then 1/¹⁰th of the time skytracer takes... Very cool indeed...

A PERFECTLY WRAPPED WORLD
If SkyGen saved rendering time creating realistic looking skys, then RefGen, another set of scenes will definitely save you time raytracing enviroments! Refgen sets up a camera to render the world around it as 6 sides of a cube - Then a second scene loads these 6 images and creates a 1000x500 pixel panorama that can be mapped back as a spherical reflection map! Very cool!

One example of why this is cool - I rendered my robot with reflections - 1m 57 secs to render a frame. I then rendered out the environment to a panorama using RefGen, reapplied the new map and turned off raytraced reflections - Same look, bu render time dropped to 53 seconds! RefGen saved a good 1m 4 secs off the rendering time!

RADIOSITY-SMOSHITY! NOT WITH OVERCASTER!
Some people drool over those renders done using HDRI and radiosity - Sure, fantastic quality, but the render times... You know the story!

Lucky for us, Erkki, lighting guru himself put together some very cool load-from scenes that load lighting models into your own scene to generate similiar lighting to radiosity, sunlight, spotlights and more! OverCaster 4 was developed for LW6.5, containing some very clever use of morphmixer to generate control panels for the lighting itself!

Overall, Erkki's tools are extremely useful, will improve your rendering quality and speed up that render time. As people were sure to note, these tools are essential for any serious LightWave work!

CLOSING IT ALL UP
As promised, I bought along the Foundation Demo Reel for those who missed it last time - As the plans for the future meetings are to start focusing on skill upgrade (in the effort to help users start building their demo reels) it was a good indicator of what kinds of things everyone should start playing with or look at for their content...

I didn't get a chance to ask everyone what they wanted to do, and we didn't discuss the meetings too much, but I did feel we got a lot of stuff covered... Next time, I'll prepare some more interesting and skill specific tutorials.

As always, get started on those demo reels. The machines in the Lab all have CDRW for those of you wanting to bring work in to show and get help on, so anything we fix can be taken home again!

...AND MANY THANKS!
Again, thanks to Stuart Smith (lecturer-extrordinaire and probably the strongest supporter of what we're doing) for organising munchies, refreshments and coming in to let us all into the lab for the LWUG. And many thanks to AUT for giving Stuart permission for this to go ahead on a weekend when the building is in fact closed!

To everyone who came along and showed support, to the handful of students (and graduated students) who showed keen enthusiasm, and asked plenty of questions, and finally to myself for thinking of such a cool spot prize! :)

Until next month, August...


Kevman