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

DATE:
Wednesday, 11th December 2002
6:00pm to 11:00pm.

WHAT HAPPENED:
Thanks to everyone who managed to get in on Wednesday night - Seems that the doors stayed open til late, so luckily nobody had to hang outside in Aucklands lovely humid wet weather!

Many thanks must go to Stuart, who while couldn't stay, did manage to supply some munchies (Donuts!) and drinks as always to keep us going!

We took a look at some videos, some images. Nothing out of the ordinary, though I did show a parody from Saturday Night Live called 'The Religetables' - A spoof based on animated kids show 'Veggietales' (http://www.bigidea.com). This animation was partially done by Flux Animation Studios here in Auckland (where a few of us work) in conjunction with Hornet Inc in the USA, so it was nice to show off something locally made with LightWave. You can check out more cool animation work by Hornet at http://www.hornetinc.com.

SHOW AND TELL
I had announced something for a little fun on the mailing list - Make a Christmas image or animation and bring it along... Thanks to those who took the time to do it!

While it was just for fun, I did have a nice little christmas gift for whomever had the most popular, and that went to ... LOGAN MAIRE ... who was the only person with an animation! Since it was the only animation, and because watching Santa get wedgied by giant letters was so amusing, we all agreed that it be declared the winner of a $40 Whitcoulls Gift Voucher, enough to buy yerself a DVD or a couple of Videos to watch over the break!

A big thanks goes to Sami who took some time to not only show us his cool Demon character model and rig (also used in his jolly xmas image!) but also for taking the time to demonstrate the excellent FI_Bezierbend plugin

Sami also showed us some cool modelling he did for his demon model using a plugin called Quadsew that allowed him to quickly model objects by laying out the basics with boxes and primitve shapes, then just 'sew' them together... Very cool!

HAIR DYNAMICS WITHOUT A DYNAMICS SYSTEM
I was asked if I could show some ways to achieve Dynamic flowing hair effects without having to buy a complete hair systems, so I came up with a few ideas, not all fantastic, but Motion Designer (which kept crashing constantly - It wasn't a good night for MD!) was the most obvious choice for animating hair guides for the Saslite hair system that ships with LW7.5.

I also showed the use of Inertia with some displacement plugins, and if I had not needed sleep the night before, I also had been working on an IK/Bone system for dragging hair guides around. So plenty of ideas, some better then others... Obviously, the full version of "Sasquatch", or the long-lost "Shave and Haircut" both are powerful and have their own Dynamics system built in.

PUT YOUR MODELS IN THE OVEN!
Surface baking is one of those 'often heard, seldom seen' topics that people talk to me about, so I decided this time around I would demonstrate how to bake radiosity, bump maps and procedural textures onto UV maps, then map them back for faster rendering and cool real-time looking shaded objects in Layout and modeler. Very cool tool and well worth the time if you're creating game graphics, complex Radiosity-lit scenes and more...

JINGLE ALL THE WAY!
I had been experimenting on making glassy reflective surfaces the night before, as well as funky decoration 'patterns' and had originally thought to do a newbie tute on creating a decoration, however no real newbies were present!

But I did show a few examples, and for those of you wanting the presets, you can download the surfaces from my website under the 'LightWave' -> 'Textures' section. (http://www.kevman3d.com)

AND THEN IT WAS OVER...
The rest of the evening we talked 3D, and looked at Sami's rig and models and discussed some ideas and issues he had. As always, if anyone has issues, problems, questions, or whatever, then feel free to bring them along to the meetings for some 'hands on' help or feedback. Its what we're trying to be all about!

The meeting finished around 11:00pm

Thanks to everybody for coming this year - All your support has made my efforts seem worthwhile!


Kevman