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

DATE:
Wednesday, 16 October 2002
6:00pm to 10:00pm.

WHAT HAPPENED:
We started out with some awesome animation - GunTwenty from Japan showed some truly sexy colours, pyrotechnics and visual effects that show just how creative the Japanese 3D artists can be! There were other videos, but I've been toning these back for a while, so we can get more meeting in!

SHOW AND TELL
First of all, many thanks to Dave who bought along his awesome 'Animusic' DVD for us to get a preview of - While we only viewed 2 of these MIDI animated music videos, there were 9 in total - Check out the website at www.animusic.com for more information and to buy the DVD at a bargain $19.95! Note that the videos were all created with 3DS Max, and not LightWave - However its great to always check out some nice work from artists using any 3D application!

Thanks again to Kevin Sharpe who showed us some of the neat work being done by students at Natcoll. As always, really cool to see what other people have been up to!

Anna Greve bought along her showreel - And very funky it was too, showing a cool mix of character work and other 3D work! Thanks to you all for sharing material, albeit yours or something you had on hand, with us all!

TUTORIALS?
So many questions - Very handy, considering how little I had prepared this time around! In fact, it became another pretty interesting night...

SCREAM(ERNET) UNTIL YOU LIKE IT!
I demonstrated the simplicity of setting up a small screamernet farm in the Lab - We set up 10 machines, I created a simple scene and we successfully set it up and got it rendered... During the tutorial, it was a good chance to hone in the necessity for good working habits using Content folders in LightWave, to ensure that the animations would be loaded and render cleanly on the renderfarm. Though in general it really makes life easier for everyone... This then led onto a demonstration of how to use LightWaves 'Content Manager' to collate, move and clean up projects

IK 101
A very simple look at IK - How it works, how to set up an IK chain and how some simple rotations can assist in 'training' LightWave to understand how to calculate more accurate IK results for limbs. I followed this up with an example of how IK can be used on any kind of Heirachy in LightWave (ie. Models - I built 4 and parented them together) and not only bones...

This was great as it sparked off plenty of conversation from a couple of the professional animators into why they do and don't use IK to animate with, and some problem/success stories as well...

SASQUATCH LITE
Kevin (one of the 3 of us at the meeting!) asked a simple question about whether it was possible to cast shadows from saslite - Which we discovered it wasn't (looked like a full sasquatch feature only!) however it was a nice opportunity to show everyone some simple basics of using saslite to apply grass and super-thick fur to our poor old Beethoven bust!

SPIN ME BABY, YEH!
I bought along a couple of excellent models from my 'Movie Models' CD rom - A Fokker triplane and a Messerschmitt ME109 - Both of these I used to show various methods to create high-speed spinning propellers on a flying aircraft. The first was part of the Fokker model - A spinning blade image map. This produced an ideal effect, but not everyone had access to a spinning blad image map.

I then showed how using LW motion blur wasn't producing the ideal result either, and how a simple trick of modelling with weightmaps, and using transparency could produce a similiar effect without any image maps or motion blur effects! For anyone wanting to see this technique, check out my posting online at Newtek Forums.

AND THEN IT WAS OVER...
As always, thanks everybody for coming! A few of us stayed behind to check out some Saturday morning TV I had taped (Jimmy Neutron and Dan Dare episodes). I also had some awesome old CG clips from the Babylon 5 episode 'Severed Dreams' which still looked outstanding, given how long ago it was done!

Again, one a cool meeting! I met a few new people, and I'm starting to see more 'regulars' coming back, so I guess I must be doing something right!? Until November...


Kevman