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

DATE:
Wednesday, 17th Apr 2002
5:45 to 10:00pm.

WHAT HAPPENED:
We started the meeting with a variety of images (only a few) from newtek gallery, and off various web sites was a good place to start the meeting - Often I'll have at least one image that will get conversation started... I also had 4 videos of LightWave work (iBeach, a short iMac animation was truly amazing - From its photoreal environment (how did he pull off those cool waves?), to the cool way that the sand moved and reacted to the partying iMac's! Its what you'd expect from Tan Jin Ho, the man who did the impressive Malaysian Friday!). I also showed an update to 'Lots of Robots', an animation created in 3DS Max, but a real fantasy of mechanical wildlife and a few others...

SHOW AND TELL:
GET A-HEAD OF THE CROWD!
I showed the human head I'd been modelling from the Professional Character Series training course being run by Larry Shultz, some of you will recall he gave us a great talk last year about working in the industry - Check out Larry's website, Splinegod if you want to know more, or even join up - Like I said, its pricey for some, but I kid you not - Its really the best investment I've made in regards to training material for LightWave! If you wanted to do character animation and modelling, this is THE course you need! :-)

Now I'm working on the torso/body of the model (The next section of the tutorial CD). I'll bring that along when I'm done...

SCI-FLY STRIKES BACK!
I also showed the textures from the Flying wing I did a tutorial with last meeting - Unfortunately a little overenthusiasm on my part to 'scuff paint' created instead large white splotches on the surface - Something I could easily fix by simply removing the bright diffuse values that boosted the white to maximum! But enough on that for now...

EDUCATION DOES WORK!
Stuart had just been on a small tour in Aussie looking at some of the 3D training schools - He returned with a few *hours* worth of show reels by students! We took a look at just a few, all done in Maya, but interesting to see nothing really in there that couldn't be done just as well in LightWave! Great stuff, thanks Stuart! :-)

This was followed up by Kevin Sharp from the National College showing some extremely impressive student work - Lots of character animation and Lipsyncing, and some very funny ideas and stories - It was truly wonderful to just see some of the work being done with LightWave right here in NZ. I'd swear every year I see student work from various schools, the level of quality just gets higher! :-)

My many, many thanks go out to both of you for showing us some cool CG work!

TUTORIALS
NATURE CALLS!
My short 10-minute natter on Skytracer proved more interesting then expected - Plenty of questions were asked, pulling what I'd expected to take 5-10 minutes out to almost 3/4 of an hour. However, I think by the end of it, I knew a lot more about Skytracer myself! :-) I also played the 5-8 minute snippet from the DesktopImages 'Nature effects' video about Skytracer also (even if it was in LW5.6). BTW, I had a look at SkyTracer2 in LightWave 7 - The realism of the skys has taken a big jump forward from the older Skytracer! Definitely very amazing stuff - Not only that, but Renderwarp (now called 'Sky Baking') not only does a cubic sky render, but also a cylindrical, spherical map as well as an HDRI lightprobe! Very impressive! Needless to say, its just one of the many, many improvements in LW7 that has moved me to order my upgrade (finally)

FOLD AND STICK
I covered a quick modelling technique tip where I built a spaceship/jet fighter cockpit frame using subdivision surfaces and a simple approach of building flat polygons and 'folding' them into shape. I also demoed how to sharpen the edges of the subd object while retaining the nice curvatures we wanted using bandsaw to slice extra geometry where we needed it - While most people instantly jump to use subpatch weights, I explained why I instead opted for the extra geometry instead (to keep the smooth curvature). I also showed a basic tip to creating 'glass' to go into the frame...

FINALLY...
At this stage, we'd reached 9:00pm - So I didn't get to demo the plugins I'd bought along with me, neither did I manage to demo Terragen - However there's always next time (and it gives me a good month to make sure I put together some hot tutorials and demos using them!)

Those dedicated (or crazy) people left spent another 1 and a bit hours watching some RoughNecks Hydora campaign on DVD (BTW, it was playing on TV2, 2:00-3:00pm on Saturdays - But its finished unfortunately)

Note that you can buy the first Roughnecks DVD (The Pluto campaign) here in New Zealand for around $29.95 - However it doesn't contain any extra commentary and none of the other DVD's (the whole series is mostly available on DVD in the USA) are available here (yet). If you're keen on getting some of these excellent DVD's (with lots of cool technical commentary) then check out Amazon.com. They're priced between US$18.95 and US$21.95 therefore will cost you approximately NZ$60-70 per disk (so its not cheap).

Thanks again to everyone who came. I'll see you all next month in the middle of May!


Kevman