LOCATION:
Auckland University of Technology (AUT)
State Building (corner of Wakefield and Queen streets)
14th floor (room 1401)
Auckland

DATE:
Tuesday, 17th October 2000

WHAT HAPPENED:
I'm happy to say that this time around we had quite a good turn out. A lot of new people I'd never met - Many being students and staff from the National College of Media and Design so welcome and thanks for coming.

I had the traditional video - A few newies, and to fill in the rest was last weekends "Max Steel" and "SST:Roughnecks" episodes. I always say, if anything can show what Lightwave is capable of, its those two shows! :)

The first hour was essentially socialising time - Many people jumped on PC's in the Lab to have a play with L[6], there were munchies and the TV/Video set up. AUT are currently trialling an SGI230 workstation, so Stuart had that open so that people could take a good look at it. I've read some good reviews for this machine in overseas magazines... It was quite a nice box and if it had come with more Ram and hadn't bluescreened when we tried to load a quick demo scene on it, it would have perhaps been even better! :)

Anyway, about 3/4 of an hour into the get-together, I was showing some quick pics I'd done (since nobody else really bought anything to show - Tut! Tut!) and then was pointing out the use of the Corona filter to get a 'glint' on the cockpit of a Spitfire I had rendered. Out of all the people there (around 12 or so - We had more, some people left early to work on assignments, etc) only about 2 others had apparently used L[6] so somehow this led to a quick show of the corona filter on the Lightwave Cow (Don't ask!), followed by a demo of PS2se, Hypervoxels, OpenGL Lensflares and using Gradients! By the time I'd finished, we had the cow flying past the camera pumping multicoloured smoke out its rear! :)

After that, with so many new people, we decided to very quickly re-run over the 1-polygon mountain range tutorial I ran last time - A damned good example of how simple it is to create quite complex models using the new technologies inside L[6]! (You can find the tutorial at Newtek)

I think from the blank expressions I'd either impressed or totally confused most people by the end of the evening! Either way, it was fun!

Next meeting I hope to have in a month or so (if the Intro to L[6] classes don't get in the way!) but like always, I'll send out an email beforehand. I'll make sure I'm a bit more organised as well - I'll try and get some tutorials, or perhaps even some demos of new plugins to show next time around... You never know, maybe even a guest speaker! :)

Thanks again to those that came. Thanks to Stuart Smith and AUT for hosting the meeting/get-together and supplying the nibbles!

Til next time...


Kevman