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

DATE:
Wednesday, 18th April 2001
5:30 to 9:00pm.

WHAT HAPPENED:
I started the meeting off with just a few video examples, including some logo and product visualisation work I'd been working on, along with a great example of Scifi work from Babylon 5 - CGI work that is getting close to almost 10 years old now, but still looks amazing! You can see why Foundation Imaging are among the leaders in 3D animation! And even more important to our community is that their key tool is LightWave!

NOBODY GOES HOME HUNGRY
For a non-profit, free group, we always endeavour to make sure people are comfortable at meetings by providing munchies - I must say that I give many thanks to Stuart for again supplying some tasty morsels in the forms of chips, fruit juice and muffins...

AGENDA ON HAND!
As promised, I covered all the agenda items - Though some better then others!

SockMonkey proved to be a quick and easy way to set up a weightmapped object without needing to set up a bone structure, then assign weight maps one by one. Just select Sockmonkey and let it automatically set up the weight maps with custom 'sockmonkey' objects to control the weightmapped polygons! Easy!

UVMapper is one extremely cool tool - Take one 3D ship, get UVMapper to generate the UV map, then proceed to show how useful the tools in UVMapper are, from UV layout to stretching UV coordinates for more detailed mapping. Worth the download, considering its freeware!

It was also a good chance to demonstrate how Layout could now import external file formats (in UVMappers case, a wavefront OBJ file) directly. I also demonstrated how multiple surfaces could be modified simultaneously by simply SHIFT-SELECTing the names! Very cool indeedy!

Finally, I showed off my Stapler - What does a 3D artist do when there's nothing to inspire - Heck, find something in front of you and model it like my desk stapler! I attempted to show some people how I'd modelled some parts of the stapler... Well, I managed to make a bit of a mess, but in the end mumbled my way through it all!

SHOW & TELL
I've always said it would be great if people would bring in work to show, especially if you want to get feedback or help with ideas or techniques

Thanks to AJ for showing us some of the work he was doing for Television, and how he was working on getting a decent fly-through of clouds... Very cool to see what the professionals are getting up to!

FINISHING UP
A quick visit to some cool sites - In particular a great tutorial site is DVGARAGE, loaded with neat quicktime video tutorials about recreating realistic 3D surfaces. Well worth a good looksee!

And we were done for the evening... Cheers, and see you at the next meeting in a month or so!


Kevman