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

DATE:
Wednesday, 19th June 2002
6:00 to 10:00pm.

WHAT HAPPENED:
I had a few images and videos to show... It was perfect for an icebreaker, and gave people time to arrive, as well start talking!

SHOW AND TELL:
GET SOME CHARACTER!
Yes! Finally the character was completed, now with feet and hands, head and body all joined together! For a first human character attempt by myself, I was quite proud, though a little embarrassed with a few proportional issues and the fact I'd mangled the pectorials a little before compiling the material for the meeting - But we can't all be perfect, eh! :-)

BTW, Check out Larry's website, Splinegod if you want to know more, or even join up with this course - 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! :-)

WING AND A PRAYER!
Mostly textured and modelled, I also had a new spaceship mesh I had built over queens birthday weekend. There were the usual Q&A over how I'd textured it, so I ran through the layers I used in photoshop, and then looked at how the specularity layer really worked to hilight grime on the ships surface well (better then expected in fact!)

...BUT WAIT! THERES MORE!
While nobody else had actually bought material with them, two people had posted work in Newteks public forums. So we quickly previewed the renders and comments online - There's some great work being done right here in New Zealand

First was a new character created by Anna Greve (see it here). Marilyn Mantis, a very cool looking insect creature!

Kevin McCullough's 357 Magnum handgun was next (see it here). The last render in the discussion using HDR images really helped bring out the metal of the gun.

Great work folks!

TUTORIALS
LSCRIPT
I was a little 'iffy' covering a programming tutorial at a meeting to a lot of non-programmers, but I tried to keep things simple. We started by looking at a simple expression that would spin an object infintitely. While this was relatively simple, many users avoid expressions because of their mathematics, and because making a lot of 'variations' of the expression in a more complex animation situation would prove to be more of a headache then anything!

We then took this situation, and decided to create a plugin that would do exactly the same thing, but mean there was no need to know maths, copy and paste settings or anything else involved! Firstly I showed the three development tools that ship with LightWave - LSID, LSED and LSDB - All these are found in LightWave's programs folder.

LSID allows us to create cool looking interfaces for our LScript plugins, in a similiar manner to Visual Basic, or Delphi. Just plonk a new 'tool' on the interface window and move it in place!

LSED is a nice little code editor - The nicest thing for most is that in the Tools menu, there is a 'Template' function that creates very simple base code that we simply 'fill in' with our own code!

LSDB is a debugging tool that we didn't look at, and in LW7.5 is actually built-in to the Lightwave interface.

A few simple lines of code, and a few headaches as people tried to understand how I was manipulating values like vectors, and we had a plugin that simply asked for 3 rotation values and took care of all the work that our expressions previously did! While it was relatively simple, I do apologise to those people who did get a little confused by all the programming language nonsense!

Finally, I showed how LScripts could be compiled, and how the compiler allowed the developer to add in shareware-type restrictions such as time-expiration, limited usage, etc. Making your own plugins in LightWave is right at the tips of your fingers, and with the LScript manuals being available from Newtek (click here), there's no reason we shouldn't see more cool tools appearing!

PLUGPAK DEMO
I had to apologise that the PlugPak zip file I had bought with me was corrupted, so unfortunately couldn't do a demo of plugpak. However, a lot of the evening had already gone by at this stage with LScript and the review of surfacing of my space wing object...

FINALLY...
One of the people who came along bought with them a few videos and animations, and we spent the last half hour checking out some very cool and very funny material including 'Thumb Wars', a parody on Star Wars with thumbs as the characters! This is available on DVD if you feel so inclined to get a copy from Amazon.com - I've already ordered mine! (As well as another 'Roughnecks' DVD! I couldn't help myself!)

As always, a nice night and while a few less people then last time, a lot more talk and conversation went on then usual, helped by plenty of questions and answers! Many thanks have to go yet again to Stuart who provided plenty of yummy muffins and drinks to keep us going!

See you all in July!


Kevman