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

DATE:
Wednesday, 19th September 2001
6:00-9:30pm.

WHAT HAPPENED:
I was pleased to have available a variety of animation work from both National College and AUT students - Many thanks to Kevin (NatColl) and Stuart (AUT) for providing these and letting us see what everyone was getting up to.

I showed a few small snippets from an old copy of LightSpeed Video Magazine (1995) - A bit of Nostalgia I thought may be due for those who have only known the more recent incarnations of LightWave - In particular, Dean Scott building a Shadow vessel on his Amiga showed everyone what LW was all about in those days! :)

I also followed this with some of the very impressive space action from Babylon 5 (So that all those people who had never seen Babylon 5 before could see what this 'shadow vessel' was!). Some of this work is almost 8-10 years old - But it doesn't really age... I also threw in a few snippets from the Hypernauts, a kids show created by Foundations' Ron Thornton! Great stuff!

I had plenty of stuff from my online scourging, including the bloopers from Robbie Williams 'Let Love Be Your Energy' (For those who wondered where to get this, you can download it from here : Project Messiah - Just go to the 'Theatre' - There's a lot of very cool animation available here (including the Gorillaz 19-2000 video!)

SOFTBODY ANIMATION:
I started with an introduction of Motion Designer 2000, LightWave's softbody simulation tool. I built a simple cloth and ball object. I used these objects to explain the basics about Motion Designer, having a cloth fall and wrap itself around the ball, and the effects of the ball bouncing up underneath the cloth... From there I showed (or at least attempted to show) how most of the settings affected the soft body setting.

Of course, you can also use Motion Designer for other things then just cloths falling on balls - This I demonstrated with a clothes-line I had built - 4 simple 'towel' objects hanging from a 30 segment 2-pont polygon line... Some wind and viola! Instant clothes line! :)

Another demonstration I showed how motion designer could interact with each other, and how objects did not have to be cloths or even polygons. I showed a simple effect of a particle cloud dropping into a cloth which was held up at its corners - As the cloth bounced back from the impact of the particles, the particles were thrown up and bounced down again.

Finally I demonstrated my own character test - I built and animated a t-shirt onto a boned and animated subpatch model. By setting up a cut-down version of my character (freezing and deleting all non-necessary polygons to speed up MD simulation), I replaced the subpatch model and generated the animation of the shirt. After the tshirt was fully animated, I then replaced the cut-down with the original Subpatch - Viola! Walking character with T-shirt!

SURFACES:
A quick overview of how I created a rust texture using multiple layers and mixing styles - Much of the texturing used the 'dented' procedural for its patchy, blotchy effect. Turbulence was used as a layer 'under' this procedural and mixed as 'Texture Displacement' to further break up and randomise the edges of the dented procedural, giving a more natural and jagged edge to the rust. A few gradients were used - One in the colour channel to let the rust be brown in heavy parts, and white-ish around the edges of the rust patches, as though corrosion was taking place. Outside a certain point, the gradient became transparent to show the underlying surfaces.

Hopefully I didn't run through this TOO fast for people - I'm planning on writing up a short tutorial that I'll place on the web site when I get some time.

SOFTWARE DEMOS:
Texturescape
A cool modelling tool that allowed us to used procedural textures, gradients and image maps to create 3D landscape meshes. Because the plugin only generates polygons where it needs them, the models produced are well optimised in size. As its freeware, its even more impressive!

You can Download it here.

DogWaffle
I hadn't had a chance to look at this package until the meeting, but I must say - "WOW!" - Created by Dan Richie, this is a VERY impressive FREEWARE piece of software, looking very similiar to the old Amiga Deluxe Paint. It incorporates some impressive features such as Lens flares, plugins, animation and loads more! I can't believe it's free, but it is!

You can Download it from here.

THE END:
That was about it - I met some new and great people, and I hope everyone had a good time, learnt something, or found things interesting - I try my best to come up with stuff to keep the hordes coming back! :)

If anyone has ideas for the next meeting, problems they're stuck on, projects they're planning to do and want to get feedback on, or just cool stuff to show'n'tell, then lemme know.

Until next month, October...


Kevman