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

DATE:
Wednesday, 22 January 2003
6:00pm to 11:20pm.

WHAT HAPPENED:
Another cool meeting! Thanks again to Stuart and Nicola for providing munchies!

We started as we always do - I waited for the stragglers and played a small collection of videos from the web that I'd collected, from 3D dragons to strange Space raiders... The usual batch of unusual animated ideas!

SHOW AND TELL:
Petrik showed us some of his spline-modelling progress working through Larry Shultz' (aka Splinegod) excellent 3D modelling tutorial series.

I also showed a new character I built over a weekend, and rigged up the weekend after! I ran over the 'history' of the project and covered a pile of non-weightmapped boning ideas... I also demo'd how the Leg IK worked well for posing the character, as well as my little 'walk cycle' I'd finished up about midnight the evening before!

For those curious, you can read the whole story online, including all the images and examples:

Part 1: Modelling http://forums.newtek.com/discus/messages/2/37341.html?1042539285

Part 2: Rigging http://forums.newtek.com/discus/messages/2/37515.html?1043310078

STORMY SEAS:
I created a cool tutorial covering some techniques to create a stormy ocean, based loosely on a small tutorial in 3D world magazine. BTW, Someone has also created a video tutorial doing the same kind of thing here (http://www.simplylightwave.com) if you care to download 97Mb worth of movies!

In the end, the effect was spectacular - Churning froth, hazy rain... A pity I didn't first preview my displacement map to discover waves churning at 100 miles per hour BEFORE I rendered it to an AVI, eh!

SMARTSKINNING:
A mistake on my part trying to do this off the top of my head, with untested models and without any proper planning - Though the idea of using a bones rotation to activate a morph was there, the quality of the effect was well, not quite what I had planned to show! However, luckily, I demo'ed how I used LW's own Muscle flexing to generate some very nice effects on my own character, another way to get around the pinching of bones...

CLOSING IT ALL UP:
A few of us stayed behind, checked out some RoughNecks on DVD and nattered... The really deparate last 2 of us finally threw in the towel around 11:20pm, just missing out on the last 20 minutes of the DVD in favor of going home and getting some sleep!!

I'll see you all again in February (just a couple of weeks away now!)


Kevman