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

DATE:
Monday, 22nd July 2002
6:00 to 10:00pm.

WHAT HAPPENED:
The usual collection of videos (all 3D animations) collected online - Some sweet stuff coming out of France in the last year, mostly Maya or Max, but there were a few cool LW animations in the collection...

I also managed to snatch the newest LinkinPark video for their remixed version of 'Points of Authority' from TV2 - Total CG Finalfantasy-warcraft battle sequence - with the band heads all hooked up to wires and stuff... Apparently all created in LightWave as well by US based effects house Radium

Stuart as always had the muffins and munchies out, and 'borrowed' the coffee facilities from another room! :-)

SHOW AND TELL:
Wow! Occassionally people will show stuff they've done - But its rare - However this time someone (sorry, I didn't get the name of who you were) bought along a model they'd been working on - For someone who says they're coming to grips with LW, it was a great start! Thanks for allowing us to see your work! :-)

I tortured everyone with 50 seconds of Scifi CG I had sitting on my hard drive - I did warn everyone! :-) I also showed my new character model - 'Gohan' - from DragonBallZ - my first ever attempt at doing anything remotely Manga in LW. Thanks to people for asking questions about the model, and giving me the chance to explain a few key details...

NOT SHOWN:
Kevin McCullough mentioned that he'd recently also updated one of his personal projects - For anyone who's interested in checking out Kev's great looking Magnum render, check out the image here

DEMOS:
Since I was using LW 7.5 to show the models in, so while I was there I did a short demo of some of the new features in LW7.5 for those 6.5 (or older) users!

MODELER:

• Band Glue - A plugin that 'merges' bands of plugins together - Essentially the opposite of the 'Bandsaw' toolset!
• Magic Bevel - A plugin that continuously bevels interactively as you move the mouse, making tentacles, roots, branches and other flowing organic shapes easy to create in LightWave.
• The ability to directly edit subpatch cages by clicking on the subpatch wireframe (and not search for that elusive 'cage' point!)

LAYOUT:

• I quickly showed some of the new particle system at work - A simple 'explosion' effect that fired out smoking projectiles, and particle gunfire at a wall where a puff of particles was created where a 'bullet' particle hit the wall...
• Spreadsheet to mass-edit items (like lights) in a scene
• Pressing SHIFT-F9 generated motion blur/Depth of field previews directly in OpenGL!
• The Expression builder, a nice 'wizard' type tool that made creating those mathematical expressions a piece of cake!
• Item shapes for adding shapes and comments in openGL to objects, followed by 'Proxypick', where you can create a 'selector' object that selects another item when its clicked on - Handy for complex character rigs for making 'click here' points to select common items like IK goals, etc
• The new preview of the soft-edge of a spot light in the light-view viewport, as well as the ability to colour shadows!

There was just too much to cover, though I did have an extensive list that I didn't get to go through!

PLUGPAK:
Next up was Eki's plugpak, a set of handy lighting and environment effect plugins that make life easier for you! Many thanks must go to Eki for providing me advanced preview copies of a few of his latest plugins from the new version of plugpak 2.0, due out soon! While we previewed, it was also an opportunity to show off another cool little LW7.5 enhancement - slider controls! :-)

I should say at this point that one of the nicest things in all of Eki's Overcaster and sky/sea tools is that they have easy to use slider-type controls through a morphmixer panel. However, I believe like Seagen, plugins in plugpak 2.0 will start to use these onscreen sliders to make keyframing and management of settings extremely quick and simple...

Newproject was first - A handy dandy tool that takes care of making a new content directory, its folders and a base scene to start with...

I followed this up with what most people came to see - the suite of plugins known as Overcaster - A series of plugins that create soft-shadowed, photo-realistic, fast rendering lighting environments for scenes. In particular, I demo'd how I had used the Overcaster plugins to illuminate a composit scene (a 3D model composited onto a photograph) with accurately cast shadows...

Click here to see a large comparison image showing the differences with Overcaster lighting vs. generic LW lighting settings.

Note that OC_Exclude (Overcasters 'compositing-assist' tool) was used to allow the shadows to be cast on a polygon underneath the logo, and to remove the influence of all the other lighting from blowing out the polygon. You can however see that using generic LW ambient lighting makes the 'seam' between the image and the polygon visible. Also note how much 'softer' Overcasters lighting and shading appears then using a generic spotlight...

We also looked at a beta of a new plugin called Seagen, designed for, well, generating very nice looking oceans and seas! This plugin also added in some environment backgrounds using another plugpak tool...

Skygen, Eki's excellently super-fast procedural sky generator, complete with moon and sun (these are only available in the LW7.x versions). This plugin produces very nice looking skys, with simulated cloud illumination, suns and moons (with glowing halos) and background gradient colouration in mear seconds rather then minutes that Skytracer takes...

Luckily because Skygen uses LW's textured environments, we could also generate previews of animated sun rise, moving clouds and more using the VIPER window without having to generate AVI renders! Very cool!

There were other parts of Plugpak that due to time I didn't get to demo - One cool tool is refgen, a plugin that generates 360 degree reflection maps from an existing scene. Using reflection maps will make rendering a lot faster then using raytracing. There were 4 other freebee extra tools for Layout to do some nice stuff like cloning objects in arrays, add some randomness to their movement and more... I would recommend downloading a copy of Plugpak and trying these tools for yourself... You can read more about Plugpak, and download it from Eki's website.

TUTES:
I managed to fumble my way through the absolute basics of spline modelling by creating a leather womans shoe. Of course, along the way I managed to make plenty of mistakes (on purpose, of course!) but I hope it gave everyone the basic idea what spline modelling is all about... Its one of those things that I felt many people avoided because it all looked too 'confusing' or 'hard'...

FINALLY...
As always, a nice night with many new and old faces! Many thanks have to go yet again to Stuart who provided plenty of yummy muffins and drinks to keep us going, and to the unamed person who bought along some work to show!!

See you all in August!


Kevman