• Project news: The Passenger
• Plugin news: KRay goes gold
• Picture of the month
• Plugin news: LWCAD 3.5
• Spore creatures in LightWave

A short film has seized the imaginations of NewTek LightWave users, and more than just its incredible quality, the devotion that one man put into making it. NewTek talked to the artist Chris Jones about making The Passenger.

NewTek: How long did it take you to complete The Passenger? Chris: I started it eleven years ago, fitting it into my spare time after work, then went full time a couple of years later for almost six years and finished in 2006 - so adding all this together it took about six years of full time work.  I started the project on LightWave v5 in 1998, then I upgraded to 6 when it came out.  Most of it was done in LightWave v6.5 (I think that version introduced particles, which was handy). NewTek: How many festivals has it been presented at now? How many prizes have you won? Chris: At last count, it's been in about 13 festivals, which isn't really all that impressive but probably not too bad considering the lack of effort I put into entering the contests.  I actively pursued only two of them (and they were the ones I won awards at, ironically).  The rest came about through invitations, which usually meant it was "out of competition."  It also toured the United States with the Academy Award nominated shorts, and parts of Australia with the Australian Film Festival.  It won Best Animation at the 2006 Los Angeles Short Film Festival and Best Australian Film at the 2008 Melbourne Animation Festival. NewTek: Has the aim of creating this short resulted in gainful CG employment yet? Chris: It has attracted a few job offers (in fact, there are one or two in my inbox this very moment), but I keep knocking them back in favor of getting my own projects off of the ground.  So far, I see no evidence that spending the amount of time that I did notably increased job prospects.  I think if I'd pulled the plug after two years, I still would have had enough of a showreel to get the same kind of jobs that I'm being offered now. NewTek: From the Making Of on your site, you seem to have spent as much time moving as working on the short. Have you moved houses again? Chris: Yes, four months ago - and again in a few weeks by the looks of it.   I'm always on the move... NewTek: How did you manage to do this? Are you married? Do you have kids? Another job? If any of those are true, where did you find the time? Chris: None of the above (with the exception of four-and-a-half months of employment as I neared completion), combined with an uncanny knack for living on the cheap.

Chris' work intrigued the forum so much that through the medium of forum leader Roberto Ortiz, Chris was hammered with questions to which he replied:

Forum: What tools do you use today? Chris: NewTek LightWave v6.5b. Forum: Did you use any of the new toys in LightWave when rendering (i.e. nodal shading, new lights, new cameras) ? Chris: I used the new toys in LightWave v6 and 6.5, but nodal shading didn't exist back then. I might have used new lights/cameras that weren't in the previous version, I don't remember. Forum: Tell us about your experience with rigging? Chris: I think that I had a pretty good grasp of rigging using only the available toolset. My mathematical skills are not great, but I did try learning to use simple expressions - which invariably gave me the same results as using the built-in tools or plugins. I tried the Follower plugin, changing the bone hierarchy, a multitude of IK and FK configurations and combinations, but there was always some drawback that caused the hands to move away from their goal nulls, or the motion of the torso to be delayed by a frame or two. (I was able to reproduce that effect with a simple two null setup - it was quite inexplicable). Forum: Did you render out buffers and AO passes? Chris: I rendered out alpha channels, but that was about it, I composited all of it in Premiere 5.1. Forum: How many changes were made during the eight years of the production. Any and all changes: changes to animation, models, sound, script.... Chris: I am not sure how to answer that.. one to a couple of million? For the most part everything evolved until it reached its final form, then it stayed that way until the end of the production.

A couple of shot breakdowns:

 

NewTek spoke to Grzegorz Tanski about his render engine finally going gold:

NewTek: Why did you start writing it?
Grzegorz: At the beginning it was just a raytracing experiment written for fun. I was always a 3D graphics enthusiast. At that time I was interested mainly in real-time 3D programming. When 3D became hardware accelerated, it was no longer interesting for me to access high-level APIs. I wanted to "touch pixels." That is how an idea to write a raytracing engine came to me. I wrote the first lines of Kray code was written in 2001 and then it evolved as a freeware project. At the end of 2004, MindBerries was founded and at the beginning of 2005, Kray became a commercial plugin for LightWave and a full-time project.

A Kray gallery

 You can see more images in the Kray gallery, or purchase Kray at the Kraytracing site.
 

This image beautifully sums up the weather that many of us in the Northern Hemisphere are currently experiencing. NewTek asked Sven just how long it had taken to craft this intricate picture:

"It took about 14 days to create the scene, rework the church and model eight new buildings. Of course I had created a lot of the other buildings and characters before. So overall I spent more than two months to create the image and all content. A few of the new market stalls were modeled by Jorge Suarez".

The Wintermarket image shown here took about 35 to 45 minutes to render with low GI and low AA. Sven uses a low-end quadcore with 8GB RAM.

The "other buildings and characters" in the image are part of his Medieval Worlds Web site. Founded in 2004, the Web site serves as a portal for his artwork and as a place for him to sell the models that he has made all relating to the medieval, fantasy and historical motifs that he has loved since his childhood.

Sven also wrote a small LScript plugin called "Autolightcreate" that places lights onto an object's polygons for placing all of the lights in this scene (more than 400). All of his scripts are available from his other Web site.
 

NewTek spoke to Viktor Velicko, the author of the Modeler plugin set LWCAD, now at version 3.5 (a free upgrade for owners of LWCAD 3.x).

NewTek: How long have you been working on LWCAD now?
Viktor: I have been working on the LWCAD project since the winter of 2004.

NewTek: What made you start writing LWCAD - you started in the winter of 2004, but why?
Viktor: After I released Cap Hole studio, which was my first commercial set of plug-ins, I received couple of requests from LightWave users. One of them was to make a Move tool with an ability to snap to points. And I did it. :)

NewTek: What was the most satisfying thing for you to deliver in LWCAD 3.5?
Viktor: I am very satisfied with the MassRound tool. It was my first tool that works with NURBS surfaces. The current version 3.5 is freezing geometry into polygons, but internally it is pure NURBS tool.

NewTek: A lot of people are saying that you put enough in this to make it a paid upgrade, why didn't you?
Viktor: Yes, I was probably too generous with current upgrade. :)

NewTek: When you say high-level architectural tools, do you mean something like this Houdini procedural modeling example?
Viktor: Those are exactly the tools I want to create. But first, you have to have a very advanced library of basic operations. I have been building that library since I started writing LWCAD. Because if you don't have boolean operations, which works flawlessly, for example, those advanced real-time tools will crash every minute. I already have some medium advanced tools such as the Fence tool. And I want to create more of them and make them better in the future.

NewTek: Are you writing a LightWave CORE version of 3.x, because you said initially that LightWave CORE users would get a free upgrade to the CORE version, or will it be version 4?
Viktor: Yes, I am planning to release LWCAD 3.x also as a LightWave CORE version. It will be a free upgrade for all users with LWCAD 3.x. LWCAD 4 will probably be LightWave CORE only.

A LWCAD gallery

You can see more images or purchase LWCAD at the wtools3d Web site. If you have version 3 already, don't forget to download your free upgrade.





NewTek forum user precedia, Daniel Lanovaz IRL, has written a tutorial for importing any creature created in Electronic Art's evolution game Spore into LightWave:

Here is Daniel's Tutorial PDF: Spore creatures in LightWave

* Owners of LightWave v9 can join the open beta program to get the 64-bit Mac version that Daniel is talking about by signing up on your account at http://register.newtek.com

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