• LightWave v9.5 released
• Battlestar Galactica wins another Emmy®
• Project news: Tropic Thunder
• Project news: Fringe
• Project list update
• John Gross of Eden FX in StudioDaily Webinar
• Picture of the month
• Forum news: Speed modeling challenge
• Los Angeles LightWave Users Group meeting
• Interview news: Yafka
• Plug-in news: LWCAD 3
• Web news: PresetCentral relaunched

SIGGRAPH 2008 was the venue for NewTek to release the highly-anticipated fourth free update to LightWave v9.
LightWave v9.5 for Windows 32/64 is in your My Downloads page right now and brings new features including:

• A complete hair and fur system [pic]
• A networkable radiosity caching system for speeding up photorealistic rendering
• A unique animated radiosity cache
• Better symmetry handling for Modeler
• Lights have been completely overhauled and opened to third party development
• IES (photometric) lights have been added to LightWave's roster for realistic architectural visualisation
• EXIF data has been thoroughly implemented in LightWave for image input and output
• Industry-standard FBX and COLLADA import and export facilities along with improved OBJ support
• Numerous workflow improvements

Not only can you get LightWave but the manuals have also been updated for v9.5 and a new one has been created for the FiberFX hair system. The OS X version of v9.5 has been held back a little longer for tweaking, but owners of OS X LightWave v9 who wish to take advantage of the new functionality presented by v9.5 can join the open beta program by clicking on the link on the home page of their account.

In the 60th Primetime Emmy® Awards this year, Battlestar Galactica won in the category "Outstanding Special Visual Effects For A Series" for the episode "He That Believeth In Me". Congratulations to Gary Hutzel and the team. The award winners names in full: Gary Hutzel, Visual Effects Supervisor Michael Gibson, Visual Effects Producer David Takemura, Visual Effects Coordinator Doug Drexler, CGI Supervisor Kyle Toucher, CG Artist Sean Jackson, CG Artist Pierre Drolet, CG Modeler Aurore de Blois, Senior Compositor Derek Ledbetter, Compositor

TROPIC THUNDER ©2008 DreamWorks LLC. All Rights Reserved. Images courtesy CIS Vancouver

CIS Visual Effects Group's Vancouver, London and Hollywood facilities were called upon to support Tropic Thunder's action. "We first got involved while Ben was still shooting in Kauai," says CIS Vancouver's visual effects supervisor Mark Breakspear.  "Our team handled the war scenes which necessitated generating everything from CG planes and helicopters and digital doubles to exploding debris and crashing helicopters, matte paintings and set extensions of jungle camps, to bullet hits, hand grenades and flame throwers - the work was quite challenging."

“We used LightWave on Tropic Thunder because there simply wasn't a better solution for us for what we had to make. We had to model two CG Skyhawk planes, and a helicopter that would be blown to pieces. We also built various grenades, RPGs, knives and guns. For the helicopter explosion, we used LightWave for all the hard-body animation, the breaking up and destruction of the chopper. It was so easy to make modifications, which we had to do constantly!”

You can read more about Tropic Thunder in this article on fxguide.

Kings of TV FX work Zoic Studios aired their latest oeuvre in Fringe, a new Fox TV show that aims to outdo the X-Files. LightWave was used to turn Homeland security agent John Scott gradually transparent and to bring a plane crash to life with the agent and plane in question being textured and rendered with LightWave v9.3. Andrew Orloff was at the helm of the effects team bringing the sequence to the screen in Fringe's two-hour opener that aired on September 10th.

You can read more about Fringe in this article on VFXworld.

Film: Tropic Thunder; The Dark Knight; Battle of Red Cliff; Eagle Eye
Broadcast: Earthshocks; Fringe; Untamed, Uncut; Lost Treasure of the Grand Canyon; Lost Treasures; Last of the Dambusters: Revealed; Nile TV idents
Short film: Robotochan [pic]; La dama en el umbral; Phoenix mission to Mars; Die Seilbahn; Ona koja mjeri (she who measures)

If you've worked on a project that should be included in the LightWave projects list, email bvost@newtek.com with the details

StudioDaily.com is launching a new craft-based Webinar series that will focus on how a variety of specialized facilities from across the country handle the art of visual effects, animation, production, broadcast graphics and editorial while they grow their businesses. The two-part fall series, which will feature live e-chat with the panelists and moderator, kicks off on September 30 with "The Business of VFX." Learn what it takes to get up and running, staff up and down, and go big. The second Webinar in the series, “The Business of Animation,” is scheduled for November 19. Among the list of esteemed panelists for this first Webinar is NewTek LightWave artist John Gross, Co-Founder/Visual Effects Supervisor at Eden FX. Gross and his team's recent credits include effects for top television programs like Chuck, Lost, The Ghost Whisperer and The History Channel's Life After People miniseries (2008 Emmy nomination); and the upcoming film, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (12/08). For more details about this Webinar series, visit: StudioDaily.com

Rubber band ball by Dave Codeglia, Ghostlight Digital

"I started modeling by hand, but it took way too long and there were gaps and intersections.

To model the ball with dynamics, I had a ball set as a collision object. One rubber band object, a simple ring of polys, was given ClothFX with polysize set to 80%. When calculated, the band would shrink and wrap around the ball.

I saved a trans object of the band wrapped around the ball, opened it in Modeler, fixed any intersections and closed any gaps, then extruded the band (using William Vaughan's thicken technique: ftp://ftp.newtek.com/multimedia/movies/w3dw/Thicken.mov) and added poly loops for sub-patches. I pasted that rubber band object in with the ball object and switched back to Layout.

In Layout, the ball collision object now has the first modeled rubber band included. The single band object (the one made up of a simple ring of polys) is still in the scene with ClothFx. Randomly rotate the band and solve again. It shrinks around the ball AND the first modeled rubber band. Save that trans object at a frame that looks good, in Modeler fix intersections and gaps, extrude, model it, paste with the ball and object.

Rinse, repeat, and keep adding rubber bands until you feel like drinking cyanide." 
- Dave Codeglia, Ghostlight Digital
http://www.ghostlightdigital.com/

The next meeting of the LALW will be this Sunday 28th September where Ken Nign will be presenting two plug-ins he has written and Larry Shultz will be discussing LightWave v9.5's new joint tools and FiberFX.
http://www.lalightwave.com/

Antonis Kotzias has worked all over the world but when he came to start his own studio, the obvious choice was "back home" in Athens. Read about Antonis' work on documentary series Ancient Discoveries and more in CGSociety's interview. As Antonis said when we spoke to him: "LightWave gave the small team at Yafka the opportunity to satisfy big and demanding customers in insane deadlines".

WTools 3D has released the third version of the Modeler plug-in LWCAD. Designed initially for use with architectural visualisation modelling in mind, LWCAD is really suitable for all hard-surface modelling tasks. Version 3 introduces real-time 3D booleans and UCS or Universal Coordinate System - a concept familiar to serious CAD operators where any flat surface, no matter its attitude, can become your X, Y and Z planes. "I wanted to bring the best modelling tools CAD users have to LightWavers and LWCAD is the result" said LWCAD creator Victor Velicko. Find out more at http://www.wtools3d.com Image by Paolo Zambrini www.engram.it

After a long absence PresetCentral is back online with a Web 2.0 interface and a whole host of improvements. Surface presets can be classed on whether they use nodes or not and are not limited to geometry surfacing but also Hypervoxels and more. www.presetcentral.com

Small print:
So that's the first newsletter, did you like it? Is it missing something for you? All feedback gratefully received to make it better or to include your story in the next one. There will be cake!

Current version: LightWave v9.5 (Windows), v9.3.1 (OS X)