November - 2009
In this edition:
- Update letter from Jay Roth
- Cut&Paste Finals
- Picture of the month
- Project News: Death Masks
- Unity
- Project News: Flight 1549 Hudson River
Update Letter from Jay Roth, president of the 3D division NewTek, to the NewTek LightWave 3D Community
November 24, 2009
Dear LightWave® Community
On November 16th we were excited to deliver a first feature set for LightWave with CORE technology to our HardCORE membership (a benefit of HardCORE membership—which is still open). The extensive list of features and productivity enhancements we delivered, detail the planned features for LightWave 3D® with CORE technology.
We will be sharing the news with the entire LightWave community in the upcoming December 2009 Newsletter. Do not miss this important newsletter with all the details of what we have planned for LightWave with CORE technology.
This is an exciting beginning for LightWave with CORE technology. NewTek is working on delivering a LightWave product that will keep your workflow and pipeline intact, while introducing powerful leaps in productivity through our new CORE technology. As you explore and learn the new features that CORE will offer, you will be able to quickly learn and master tools that keep up with the growing demands and complexities of 3D production—but more about that in the December newsletter.
Thanks for your continued support, feedback, and commitment to the first release of LightWave 3D with CORE technology. If you’re really excited and want to learn now what’s on the horizon, you can still join the LightWave HardCORE team. We remain committed to the evolution of LightWave, a world-class 3D application with Emmy® Award-winning features and functionality.
Jay Roth President, 3D Division
NewTek
NewTek spoke to Stephen "monovich" Fitzgerald (on the left in red in the above picture) about his Audience Choice-winning entry in the Cut&Paste final in October (it was delayed from the original July date due to scheduling difficulties).
| "The Cut&Paste Global Championships was a pretty intense night! From the get-go, I knew it would be interesting because the workstation I was supposed to be competing on wasn't set up, so I defaulted to my laptop... not the speediest way to go, but sometimes you just have to adapt. "Executing my idea went smoothly and according to plan - no crashes or surprises. LightWave was great and enabled me to easily get my concept animated and rendered with about three hours left for compositing. I don't usually attempt any sort of character animation work in my normal day-to-day projects, but it was central to my concept for the night, so I gave it a go anyway and the Layout tools were intuitive enough to just roll with without any surprises. What a relief! "The guy next to me had an 8-core MacPro and I had the laptop... so you might guess that my compositing didn't go very quickly. I had the piece composited and ready to render with about 30 minutes left before deadline, but then my After Effects render ended up taking more than an hour. They tried to stall for me because of the circumstances, but I missed the judging by about THIRTY seconds. As I ran my clip downstairs I saw the judges walking upstairs. I couldn't believe it! I did get the clip to the editor in time for viewing, so all was not lost. "When the videos were shown the crowd response to mine was great, and that made me feel a little better. It got a lot of cheers, oohs and ahhs. They announced the winners and I wasn't among them, but a bunch of people came up after and expressed a lot of support, so I knew at least the piece was well-received. I was okay with the outcome overall because I knew mine was 'late' and the competition were all on their game as well. Shortly thereafter, most of the judges approached me and let me know that they'd tried to change my entry to the winner at the last minute, but the change got lost in the hustle and bustle of the event. Near miss! "After that, the competition organizer announced the audience choice winner, and mine won that one. So even though it was all crazy, I guess my entry did okay. "The best part really was just making something I'm happy with and having people respond to it, so for me it was a night well spent. "I got to represent LightWave a lot; many people asked if I used Maya and of course, I set them straight. I started with Quidam characters for speed and simplicity, then poly-reduced them in Modeler for the look that I wanted, then animated them in Layout, rendered them in FPrime (so I could start comping before they were done rendering), and composited the final in After Effects with heavy doses of Particular. I used Transmotion to export my camera data from LightWave to AE so I could match up the 2D and 3D compositing elements." Have a look at the LightWave preview here. |
 |
||
 |
|||
 |
|||
 |
|||
NewTek asked Chris Lomaka about the inspiration behind his bonsai:
Chris: I had been trying to find a good project in which to use the great tree generator plugin from Olas. One of the things I love about bonsai trees is that they try to look like grand trees shrunk down to a tiny scale. So I thought, what if instead of a tiny tree trying to look big, it was a large tree trying to look like a small bonsai? Who would tend to such a tree? A full-grown tree would be bonsai-sized to a giant, and my project was born. After that, I had to figure out how to convey the unexpected scale of the tree. I initially planned on using something large like a train car as the pot, but decided to have a couple enjoying a nice sunny picnic under the bonsai. People are hard, so they disappeared but their picnic remained, which I found more intriguing anyways. Adding the cardinals was my wife's idea, and really helped with the sense of scale as well as adding a touch of color that helped the composition.
Chris: I had been trying to find a good project in which to use the great tree generator plugin from Olas. One of the things I love about bonsai trees is that they try to look like grand trees shrunk down to a tiny scale. So I thought, what if instead of a tiny tree trying to look big, it was a large tree trying to look like a small bonsai? Who would tend to such a tree? A full-grown tree would be bonsai-sized to a giant, and my project was born. After that, I had to figure out how to convey the unexpected scale of the tree. I initially planned on using something large like a train car as the pot, but decided to have a couple enjoying a nice sunny picnic under the bonsai. People are hard, so they disappeared but their picnic remained, which I found more intriguing anyways. Adding the cardinals was my wife's idea, and really helped with the sense of scale as well as adding a touch of color that helped the composition.
NewTek: Was the LightWave side of things easy?
Chris: As far as the actual work was concerned, everything was pretty straightforward. I made plenty of sketches so I knew what shape of tree I wanted. Once I had the tree made, I went into Layout and set up where my camera would be; so I could go about trimming and bending the tree for better composition. I wound up splitting off the background so that render times would be low and so that I could do adjustments in Photoshop rather than endlessly tweaking in LightWave. The last thing I struggled with was getting the ground in the pot to look right. I eventually settled on using Olas's leaf generator on the ground geometery, creating cards that angled up on which I could map grass clumps.
I did lots of work in Photoshop: light rays, dust, additional props in the table, even the far-background. I also did the butterflies in Photoshop. I downloaded some free butterfly brushes and painted them in. Unfortunately, their lack of color pattern and value changes made it look like butterfly-shaped candy sprinkles. So I grabbed a bunch of butterfly photos and placed them in my image, using the brushed-on butterflies as a guide.
NewTek spoke to Antonis Kotzias, the CG supervisor on Yafka CGI's latest project, working on a show for the History Channel called Death Masks.
 |
 |
 |
 |
We scanned eight death masks using the excellent Next Engine 3D scanner - it is worth mentioning them because their support was instant and their product was great. We brought the data along with UVs directly into LightWave through OBJ export from the scanner. We worked on each model in LightWave, cleaning up and also properly building eyes and eyelids, and we added morphs to open and close eyes and mouths, etc. (The death masks are exactly that, dead, so all of the models were scanned with eyes closed and we had to structure the shape of the open eyes based on research using photos, paintings and written material). Some of this was also done in 3DS Max because one of our freelance artists was more comfortable with it.
We then took the models into ZBrush to texture and create normal maps. We used Photoshop for editing the maps and then took them back to LightWave where all the images - maps for normals, bump, specular, diffuse, etc. - were wired into the node editor. We also used SSS nodes and FiberFX for the hair. Finally, we rendered various scenes zooming in on different areas of the masks, and some morph animations.
The scan in process image linked shows the raw data from the scanner. We did this for each of the heads and kept just the points, not the polygons. We added HyperVoxels to each point and animated all this cloud of data to come from different directions in order for all the points to join up to reveal the face. It took us about four months for the whole project, including a month of traveling around the US and Europe to actually scan the Death Masks.
We then took the models into ZBrush to texture and create normal maps. We used Photoshop for editing the maps and then took them back to LightWave where all the images - maps for normals, bump, specular, diffuse, etc. - were wired into the node editor. We also used SSS nodes and FiberFX for the hair. Finally, we rendered various scenes zooming in on different areas of the masks, and some morph animations.
The scan in process image linked shows the raw data from the scanner. We did this for each of the heads and kept just the points, not the polygons. We added HyperVoxels to each point and animated all this cloud of data to come from different directions in order for all the points to join up to reveal the face. It took us about four months for the whole project, including a month of traveling around the US and Europe to actually scan the Death Masks.
 |
 |
 |
 |
The Death Masks documentary can be seen in the History Channel in the US, and in other locations where it is syndicated.
History Channel: Death Masks page
 |
Since Unity has been released in a free version, it has caught the imaginations of LightWave users wanting a realtime 3D option. Although Unity 3D is a games engine, it can also serve as a way of distributing archviz visualizations to clients easily. LightWave artist Phil Nolan was one of the ones intrigued by the possibilities that Unity 3D has opened in his workflow. He kindly volunteered to write a quick guide on how to bring your LightWave assets into the FPS realm.
LightWave to Unity 3D  • Phil's simple example  LightWave content  • Unity web player Many thanks to Phil Nolan for all his help with this article: www.philnolan3d.com |
NewTek spoke to Exosphere3D's Kas Osterbuhr about his reconstruction of the ditching of US Airways Flight 1549 into the Hudson River on January 15, 2009.
| Kas: "I have been involved in 3D CAD software as far back as 1995, but I put my involvement in 3D on hiatus for a long time until I started getting into LightWave 3D in about 2003. LightWave is one of many software tools that I use for a project, so I timeshare my talents between many programs. My focus is on 'engineering' or 'data-based' animations, where seeing patterns or spatial relationships are the most important goals. "Exosphere3D, in terms of using LightWave for accident reconstruction work, is just myself. However, we are involved in some other venues of scientific data visualization; to be more specific, oil and gas (O&G) exploration. That side of the business has four of us working together. "I started on this 1549 project just after the event occurred because I was curious, like everyone else. I started out by combining the audio files into an accurate composite. It was quite some time before more data was released by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), but once that happened, my efforts really ramped up. Every step I took into the project just got me deeper and deeper. The only way out was to "do it right". I won't say exactly how many hours I spent on this, but let's just say it would have kept me busy for a few months without any difficulty. "To bring numeric data into LightWave, I wrote some simple code in Microsoft Visual Studio, which was capable of creating LightWave ".mot" files. Lucky for me, LightWave's motion file format is text based and I was able to "reverse-engineer" it. I wrote a program that I call "CSV2MOT", which reads a columnar-type text file (i.e. from your favorite spreadsheet program) and creates the keyframes. My biggest challenge was writing the program to extract numeric data from the radar files that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) released via the NTSB docket. Those are in ASCII format and consumed a great deal of effort in writing the parsing algorithms. "I purchased a commercial A320 Aircraft 3D model and re-did the surface textures. I did the same for the buildings. Because the area of interest (New York) is so well-known, someone has actually taken the time to create a 3D model of all those buildings. I was lucky to find the city skyline models - that made a huge difference in the quality of the animation. "Everything about the animation is, in my opinion, accurate. I could probably write several pages about the techniques, software and data utilized... [and Kas did here - ed]. LightWave of course is responsible for the very dynamic visual aspect of the final product and I've been happy to have it in my software toolbox. In that respect, I really don't know what I would do without it. "As a final thought, the LightWave community has been a valuable resource when it comes time to learning and solving problems. I have asked many questions and exchanged many techniques through the discussion forum at NewTek and I hope that individuals (myself included) continue to share and help others when they need it." We invite you to go see the animation on the Exosphere 3D site. |
|
Discussion thread for this edition of the newsletter on the NewTek forum
Tell us about your projects
We welcome all feedback to help improve this newsletter. We would love to include your story in the next one. If you came to this page by word of mouth and would like to receive notification of future newsletters, visit your account and check the "NewTek's monthly newsletter" box. In the centroid of the mechanism (there's a Google Wave invite for whoever sends an email with the origin of the most quotes in the small print of each newsletter)
