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| MIR
Visuals
One ambition of digital artists Mats and Trond
of Mir Visuals in Norway is to put one of their
buildings or bits of furniture in every city in
the world. LightWave is their 3D tool of choice
in this quest. They visualize a wide range of
projects for clients, everything from massive
building projects to furniture collections to
electronic products. Mats cites ease of use as
the core reason for his preference: ìWe love
that the navigation is text-based instead of...
pictograms that just complicate everything. Nice
colors... It's quick and not quirky... You feel
like a pro whatever level you are at just by the
look of it.î
For Trond, quality and economy
are key factors. ìThe main reason why we like
it is the extremely photo realistic native renderer...
and at a low price.î
Clients are amazed by the
photo real quality that the pair achieve in their
projects. ìWe let radiosity do the work,î
says Mats, with a grin. ìFor the interior images
we sometimes use up to about 3 and 4 bounces on
the radiosity settings. This gives us necessary
depth in the lighting situation.î For exteriors,
Mats notes, ìAlso Skytracerô is a very powerful
tool with its ability to produce lighting situations
at certain times of the day and year.î
Mir Visuals was able
to help furniture company Norway Says prepare
promotional materials to launch a new product
line at a major trade show before finished pieces
were available. ìThe Norway Says collection
shown in that article [in Scandinavian Living]
was entirely modeled by us,î says Mats. ìThe
group was in such a hurry before the exhibition
in Milan that they could not complete the prototypes
for a photo-session. We rendered the collection,
and they are still using the renders instead of
real photos of the products.î |
"With
LightWave I am confident that each project will
come out looking great no matter how tight the deadline
is."
Amir
Youssef, Swift-Render |
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"I
really appreciate the quality of LightWave
and LightWave's renders. And actually that's
the end product if you don't have a
good render, then it doesn't really matter
how hard you work."
David
Isyoman, Director of Visual Effects, Luminetik |
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| Need
to turn a design into an image that lets
a client really see what the building will
look like, inside and out? Want to make
to make it possible for an online shopper
to peek inside the computer they are considering
and view it from all sides? Or do you wish
to revive the wonders of a past civilization
to let visitors stroll through ancient streets
and tour majestic temples and public buildings
long since lost to time? NewTekís LightWave
3D is your solution.
Radiosity
LightWave's radiosity offers a powerful
simulation of the way light actually behaves,
bouncing from surface to surface, so surfaces
subtly color one another, take on the inner
glow of reality, and shadows soften and
take on a natural look. A variety of controls
let you achieve just the effect you want,
and the radiosity solutions can be cached
or even baked into image maps, for major
savings in rendering time.
HDRI
Most rendering engines limit you to just
256 levels of brightness to express a world
where luminosity actually ranges across
orders of magnitude from a pitch black cavern
to the searing face of the Sun. LightWave
3D includes High-Dynamic-Range Image and
light support, so using or creating images
with thousands of levels of luminance is
easy. In combination with LightWaveís radiosity
renderer, the results are stunningly photoreal.
Images completely generated in computer
look as though they were snatched from the
real world. Youíll feel you can step right
into the picture, and know just how everything
will feel to the touch.
SkyTracer
With Skytracer, you can enter real-world
parameters and create sophisticated atmospheric
effects to complete your image. Settings
are available for characteristics of the
atmosphere, sun, and clouds, and for time
and location settings to accurately simulate
the sun rising or setting, in this world
or another. Skytracer accurately simulates
light scattering and light absorption in
the atmosphere. |
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| Juan
José González
Juan José González,
of Genesis Visuals in Spain, is specialist in
architectural visualization who often works on
projects of massive scale. ìLightWave works
very well with large scenes in visualization work,î
Juan says. ìUsually I have from 2 to 4 million
polygons in one scene without any kind of instancing
and Layout works very well.î
A recreation of the city of
Ria Aviles is among his more ambitious projects:
ìThere are about 3,000 buildings, all textured
from generic photographs of the city. The near
terrain texture has about 8000 x 8000 pixels applied
to a model of about 200k polys, and the high altitude
terrain is textured from a series of aerial photographs
at 4000 x 4000 pixels.î
And how well has LightWave
performed for this project? ìWhen people who
are actually living there see images and video
they think that the video is real footage with
digital effects to make the river project... no-one
thinks that what they are watching is 100% CG.î
Juan José González
concludes, ìLightWave is probably the most
complete software for this kind of work. I see
the workflow of other professionals and companies
using other packages and it is by far more complex
and less flexible than me using LightWave. Out
of the box it is the most complete and balanced
CG software today and it has the fastest workflow
for visualization projects by far.î
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© 2003 Juan José
González |
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