Having
fun is serious business |
| Admir
Elezovic
Admir Elezovic and Croteam have now brought several
generations of the award-winning Serious Sam and
other exciting games to players world-wide, on
both PC and X-Box. Admir has used LightWave as
the key 3D application in each cycle of development,
and each time LightWave has been able to help
them meet the challenge of improving the quality
of the content and making the next game more beautiful
and engaging than the last.
ìAll our artists use LightWave
for modeling, animation, texturing and special
stuff like backgrounds, special effects and prototyping
levels,î says Admir. ìWith [Croteam's]
new Engine and Tools in work, Level editors are
using LightWave to model and texture templates
(architecture, decorations, environments) and
import them into our new Engine.î
Game content creation begins
with modeling, and Admir finds LightWave's fast
and flexible Modeler fits the bill admirably.
ìModeler is extremely powerful and fast to
work with,î he says. ìIts polygonal tools
are top notch. Modeler's workflow allows us to
use different approaches to achieve the same results
- very important for maintaining the speed of
production. Often, you are required to make changes
to models or animation on a daily basis, in order
to fit them into game better and the LightWave
way of working makes our job much easier... LightWave
allows us to redo a model a zillion times without
worrying about loosing the mapping.î
The fast workflow of character
setup and animation features round out LightWave's
virtues for Admir. ìFor example, for player
models, I made a skeleton, animated it, and then
with ease I was able to replace different models
on that skeleton with little adjustment to the
skeleton itself. That was a real time-saver!î
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"I'm
very much in love with LightWave's rendering engine,
as most people are. It has a quite fast and flexible
built-in radiosity engine and its native support
of HDR and 128-bit rendering pipeline make it unique."
Emmanuelle
Salvucci, Revolution Software |
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"I've
watched the rigging process done by skilled
users with other packages, and more often
than not I find myself thinking how much quicker
the same thing can be done using LightWave."
Jonny
Gordon, Zero Gravity Entertainment |
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| Games
are rapidly becoming the dominant segment
in the entertainment industry, and the production
requirements are rapidly pushing toward
real-time photo realism. This growth creates
a lot of opportunity, and NewTekís LightWave
provides the tools to take advantage of
that opportunity.
LightWaveís Modeler
has long held the title as the worldís best
polygonal modeler. Game developers will
find this a major weapon in creating efficient,
yet great-looking, models for fast, exciting
game-play. LightWaveís advanced UV mapping,
weight maps, gradient controls, and motion
and texture baking all contribute to a powerful
arsenal for the game developer.
Subdivision
Surfaces
With the tap of the tab key, your model
changes from a 30-polygon faceted rough
to an organically rounded, smooth, flowing
sculpture. A head or a body, human, animal,
or alien; a cool sports car; or a techno-organic
spaceship perhaps. Subdivision Surfaces
provide modeling as complex as you need
with great economy of effort and time. You
model with simple polygons and at only a
fraction of the number the final model will
need. You have complete control of your
model but with a simplicity and ease you
would never have expected when creating
complex natural or engineered objects.
Surface
Baker
Today's games require both real-time performance
and incredibly detailed visuals in game
play that is far more rich in objects and
characters than ever before. The ability
to bake surface textures, including bump
mapping, and then apply that to simpler
objects that will perform faster in the
game engine is an advantage LightWave offers
game developers, as well as artists working
in other fields of visualization.
Inverse
Kinematics
LightWave lets you use virtual bones to
quickly and easily make a skeleton for your
character, and use FK and IK to move the
character. FK and IK? Forward Kinematics:
rotate the upper arm, and the forearm, hand
and fingers must follow. Inverse Kinematics:
put a ìgoalî just at the end of the fingers,
and then if you want your character to reach
for that M&M on the table, just move
the goal toward the M&M, and the characterís
arm will move in proper fashion. These can
be combined for realistic movement in any
situation. And LightWaveís cutting-edge
character tools make animating a complex
character quick and responsive. |
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| Pancho
Eekels
The role of LightWave at Digital Extremes, makers
of the Unreal series, has grown over the years
from modeling exterior environments to creating
many more elements of the content as well. ìWith
each update, LightWave has become more and more
powerful,î says Pancho Eekels, Lead Designer.
ìAfter the release of LightWave [6], I was
able to do it all in LightWave.î
ìLightWave 3D has lots
of stuff...right out of the box. No extra plugins
are needed to get you up and going.î
Features Like UV mapping,
texture baking, and the ease with which LightWave
fits into any pipeline keeps the folks at Digital
Extremes focused on the game, not worrying about
software issues.
Why would Pancho recommend
LightWave 3D to game developers? ìThe ease
of use, people can pick it up very fast.î
And, he says, what he likes best about LightWave
3D ìis the people behind it. If you need something
special, the NewTek team seems really bent on
helping or adding features to the software for
you.î
Josh
Tsui
Studio Gigante, a new game development company,
has achieved breakthrough status with its very
first release, Tao Feng: Fists of the Lotus, which
became the top-selling fighting game. The success
comes dues-paid; since the founders, including
Josh Tsui, have years of experience in game development,
most notably work at Midway Games, where they
were part of the Mortal Kombat team.
ìUnlike most fighting games,
the environments had a lot of stuff going on such
as breakable objects and animations that interacted
with the characters,î says Josh. ìBecause
of this, we had our work cut out for us.... All
the backgrounds were created solely in LightWave.
Using features such as texture baking greatly
enhanced the look and feel of our game.î
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