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What
spec machines are you using it on at the moment?
I have two workstations to
play with. One at the office and one at home.
The one at the office is a 3DBoxx
dual Xeon 3.06GHz, with 4GB ram, a Quadro FX 3000,
a Sony 24" wide screen CRT and about 2.1TB storage
using external Promise disk arrays. At home I
have a single Pentium 4 3.2GHz on 800MHz FSB,
2GB ram, a Quadro FX 2000, a Dell 20.1 Ultra Sharp
TFT and about 500 GB for storage. All machines
are equipped with Plextor 8x DVD burners and TEAC
DVD players. At the office, I also have a DVS
SD StationPro video card and an 80GB DLT for late-night
backups. For rendering I have eight RenderBoxx
nodes, that handle the 3D tasks (LightWave) and
2D tasks (Digital Fusion). All these nodes are
dual Xeon 2.8GHz with 2GB ram each and they can
save the day. Of course, I use a separate machine
room for all these noise makers.
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there any plug-ins you wouldn't be without?
Not really. LightWave out-of-the-box
can handle most tasks quite easily. And if there's
a job that needs something special, there are
thousands of free LScripts or plug-ins you can
find around the net, which can make life easier.
For commercial products, I think the most valuable
3rd party developers, which are a major credit
to the LightWave community are Worley
Laboratories, Dynamic
Realities, Evasion3D
and Amleto,
the easiest network solution available. And off
course, the valuable but extremely low priced,
OGO_Taiki,
which I used on my last project…
In your opinion: Integrated
or Separated? :)
Ha ha... I was waiting for
this question. And what do you mean by saying
integration? You mean, take all the tools and
buttons that Modeler have and throw them into
Layout? Hell, no! Keep them as they are now! Thanks,
but no thanks!
As I see it, what needs to
be done here is give Layout the ability to edit
and animate the points of an object, create or
edit endomorphs, animate weight maps and UV texture
maps. And give Modeler the ability to save the
progressive creation of a modelling tool as a
motion file of some sort - maybe embedded in the
LWO format - so we can use that file in Layout
and animate things like lathe, smooth scale, Booleans,
rail extrudes or anything. Also, lights and cameras
in Modeler would be great for most surfacing tasks
and for perspective camera matching. Now, that's
what I call integration!
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me more about your airbus. Did you model the plane
from scratch, or buy it?
I wish I had bought it. I
tried to find a suitable Airbus plane to buy for
the project, but I couldn't find anything. You
see, at first, this project required the plane
to fly so close to the camera, we could see the
screws on the window frames! This is something
you either build it by yourself or hire someone
to do it for you. But, later on, we decided that
that particular angle was too harsh for the desired
feel for the shot and changed to a mid-to-long
shot for the plane. By, that time I had built
an aeroplane that was extremely heavy on details,
with all the screws, fins, edges, doors, hatches
and windows that would be seen on camera, but
no textures. Since all that detail wasn't going
to be seen from a distance, I built a lighter
version of the Airbus and also choose some design
parts from a Boeing to put on, just because we
liked them, but didn't want to start a Boeing
from scratch.
In the end, most of the details
like doors and control surfaces were based on
textures and worked really well for that particular
shot. Modelling and texturing the plane was about
two months work, with all the changes included.
In parallel to that, there was a lot of R&D
went on for the clouds, because the shot required
this plane to fly through volumetric 3D clouds
at high altitude. For the clouds I used a 3rd
party plug-in called OGO_Taiki. It's part of another
great plug-in called OGO_Hikari. In my opinion,
Taiki produces the most realistic volumetric clouds
one can produce these days with computers. Period!
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