Are the screens showing video, as we know it, (since you said PAL) or are they Quicktimes or AVIs?

NO, they are all showing PAL frequencies but they are actually showing a video file in 800x600 x 6 screens scaled by hardware to 1024x768 resolution. They are overcoded mpg2 files.

Tell me more about actually building the animation

In LightWave it was a simple task. I added six cameras and made five of them follow the master camera (with parenting). Each camera had their own view so that the perspectives seemed a bit strange, but very real. I could have made the animation with one camera with perspective fixing but it did not look cool enough in the tests I did.

How did you get involved with the Opera icons?

Olav Mørkrid - a great friend of mine and one of the best programmers on the Commodore 64 back in the 80s - worked for Opera Software. He told them that I could do pixel art... so that was the start of it all... I love doing the opera icons and style together with Trond Werner Hansen and Johan H. Borg at Opera Software. They are very skilled in the things they do and I would say that us three together is a fantastic interface design team that could do any software or Operating System design and logic in a proper manner.

Why did you use LightWave for the icons, rather than hand-painting them as would have been done in years gone by?

Because LightWave has a very well-antialiased rendering engine that I love using. The thing I do often is to render out images, altering them in Photoshop and then use them as a texture in LightWave with a bump map and then finally render out in small sizes. Then I get an image that is very good to handcraft pixel-level modifications and altering in Photoshop and Pro Motion (a Deluxe Paint clone for the PC).

I also use LightWave to scale photos for various print work I do. Not many people know that to use a large photo as a texture, mapping it to a box and rendering it out in large formats is the ultimate image scaler. You get a very good image without Photoshop trying to make some blurry in betweens... LightWave simply does this job a lot better. In the rendered large file there are much more to work with. It is very nice to have a machine with lots of RAM, then one can work in large resolutions and the work is top-of-the-line for all kinds of output in the years to come. When scaling with LightWave it is more like an analogue zoom or enlargement.

Tell us about the Euronics weather animation:

I made the animation in plain LightWave with no plug-ins at all. This is a good proof that when you concentrate on the process and final result of an animation there is no reason to buy a plug-in that costs more then your budget. I am really proud of this animation as it works in native LightWave! This animation is shown before and after every weather forecast on TV2 (Norway's largest commercial TV channel).

A stripped down version of the water anim is a gift from me to the LightWavers out there. I struggled for a long time trying to make good-looking water, tried shaders and plugins and so on, this is a nice scene starter for water. You must ad a reflecting background(like a skydome or a HDRI) and you can play around with the displacement, colours and camera angles and so on - if you add DOF it looks really nice. This is the best water that I can imagine with such a simple way of making it. You can also smooth the object to get more details in the waves... The logo that floats on the surface is all keyframes in LightWave.

Windows / Macintosh (OS X)

Zip

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For non-commercial use only

Thanks Pål! Very handy for people looking to make their own floating logo scenes!

What would you like to learn about LightWave next?

Character animation for sure... I want to make better things than I have made so far, my ultimate goal is to please children with a really nice and funny cartoon series with a lot of good moral and learning. I want to make a 12 episode series with also a children's book and a small videogame. Other things I want to learn is to model better so that I am able to do the whole lot myself, not because I will do everything myself but because it is a good precaution to know that I can do everything within LightWave. I am so happy with the LightWave scene, because there are so many talented people here, and most of them are really, really nice. For an example, I have been working together with Peter Thomas (thomas4d) on a lot of different assignments and he is simply the best man on that side of the globe, most joy Peter!

What are you working on now?

I am working on different animation and graphic design assignments and interface work. I hope in the future that I will be able to get more work in the 3D field as I think I am a better animator and do better scene set-up than I have proven up-to-date.

Thanks for talking to us Pål! I really like the animation and the concept behind it and good luck with the children's TV series.

You can see more of Pål's work on his website.