What PShelf plans have you got for future releases?

We're currently working on two large collections aimed specifically at architectural and interior visualizers. We're quite excited about them because we'll be incorporating some new tricks, such as expression-driven surfaces, to make the presets amazingly flexible and usable. As always, we'll be giving away our secrets in tutorial form!

On the subject of tutorials, we've just finished quite a big exploration of refraction - available to Glass collection owners - and we're now working on two more for the public site that we hope to complete for the new year.

Tell me more about the big toy tank model?

This is the second model I ever made in LightWave when I started freelancing. It was done in LW5.5 and had to be split into three separate models, because you could only have about 55,000 polygons per object back then! It was part of a brief for Gameplay.com who were a big internet gaming portal at the time. We've reworked the image using radiosity for this interview.

The tank was meant to be a toy tank. It was one of a series of twenty toy and robot models. The main robot was eventually turned into a man-sized model and placed in Gameplay headquarters! I hope you didn't think we were passing it off as a piece of serious military art!

Are the human models in your reception picture actually - gasp, shock, horror! - Poser models?

Yes, the human models were Poser. It's not something that we recommend, as they don't look particularly realistic, but some of the deadlines for these visualisation jobs are unbelievable (Film and TV VFX guys don't know they're born!) and so they're quick to import and we can get them to walk using BVH files, which is kind of neat.

Was the cathedral for a particular job?

The cathedral is a personal project of mine. I'm not religious but have always been fascinated by the sheer complexity of architecture in gothic cathedrals. I wanted to try and construct an entire cathedral in LightWave that you could shoot from any angle. The shots included here were all done way back in LW5.6. It took about four months to get these shots, although it would probably only take about three weeks with the latest version. Things have improved a lot!

What have you got for our readers then? :)

Four exquisite terrain preset surfaces: Summer_Grass, Summer_Road, Icy_Grass, Icy_Road.
A test landscape scene used to create the images shown
REFTEX scenes used to manipulate the surfaces more easily
REFTEX Tutorial. PDF tutorial about REFTEX scenes with project files included.

Windows	Macintosh (OSX only)
Zip	StuffIt
5.93 MB	5.29 MB
For non-commercial use only

Thanks very much David! People who would like to see more of the Pshelf series of textures, or read some of the Worms of Art tutorials can visit their website.