Friday, June 14, 2013
The Day Dragons Attacked the World
Rogue State turns to LightWave 11.5 to conquer CG dragons and 220 visual effects shots for Dracano
Posted: Tue 23 Apr 2013
Set in contemporary times, this ambitious plotline depends upon the credibility of the dragon creatures and their appearance, movement, and interaction with people from a nearby U.S. military base who fight back.
But one incredible fact Dracano viewers would never suspect is that three visual effects animators completed the movie’s 220 visual effects shots in just six weeks using LightWave 11.5, the latest release to advance the features, capabilities, and efficiency of the popular LightWave 3D modeling and animation system.
“There is no other 3D animation software out there with the breadth of features and ease of use to allow us to handle all of these visual effects shots for Dracano, given the tight time and budget constraints,” said Scott Wheeler, the visual effects supervisor for Dracano and president of Rogue State, a visual effects and post production boutique in Burbank, CA. In the fall of 2012, Rogue State worked closely with Los Angeles-based Remember Dreaming Productions to realize this fantasy/action adventure movie for Odyssey Entertainment in Australia.
LightWave 11.5 was used to create all of the CG dragons, military vehicles, helicopters, and jets, as well as volcanic smoke, steam, and lava. It was also the primary tool for creating the 220 live action visual effects composites. Wheeler said that new LightWave 11.5 features like Genoma for character rigging, Soft Body Bullet Dynamics, and Motion Blur added to the Viewport Preview Renderer (VPR) system, are “invaluable tools for speeding up the process and streamlining the workflow on complex effects shots by a factor of ten.”
The Genoma Potential
When asked about the single biggest advancement in LightWave 11.5 Wheeler said, Genoma. This intuitive character rigging system jump-starts the 3D modeling process by providing instant rigging of legs, arms, fingers, wings, spines, and other body parts for biped, quadrupeds, and even exotic creatures, like dragons. While Genoma provides a head start in creating 3D rigs, animators can modify these rigs, such as making a tail longer, or any creative changes they may need.“You’re basically just putting pre-programmed pieces together almost like an erector set to build your character. There isn’t a lot of trial and error because once you set-up your creature in Modeler and export it to Layout, it just works exactly the way you’d expect it to,” Wheeler said.
“Before Genoma, you’d actually have to build the rig in LightWave, starting with the bone structure in Modeler and then exporting a fully functioning rig to Layout. To do this, you’d have to have a solid understanding of how to build a good rig,” Wheeler said. “With Genoma, an animator can rig a creature without having to understand the underpinnings of the process.”
The Flesh of Dragons
Most of the CG dragons in Dracano are six to eight feet tall with a massive wingspan and sharp teeth. While they emanate from active volcanoes, they do not breathe fire. They range in size from baby dragons just hatched from eggs to a 150 to 200 foot tall mother dragon. Enraged that her babies are all being killed, she emerges from a fiery volcano ready to do battle with human attackers.The dragons have soft flesh covering their bodies and wings that move in relation to the rigid skeletal structure underneath. Soft hanging flesh can even jiggle as the creature moves for greater realism. In LightWave 11.5, Genoma works in conjunction with another new feature, Soft Body Bullet Dynamics to produce this effect.
LightWave 11.5 extends LightWave 11’s Bullet dynamics for rigid models to encompass flesh, cloth, rubber, and other soft materials that deform. A dress can blow in the breeze even if the underlying model remains rigid because Genoma and Soft Body Bullet Dynamics understand the distinction between the two materials.
“Bullet knows which surfaces to deform based on the weight maps and other parameters you set. These values are not the weight of the creature, they are values you set that define the degree of deformation you want to achieve,” Wheeler said.
“It’s like mapping an object by making different areas different colors. One color denotes a rigid structure while another color means that area needs to deform and move in relation to the rigid framework underneath,” Wheeler said. “Genoma works with Bullet’s hard and soft body dynamics to figure out how much each object or surface should bend, collide, flop, wiggle, wave, stretch, or any movement based on how you set it up.”
Motion Blur for a Better View
The Viewport Preview Renderer (VPR) that was introduced in LightWave 10 has also been extended in LightWave 11.5, making the rendering process much more efficient. Instead of seeing the animation as frame to frame to frame, like a stop motion animation, motion blur gives a better, clearer sense of the animated motion and depth of field without having to go through the full rendering process. Motion blur on the VPR is not a visual effect, it’s a way to preview how the animation will actually look and integrate within the scene.“With motion blur inside the VPR, you can get a feel for the speed of something that’s moving very fast, such as a dragon swooping by,” said Wheeler. “Since you can get a quick, accurate view of incremental creative enhancements without rendering, it saves a lot of time previously devoted to trial and error interspersed with rendering.”
“LightWave has had motion blur available at the wireframe stage, but now its addition in the VPR makes this valuable tool even more indispensable,” said Wheeler. “Where it would have taken hours to experiment with lighting a scene or refining a creature’s look or movement and send those frames to your render farm, these improved VPR features can dramatically cut the time involved by providing a quick, accurate view at your desktop.”
In the same way that Genoma and Bullet dynamics work together throughout the modeling, layout, and animation process, the VPR is also readily available at every stage of the process.
Swarms and Flocks
Prior to Dracano, Rogue State produced visual effects scenes for Dragon Wasps, including swarms of dragon wasps flying in the sky. Since hundreds of wasps had to move as an organized group, Wheeler’s visual effects team used the LightWave Flocking feature.In Dracano, many dragon creatures also take to the air and fly around or congregate in caves. But in this instance, Wheeler said they used Instancing to clone one dragon and create a group of 20 to 30 creatures.
“Flocking is best to move large numbers of creatures like a thousand wasps to form a deadly swarm. But for a relatively small number of dragons, we used Instancing to create a group. LightWave lets you vary their attributes, like size or colors, and animate them independently of each other,” said Wheeler. “Having a wide array of tools ensures that we have the right one for the unique challenges of every task.”
In his visual effects career, Wheeler has presided over the effects sequences for an impressive array of feature films and episodic television series. His visual effects TV credits include the Emmy Award-nominated FOX series Space: Above and Beyond, Chicago Hope, Jag, Xena: Warrior Princess, Unsolved Mysteries, Millennium, Battlestar Galactica, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The X Files. He was the digital effects supervisor on the HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon and the Emmy Award-winning SyFy miniseries Dune.
In 2005, he set his sights on creating visual effects for Direct-to-DVD and sci-fi feature industry, with dozens of visual effects supervision credits including the SyFy Originals Cerberus, Mega Shark, and Jabberwock. Since launching Rogue State in 2009, his facility contributed visual effects, production and postproduction services to SyFy’s Dragon Wasps and Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island. Rogue State’s recent credits include Xtinction: Predator X (with K2 Pictures), Mega Piranha, The Adventures of Sinbad, and Airline Disaster (with The Global Asylum). In 2011, Rogue State also co-produced Sand Sharks.
“In our segment of the market, creating visual effects for ultra-low or low-budget features, our visual effects team needs powerful, cost-effective 3D animation tools that get the job done quickly,” said Wheeler. “LightWave 3D helps us meet the production demands of budget-conscious producers without sacrificing the visual impact
The Creation of "Shabyat"
Artist Khalid al-Muharraqi turns to LightWave to create the popular UAE TV show "Shabyat"
Posted: Mon 22 Apr 2013
In fact, Muharraqi and his nimble team of six artists created the entire Shabyat project in only 20 days. Given that utilizing light and shadow are his strengths (he has been painting and coloring most of his life with water colors, gouaches and airbrush), Muharraqi gravitated toward LightWave 3D from the very beginning. Today he continues to embrace the neweset features of the software to evoke the highly stylized daytime and nighttime Dubai scenes featured in Shabyat. "LightWave feels at home to me," explains, Muharraqi.
For Shabyat, however, the goal was to create an interesting environment for the viewer, something that would blend in nicely with the cartoon-like vibe of the animation, but at the same time push it further with greater believability and depth than a traditional 2D cartoon.
"In the summer time, the temperature is so hot here [in the UAE] that it looks like everything is one color, explains Muharraqi. “LightWave allows me to easily control the look of the environment. For example, one set I built [for Shabyat] is of a small town with houses for the characters in the story. These also include a school, a stadium and desert terrain. I wanted everything to look as if it were almost melting from the heat; that's why the shapes are all distorted.” But at night,” he explains, “the temperatures are cooler and the crescent moon, which is the symbol of the holy month of Ramadan, dominates the sky.”
Although Muharraqi and his team built one environment containing all the elements of the project, they made sure that it was all produced with low poly count models so the shots would be easy to maneuver and render. "Our role was to create the 3D environment and hand it over to the client so they could move and position the cameras according to their story as it applies to the 2D animation," he adds.
Overall, there were 500 objects, 480 surfaces and 178 images created for the Shabyat 3D scenes. One LightWave feature that was particularly helpful in the creation of these scenes was the Viewport Preview Renderer (VPR), which according to Muharraqi made the client very happy to be able to move the camera and quickly preview changes in the scene. "We also found Layout to be much faster and more responsive with the camera movement. Since we rarely create cartoony-looking environments, in fact, this was our first, all the tools in LightWave helped us achieve our sketch concepts much faster than we anticipated and with full control."
When it comes to modeling, Muharraqi believes LightWave fits well within production pipeline. "Today, all software must work together—artists always need to get better and faster results.” He finds LightWave to be especially useful for lighting and rendering.
"I love LightWave’s lighting and rendering capabilities—somehow it is a simple concept for me to understand and work with," explains Muharraqi. "It is really designed to make life easy and by usingVPR, there is no need for the F9 render and adjustments. For me, the work flow is hundreds of times faster than earlier versions of LightWave that didn’t include VPR. It has dramatically changed the way we work. For instance, we can see volume lights before render and we don’t have to sit and wait for results. "
Muharraqi also frequently utilizes the MDD import and export feature in LightWave. "I love the fact that the LightWave 3D Group has taken features that were already good and made them more robust and interactive with other programs. The ability to export perfect FBX, for example, and use it with Motion Builder makes it much easier to animate and move objects back and forth."
Control over scenes was important for the Shabyat project too—especially for the creation of daytime scenes and the handling of the overall lighting on the project. "LightWave has an amazing modeler," Muharraqi boasts, "and it makes life easy for me when I model or try to distort objects. the number of onscreen polygons is usually high for these scenes, but with LightWave, everything is smooth.”
In Shabyat, lighting was created for three scenarios: day, sunset, and night. I used the same setup for each, adjusting the lights and the textures for each to give the viewer a different look and feel. The best part of this solution was that all the scenes used the same setup with minor tweaking for each."
Creating the nighttime scenes required the added challenge of getting the crescent moon to make the look “just right.”
"Lighting Shabyat with LightWave was fun and with VPR I could see all my adjustments and changes almost instantly,” explained Muharraqi. “I like to keep image references for color selection; it helps me to pick the colors I like; I also used some GI light to get softer effect in some areas."
Into the CG Minds of "Iron Sky"
LightWave CG masters Samuli Torssonen and Kelly Myers discuss the production of the popular indie hit
Posted: Thu 25 Apr 2013
Iron Sky explores this alternate-reality view of the fate of post World War II Nazis and their re-emergence with hundreds of CGI shots. To pull off the massive undertaking, Energia Productions’s Samuli Torssonen, Iron Sky VFX producer, assembled a team of more than a dozen LightWave 3D artists, including award-winning LightWave 3D animator Kelly Myers, who served as the film’s CG supervisor. Together the two discuss the Iron Sky project, the animation hurdles they faced, and how LightWave 3D helped them overcome the challenges.
The Pitch
Samuli Torssonen: Iron Sky is a feature film about moon Nazis. It is produced by Blind Spot Pictures, a company from Finland. Iron Sky is a Finnish/German/Australian co-production. It had a budget of 7,5 million Euros, which makes it the biggest film made in Finland so far.Rise of Iron Sky
Torssonen: Like many good ideas in Finland, in the sauna of course. We already had this idea based on various conspiracy theories. There are actually people who believe that there are Nazis on the moon. It's Incredible that nobody had created a film about it before.The Crew
Torssonen: The director is Timo Vuorensola, who also directed our very first feature film called Star Wreck. The writers are Johanna Sinisalo and Michael Kalesniko, the production designers are Jussi Lehtiniemi and Ulrika von Vegesack and I am the VFX supervisor.The Visual Concept
Torssonen: The Nazis have a very steampunkish look. It appears that they are stuck in ‘50s technology that has been perfected. So everything the Nazis build is huge and massive.
The Challenges
Torssonen: The sheer amount of shots in this film was a challenge. We are talking of more than 800 shots, which means that about half of them have some CGI in it. We also set the quality standard really high.Kelly Myers: From the viewpoint of the LightWave 3D team, the challenges have been the models themselves for the most part. While the concepts are awesome and very well detailed, the construction of the models in general has not been easy to deal with later on down the line.
Because of the nature of how the film was produced and financed, many things that should have been fixed or completely rebuilt to exacting specifications for speed, efficiency and final look on screen, regardless of whatever package would be used to animate or render it, simply could not take place for every asset in the show.
Some of them work great and have come in from LightWave, Max, Maya, Modo, 3D Coat and ZBrush. Others have been downright pesky from the get go and we spent some significant time cleaning them up and improving them in LightWave.
The Zeppelins are a prime example of this. Originally modeled in Maya, the Zeppelins had symmetry and UV problems before being sent to us. While they could be used and rendered just about anywhere, in any package out there, I wanted to have them look their best and match what the art director had in mind.
Luke Whitehorn, our VFX Technical Director on the show, jumped in immediately and gave the Zeppelin model itself a geometry facelift. This is where we found out why we were having difficulties with it. There was a ton of intersecting geometry all over the place and that had to be dealt with before we could address its texturing issues.
From there, I stepped in with resurfacing the ship to bring it more in line with the look of a Los Angeles Class or Typhon Class submarine while still working with the original texture maps. The original maps we were given were incredibly limited. Diffuse map with color painted into it, a specularity map, which was just the diffuse map turned grey scale and a bump map. That was it! These were massive maps, some of them being 10K in resolution. The reasons for it being this way were perplexing to say the least.
What made it worse is the ship itself had one UV map. While that might work in video games, it wasn’t going to cut it for a feature film. We couldn’t go back to the drawing board with the modeling and start from scratch, so we had to do with what we had and this is where LightWave came to the rescue.
Luke built the additional detailing into the model along with the re-texturing work, which was in the end largely procedural and nodal-based.
The elements out of mental ray via Maya were just not giving the Nuke Team what they needed to work with because of the issues with the textures on the Zeppelin and other ships.
From Maya to LightWave
Torssonen: I’ve personally been using LightWave since 1998. But when the production started I was not able to find any LightWave artists in Finland, so we decided to use Maya. Using mental ray after LightWave wasn’t a pleasure. I found the mental ray integration in Maya lacking and really frustrating. Things that I previously did in LightWave in a couple of minutes turned into hours in Maya.I quickly understood that the only way to produce this amount of full CGI shots would be to find LightWave professionals who are used to rapid production schedules. Thank God we found really talented guys from the UK, Canada and U.S. I have to say that LightWave really saved our production.
Myers: LightWave was the preferred choice from the start. Samuli is a LightWave artist. One of the major issues for him early on, because he wanted to use LightWave, was that he felt there wasn’t enough experienced LightWave 3D talent in Finland that he could draw from. This forced him to look closer at Maya, something I know he wasn’t happy about.
Later on when it became clear that Maya wasn’t going to work with the available talent base in Finland either, he went back to LightWave as fast as possible and Samuli put the call out around the world to try to find people. In the end, it wasn’t all that hard for him, which I think came as a bit of a surprise really.
Iron Sky has attracted a lot of attention online and many of us have been keeping an eye on the project from the get go. That’s how Luke, Lee Stringer, Tuomas Kankola and I got here, although Tuomas wasn’t that far away. He was working in Helsinki at Undo Graphics doing advertising work. I had known him since 2007 and had kept in touch so when he heard I was heading over to Iron Sky from Vancouver he jumped in as well.
LightWave: The Help
Torssonen: In a team of 15 guys, everybody needs to be able to deliver shots. We just can’t afford to have guys to write scripts. LightWave is simple and fast to use. Yes, it might have some limitations, but there are also fewer things that can break down. Usually the brute force way is better than overly clever scripting and less risky.Myers: I could fill up an entire magazine about how LightWave helped the production. Where to start? Well for one, LightWave allows us to bring everything together before handing off the renders to the compositing team. That’s our job. Our biggest advantage in a production like this is that we are using LightWave. We can previs shots using models from just about anywhere while working towards finals. If we get an approval for a shot in previs, we can immediately start the work and get to a final shot quickly. We don’t have to completely rip apart what we have done in order to accommodate changes from the director, the art director or Samuli.
We can send models back to other packages for tweaks, for fixes or do them ourselves. We can mix stuff rendered out or animated in another package with what we have done via FBX and other forms of I/O. Camera moves can easily be pulled from something done in Maya months ago, fixed up in LightWave and then exported to Nuke or Fusion for 3D compositing.
This has been essential because a lot of money and time was spent in other packages and being able to reuse that work as much as possible helps a lot. We have effectively picked up where the Maya team left off, going as far as they could and carried on with LightWave. A few of the Maya guys are now learning LightWave, which is very encouraging.
LightWave Essentials
Torssonen: The internal renderer was essential to our production. You don’t need to think and worry if this node works with this renderer or not. One really important thing is that because everything is loaded into RAM, when you open a scene it also loads to the renderer. So, rendering starts instantly when you hit render. For example, in Maya or any other package that has an external renderer, like Mental Ray, it takes time to send the geometry data into the renderer.Virtual Preview Renderer (VPR) is a huge time-saver for shading and lighting the scenes. How can you live without it? I can just play around with the lighting and tweak the materials while the director is seeing the results in real time.
And of course one very big thing is that the render nodes do not cost anything. We have 50 computers here rendering. We could never afford Mental Ray or RenderMan on all nodes. I’d rather spend that money on artists.
Myers: One of the things that I know some people will be tired of hearing about is VPR, but people need to understand just how critical it is to workflow. First off, it’s a major advantage for us, compared to other artists working in other applications.
We are able to work in VPR as artists. Maya or Max artists here work in OpenGL wireframes or bounding box modes as “technicians.” They really don’t have anything like VPR that is truly integrated, and that slows them down big time.
They can’t light the way we do, they can’t texture the way we do and they certainly can’t translate on screen to a director what is going on like we can, with VPR and a rendered preview.
Sure, we can work as technicians as well, but we do it a lot of the time with VPR running. From Particles to Morphs to Motions and final tweaks, it’s there with us all the way through the process. What is more important, though, is that our director “gets it” when we show him stuff and he’s able to comment without guessing about what he sees. It was so effective that we stopped doing openGL previews almost completely in the summer and did VPR preview renders instead and sent those off to editorial or to Timo for review. It also made the editorial team happy because what they were seeing “clicked” when we provided renders done in VPR vs. OpenGL or wireframes. Our turnaround was almost immediate. To us, it’s not just a Viewport Preview Renderer. It’s helping us bridge a visual communications gap with other departments and creatives on the film.
Beyond VPR of course and most importantly to me and the others here, is the LightWave interface. When you have to spend a lot of hours looking at a program, it makes a huge difference. Beyond the aesthetic stuff, the interface also saves time. I don’t find myself fishing around for menu options or buried tools like other artists do using other apps. LightWave’s interface is incredibly straightforward and that is a huge benefit.
The Pipeline
Torssonen: Animation was mostly done in LightWave. Some of the more complex dynamic and rigging work was done in Maya and then sent to LightWave for rendering. Generally, the models and baked animation move very nicely back and forth using the FBX transfer. Compositing was done in Nuke. Our pipeline was quite straightforward. We found a balance in our production, combining key elements and talents. In the end, the space shots were Lightwave based and interior shots done with Maya.Production Schedule
Torssonen: We shot the film in January 2011 and started the post production right away. All the visual effects were completed in a year. We had 15 artists working. So, we needed to pull off miracles every day. But, more important, what makes Iron Sky special is the active collaboration between us and the online community. The Iron Sky team was and still is in direct contact with over 200.000 fans on a weekly basis. This is the first fan-made movie of such a scale.
The Release
Torssonen: The film premiered in Berlin on February 11, 2012, at the Berlinale. The official release date was April 4th 2012 in Finland. A big event for the cast and crew was here in Tampere on 26th of March. Our goal was to release the film in theaters worldwide during the spring. Other releases were also planned: Norway April 4th, Germany April 5th, Sweden April 18th, UK April 20th and Poland April 27th. We expect the film to be distributed in other countries as well. We also presented Iron Sky in international movie festivals, like the South by Southwest Film Festival as part of the Midnight program in Austin Texas.The Premiere
Torssonen: I think the Premiere in Berlin could not have been any better. It was the place to show the film for the first time. The German public and even most of the German critics loved it. In my opinion people have taken the film very well. The visual effects are also one of the stars of the film. We have proven that high quality visual effects are no longer a priviledge for 100 million dollars Hollywood productions.Iron Sky touched millions of people during the production process, it is a fan-made film. The audience cheered and liked the film. Some of the critics loved it and some didn't. I have to say that this film is truly made for audiences and fans. As a filmmaker, that was for me the most important feedback of all.
Studio Spotlight: Platinum Platypus
From freelance artist to studio owner, Pete Sussi relies on LightWave 3D to deliver the goods
Mon 29 Apr 2013
After years of rising through the ranks as a Senior Creative Director in the advertising industry, Pete Sussi’s moonlighting as a freelance 3D animator became his full-time gig. In 2010, he founded Platinum Platypus, a 3D visual effects and animation boutique based on the LightWave 3D animation system. Moving from LightWave 9 to 11.5, Platinum Platypus continues to impress clients and is on a steady trajectory to ever new and exciting CG projects.
Spotlight on Education: 3D Puppets School
Deep in the Heart of Mexico, Students are getting specialized 3D training with LightWave
Thu 23 May 2013
Advancements in technology and industry throughout Mexico continue to fuel new opportunities for 3D artists, designers and animators in the region. But going rogue and learning the intricacies of 3D modeling and animation software without guidance of a teacher isn't for everyone. Enter 3D Puppets, a 3D modeling and animation school that specializes in teaching LightWave 3D. We caught up with Roxanna Blanchet and Carlos A. Dominguez, founders of the 3D Puppets School, to find out how this school, nestled deep in the heart of Mexico, teaches students the art of 3D modeling and animation with LightWave 3D software.
Japanese Inspiration
May 2013 Power Artist Naoya Kurisu brings anime style to life with LightWave 11.5
Fri 31 May 2013
Artists from around the world rely on LightWave to create works of art—for companies, clients and themselves. This month we are proud to feature Japanese artist Naoya Kurisu whose use of LightWave to create anime-style artwork with 3D elements delivers breathtaking results. One look at Kurisu’s stunning artwork and it’s easy to see why this talented artist was selected as our LightWave Power Artist for May 2013. Artist Neil Maccormack offers up a FiberFX tutorial for 3D World magazine, sign up for free SIGGRAPH 2013 Exhibit Passes, and learn more about 3D Puppets Mexico in our Education Spotlight.
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