Render Presets for LightWave 3D

I continued to find it useful and over time I’ve included additional settings that I’ve had use for. I finally decided to clean up the user interface to be more generic and add more of LightWave’s common render settings so I could release it in public. In this release presets can be setup for Global Illumination, Render Flags, Camera Antialiasing, Backdrop and Processing Effects. I might add a few more options in the future when time permits.

Read more and download the plugin here »

Today NewTek revealed the feature list of LightWave CORE publicly that will be released in Q1 2010. I’m very happy that I joined the beta program of CORE back in march/april and have had the privilege to play, have input, and see this new application develop and take shape during the course of 2009. Very cool move of NewTek to take this route when developing.

One of my most anticipated features is the integration of the Bullet Physics Library in CORE (Most recently noticed for it’s usage in the movie 2012). I am excited about many things Core though, and it’s awesome to see all these great features coming already in a v1 release.

A PDF can be downloaded from NewTek which lines out all the features publicly announced so far. If you aren’t on the CORE beta but are curious and/or interested in this upcoming application I believe it will be an interesting read to spend a few minutes with.

Considering that CORE has only been under actual development for about a year I think the LightWave development team has made a tremendous effort and awesome job building such a flexible framework that CORE is, with so much possibilities for the future.
With modeling, rendering, animation, and dynamics already implemented – I can only imagine where CORE will be when v2 is about to ship and there is one more year of development invested, now when the foundation is in place. Woohoo!

So I thought it would be a nice idea to make a video tutorial on some useful concepts where the tools can speed up the daily workflow. So below you’ll find an EasySplit usage tutorial.

I start the tutorial by going through some basic concepts with the tool, and then I show a shorter modeling session for a few minutes – making a simple pouch and using the plugin to draw in a wrinkle in the geometry, one of  many typical cases where it can save some decent amount of time.

This video also gave me the opportunity to try out the new HD support on YouTube to ditch YouTube and start using Vimeo for my HD videos instead, so I recorded it in High Definition 720p, and the HD mode is selected by default in the player, so the video should look nice and crisp even in fullscreen. If you’re on a slower connection, you might want to uncheck the HD button in the player.

Okay, let’s see how this works out, as it was my first attempt to create a video tutorial (except a few quick ones for my own plugins). Well, I hope some of you will find this tutorial useful, and if so I could probably record a few more on different subjects – time permitting.

Fifth WIP of Elly (Click to enlarge)

Here’s another update of  this CG model, I spent some time with her last night. I modeled a new earpiece for her, fixed the clothing to make them a bit more fitting for her and also did some final tweaks to the skin texture and shading, which I am pretty happy with now.

But the major part of the time I spent with her last night went into the hair. Or hair guides to be more specific. The hair in the render to the left is still very temporary, the shading is not correct yet and looks way to shiny, and the shadow has low quality.

I dedicated my efforts towards finding an effecient workflow for styling hair guides. Guide styling can be quite tedious, and I’ve decided that I will take all time necessary for this one to find as good flow as possible for that part of the process, as I’ll have so much use for having a speedy workflow in the hair styling department for all my other characters.

I’ll continue this process tonight and hopefully get were I want to go with her hair, and when the styling is in place, and I have documented a good workflow for it, I’ll fix the hair shading in FiberFX.

If nothing unexpected happens, I’ll have the final image ready by tomorrow, and hopefully be able to post a small breakdown of the process of this character.

You know your Star Wars, right?

LightWave 9.6 has barely left the building (released just 2 days ago), when NewTek drops the next bomb. The excitement builds up at NewTek Core. Guess we’ll soon know more about the next major leap for LightWave. They sure are busy bees over at NewTek these days, and it has never been more interesting and fun being a LightWave user. Things sure have changed to the enormously better how LightWave is handled since Jay took over the operation. Woohoo, I’m excited!

12 days to go…

Improved Shading and Textures (Click to enlarge)

Here’s a quick update to the character I worked with last week. I have been really busy, with work and also updating artstorm.net with some improved design and new features (like the turntable function), so I haven’t had time to pick her up for work again until yesterday, where I got some more things done to her.

The image to the right is the latest render of Elly with a few changes since the last post. I haven’t worked anything with the hair yet, so it’s still the same as in the last image, but I did work quite a bit with the skin shading and also tweaked the textures a bit more. The deeper I dig into the simple skin material in LightWave 9.6, the more I like it, it’s pretty capable. Other than the skin and textures I have also updated the eye shading and eye lashes as well.

I can’t get over how amazingly fast the updated render engine is in LightWave 9.6. This character renders in just a few minutes with quite high anti-aliasing in 1K resolution on a now aging Quad Core Q6600 @ 2.4Ghz. the same render takes almost over 15 minutes in 9.5, which was pretty fast anyway. Rendering in 9.6 is incredible. I love it! And has saved my bacon on many tight deadlines already during the autumn of 2008.

I’ll continue working with her tonight, and hopefully wrap this character up to final state. I will do some further tweaking to the texturing and shading, fix the clothing and do a major update to the hair.

I’m so happy with this release, as about every quirk I had with 9.5 is gone. Actually there is over 600 fixes and feature requests implemented in 9.6. It’s been a long beta cycle for this version, but it’s been worth it. Being a longtime LightWave user myself (since version 3.5) this is without a doubt the most impressive and stable LightWave version released, ever! It’s indeed exciting times for LightWave users these days. Well, all info about 9.6 is available at NewTek’s site, so no point in posting them here. LightWave 9.6 is already doing an excellent job for me producing wonderful renders in a fraction of a time of what 9.5 did (together with all the other new goodies), and it’ll keep me more than satisfied until they bring on version 10.

Just wanted to share some nerdy application joy. Now it’s back to work, in the shiny new release build of 9.6.

Todays update of Elly, added first draft of Hair.

I didn’t have so much time to work with this tonight, but since yesterday I have done a few things anyway.

I cleaned up some more of the textures, and improved the skin shading network with some additional subtle SSS added to it to get a warmer tone to softer parts of the skin. I tweaked her left eyebrow a tiny bit so they are not completely symmetrical, and finally made some hair render tests of the hair guides I’ve been working on for her, rendered with FiberFX in LightWave. I still have to do quite some more work to the guides, as well as work on the hair material. The shadow from the hair for the above render is pretty rough, so it looks a bit soft and strange in some regions. I will raise the quality of the shadow when I have all guides in place where I want them.

That’s it for tonight, a few tips will follow below, other than that, I hope I have some more time tomorrow to spend on this project.

Here is my node network for the Simple Skin material I have used on Elly together with the settings for the Simple Skin material. Many settings are driven by texture maps, which I have painted in ZBrush. I have also blended in the SSS2 shader for some additional SubSurface Scattering control. I love the SSS2 shader, so fast with beautiful quality.

Simple Skin Node Setup (Click to enlarge)

Bonus FiberFX Script

FiberFX Button

Here’s a small LScript, which simply allows you to add FiberFX to your layout menus. If you use FiberFX often like I do, it can come in handy. It’s much faster to have FiberFX attached to a button than to have to Ctrl+F8, drop down the menu, select FiberFilter then double click. This script does that, and when FiberFX is added to the scene, it opens the FiberFX panel with the button. I find it to be a convenient time saver and I have added it to my Workflow tab in Layout where I have all my most used tools collected.

Download Open_FFX.ls

Over and out, Cheers!

Second WIP of this model - Texturing and shading almost completed.

I more or less completed painting the textures, and that’s where I devoted most of the time I spent with her tonight. I ended up with a diffuse map (color map), epidermis map, subdermis map, occlusion map, reflection map, fresnel map, bump map and a normal map. Phew! With those maps fed into the simple skin material in LightWave 9.6 blended with the SSS 2 (SubSurface Scattering) shader I got the above skin material.

I also worked on the eyes, where I used the SSS 2 shader as the base for the eyeball material. Other than working with textures and shading, I added the eyelashes and eyebrows, blocked in the beginning of a top for her and started blocking out some hair guides too.

So I’m pretty happy with the progress tonight. What’s still left to do now is some final polishing on the textures and shading networks, completing the work with the hair guides and finish her top and maybe one more accessory to equip her with. If I’m in the mood I might do a minor rig to make the final pose a tad more interesting.

Tomorrow is a working day, but hopefully I’ll have some time in the evening to continue this project.

Oh, and I almost forgot, I named her as well, so the lady in the render above is called Elly, hello Elly.

What I was left with, was a couple of personal projects that have been untouched for some time, but that I’d get much personal satisfaction from to complete. And with the massive axing done, I was left with six projects (in contrast to over 30 unfinished ones) which I hope I can now have a clear focus on and finish them one by one.

With the release of LightWave 3D 9.6 around the corner, with it’s improved hair rendering and new lovely shaders and updated materials, I’m craving to take them for some serious test drives by doing some character work.

So, first out is this female character bust, which I created in one ambitious day back in February 2008. I’ve just spent some time examining the state of the project, going through the mesh and the textures. And here is a render of her current state how she was left in her project folder for almost a year.

The current working state of this model (Rendered with a slightly too narrow DOF)

The modeling is more or less done, but the textures are mostly just blocked in and need quite some more work. I will spend the rest of the day and evening with her, and see how far I’ll come.

What’s left to do to have her completed as I currently see it;

• Fixing a few edge loops in the overall polygon flow.
• Cleaning up the textures and repaint many sections of the current maps.
• Update the shader network to utilize some of the new goodiness in LightWave 9.6.
• Model proper eyeballs and texture/shade them.
• Model and style a hair wig as well as brows and lashes.
• Model a few accessories for her.
• And finally baptize her, she has got to have a name, doesn’t she?

And that’s pretty much it. Oh well, let’s see how far I can take her towards completion today. It will be a couple of entertaining hours, as I love when I have some time to spare for my own projects and character work. Which is also the times when I evolve my techniques the most as well.

Happy 2009 everyone, and I hope this will be a more active year blogging wise for me than the past year.