I figured I might as well post these. These tests were done back in February and March 2010.
Posts Tagged LightWave
M’kay, an update on Act II. For the past two months I’ve been tweaking the textures on my models but I’ve also been trying to get that darn twenty-second opening shot from Act II looking the way I want it to. This is what happens when you’re self-taught… sometimes you run into the limitations of what you’ve taught yourself, and what I ran into was my inability to make it look like the Enterprise really was flying through the debris field as she desperately evaded the planet killer. After many false starts I think I’ve finally got it right… at least it looked good on the animatic! Learning how to make a model follow a curve and fiddling with matching the banking and pitching to the ship’s movements really helped a lot… here’s a frame grab from the final product which is rendering right now:
Sulu, stop texting and pay attention to your flying!
Incidentally, sometimes being as slow as molasses has its advantages… I’ve been dilly-dallying so long that technology has finally caught up and Newtek has (in the LightWave 9.6.1 beta) FINALLY fixed a very annoying bug that was causing about half of the asteroids in my asteroid fields to disappear. I’ve been using LightWave 8.5 ever since I discovered the bug but was really disappointed at having to lose some of the nice fractal procedurals when I reverted. This scene is being rendered in 9.6.1, so I have all of my nicer textures back.
So anyway, that’s where things stand now. Right now the four computers in my mini render farm are about halfway through the third concentric shell of asteroids* in my seven-layer asteroid field, so there’s still a good day or so of rendering left on that. Once that’s done I will have some final adjustments to make on the new planet killer model, and then I’ll let that scene element rip. The new translucent skin really brings the PK model alive but dang it slows down the render times. Don’t look for the opening of Act II until this time next week, is what I’m currently guessing.
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* – Asteroid shells, you ask? Think of the asteroid shells as those nesting Russian toys, one spherical layer of asteroids nested inside another. Each shell has 2,000 asteroids, with seven layers altogether, so there are 14,000 asteroids in every scene (although you will almost never see all of them in one scene unless the camera does a LOT of panning!). The layers are different thicknesses to keep the overall density of the background rocks relatively even throughout the asteroid field. BTW, in case you’re curious, here’s all of the LightWave scenes that go into a typical scene:
- Foreground hero asteroids
- The Enterprise
- The Constellation (but not in this sequence!)
- Background hero asteroids
- The planet killer
- Background asteroid shell #1
- Background asteroid shell #2
- Background asteroid shell #3
- Background asteroid shell #4
- Background asteroid shell #5
- Background asteroid shell #6
- Background asteroid shell #7
- Volumetric haze (crap but this one take forever to render!)
- Starscape
Thank goodness Newtek fixed that scene bug that was causing half the asteroid objects in my seven asteroid shell scenes to disappear… copying the camera movements from LightWave 9.6 (where everything else was being done) to LightWave 8.5 was a royal pain, and made me really appreciate the “Load items from scene” feature even more! So if you were wondering why it takes me so long to set up and grind out just one scene, now you know!
A slightly different light source angle here that hints at a couple of subtle (and not-so-subtle) changes that I’ve snuck into the model.
Does this mesh make me look fat?
We’ll take her in tow…
Jul 16
Another frame grab from Act I.
We'll take her in tow
I’m really pleased with how this sequence turned out, but at the moment I’m very annoyed with LightWave 9.6 (the modeling and rendering software I’m using for this project). Read the rest of this entry »