FEATURING...
COVER STORY:
ICE AGE: THE MELTDOWN
Take a look behind the scenes and see what it takes
to create a sequel to the hit CG film Ice Age. HDRI 3D spoke with the lead Animators,
Effects Supervisors, Modelers, and Technical Directors at Blue Sky Studios. They
shared their experiences facing the challenges in making Ice Age: The Meltdown.
by Eric Keller
AUTOMATING COMPOSITING AND RENDERING TASKS WITH
NUKE
This article looks at creating and designing custom Nuke nodes with unique
UI's. Essentially these nodes are nested flowcharts within a so-called gizmo.
These gizmos can then be loaded into any script, or even included within the Nuke
menu as a plugin. Gizmos are used for simplifying repetitive or complex compositing
tasks.
By Boaz Livny
VUE 5 INFINITE
Lesson 2: Adding
a LightWave Object to a Vue EcoSystem
Building on the Vue tutorial in HDRI
3D Issue 8, which showed you how to create cool images with Vue EcoSystems, this
issue will show you how to add a LightWave object to the Vue scene.
by Brad
Carvey
MOTION CAPTURE AS A TOOL
Motion Capture is quickly
becoming the go-to method for creating quick, realistic animation in the gaming
industry, so where does this leave the animator's job? This article tackles the
issue of how animators can approach using motion capture and its strengths to
attain aesthetically pleasing, diverse results, while still enjoying their job.
by Richard Lico
REAL WORLD PRODUCTION SERIES:
LightWave
and MotionBuilder
This tutorial describes the step-by-step process of transferring
motion capture animation data from MotionBuilder inside LightWave, through the
breakdown of a real world project that was delivered successfully under tight
deadline.
by Gregory "T.Rex" Glezakos
RIGID BODIES AND
SPRING NETWORKS 101
When working in production on character assets, not a
week goes by without some form of secondary motion or dynamics popping up in a
meeting or in a requests list. This article bridges the gap between technical
knowledge and implementation and will give you some food for thought for your
next setup, or at least shed some light on notions that are often overlooked by
novice technical directors themselves.
by Raffaele Fragapane
MEL
SPLASHFLOCK
A few MEL scripts and a model generate an effect called the "SplashFlock."
This article goes through the MEL scripts, attribute by attribute, to fully explain
the process. Content geared toward novice users.
by Thatcher Bell
GRAB LIGHTWAVE BY THE NULLS!
An In-Depth Look at LightWave's Null Objects
In this article we take a look at why Null objects are so useful and explore some
of the many uses for them in a LightWave production. Discover how you can start
using Null objects in everything you do to improve your workflow.
by William
"Proton" Vaughan
USING THE FULL BODY IK IN MAYA 7 Maya Human
Animation Fundamentals, Part 3
Once you start working with this rig, you should
find it superior to any previously constructed system. It's an impressive addition
to Maya that by itself is worth the upgrade. This tutorial will take you through
the step-by-step process of setting up the full body IK system as well as how
to use it for posing and animating your models.
by Peter Ratner
TRANSMOTION UTILITIES BASICS
If you're interested in ways to speed up and
broaden your animation options when using LightWave and a number of compositing
packages, then the TransMotion Utilities package is a great buy. This tutorial
shows you just one of the many ways you can incorporate this collection of Lscripts
to port animation and keyframe data between applications for a number of purposes
and results.
by Aaron Kent
WORN OUT LOOKS AWESOME
Part Two in a Series on Matte Painting-Weathering Effects
long The reader
will come away with knowledge of how to weather, damage, or destroy buildings
by manipulating the existing image, adding existing textures, and painting. The
focus is on manipulation of imagery while using a minimum of paint, which can
obscure or destroy useful texture.
by Briar Lee Mitchell
FX
MAGIC WITH MAYA AND PARTICLEILLUSION
Creating particle effects with wondertouch's
particleIllusion is fast and lots of fun. This tutorial shows how you can use
these effects in a animation rendered in Maya.
by Eric Keller
HAULIN'
WITH MULE
When you are working on a project and are in full production, one
of the many delays can be the rendering and test rendering of scenes. What I want
to do is take you through the weekly process I go through on my animation projects
with MULE, and show you how I saved up to 30 percent of production time using
this program.
by Dale L. Campbell, Jr.
THE TWO FACES OF
T-SPLINES
T-Splines is a new NURBS-like surface type that opens up new frontiers
in modeling by allowing you to add local detail without changing the surface.
T-Splines also allows you to merge NURBS patches together to create truly seamless
models. Learn how to create a face in T-Splines and use T-Splines in your workflow.
by Eric Allen
ESSENTIALS
The key to animating non-organic
mechanical objects is to set up an appropriate hierarchy of object parts and nulls.
Using different nulls to control a variety of rotations, movements, and deformations
allows the artist to modify each individually, without affecting the others.
by Brad Carvey
IBM INTELLISTATION M PRO
A review of the
IBM M Pro. Check out Performance and Impressions, Acoustic Specs, Thermal specs
and OS and driver issues. Windows XP Professional x64 Edition initially supports
up to 128 gigabytes (GB) of RAM and up to 16 terabytes of virtual memory. HOW
MUCH DO YOU NEED?
STUFF
Color Control
Curse of the Anasazi
by Brad Carvey
KOOSHLINGS
Change
is Blowin' in the (Dynamically Simulated) Wind
by Dariush Derakhshani
TD
LOVE IN LONDON
by Raffael Dickreuter
FINAL RENDER
What's in a Name?
by Andrea Carvey