Essential LightWave 3D- P21 doc

Using a render farm of only two machines of equal processor speed and physical memory will render your scene twice as fast as just one of the machines alone!. Even if you only have one m

http://www.joejustice.org/

Maintained by Joe Justice

LightNet

(Intel) Full Version

What it is: LightNet is an external

pro-gram that manages the bunches of

networked computers that do nothing but

await your bidding and render the scenes

you send to them (known locally as a render

farm) LightNet is the most widely used

free render farm controller for LightWave

What makes this cool: LightWave lets

you have an almost unlimited number of

“render nodes” for the purchase

price of the software (unlike

some other software packages)

Using a render farm of only two

machines (of equal processor

speed and physical memory) will

render your scene twice as fast

as just one of the machines

alone! Even if you only have one

machine, you can queue a bunch

of things to render and have

LightNet set the CPU priority of

the render node to Lowest, so

you can still work while you’re

rendering LightNet is much

easier to set up and work with

than LightWave’s built-in controller locatedunder Rendering | Network Rendering(which fully occupies the instance ofLightWave being used to control the net-work rendering)

Notes: Study both the LightNet

Installa-tion Guide and the LightWave manualsection on network rendering to make set-ting up your render farm much easier (Ifyou are setting up a networked render farm,you will also need to understand basic net-work privileges and directory mappings.(Mac users can also find ScreamerNet con-trollers through Flay.com, discussed inAppendix B.)

Figure A-28: LightNet.

What it is: Sherlock is a game of logic — a

lot like solitaire, only that with each and

every puzzle you have the ability to be

suc-cessful Your own mental ability, not chance,

is what determines whether you win or

lose

What makes this cool: This simple

game will help train you to see how solving

even the most seemingly complex puzzles

is simply a matter of doing what needs to be

done in the moment — eliminating the

impossible and slowly resolving your way

to the solution This is training for 3D —

and for life.

Notes: This demo version only contains

five puzzles of each size (3x3 through 8x8).The full version ($19.95 + shipping) has

over 65,000 puzzles of each size.

Figure A-29: Sherlock.

Figure A-30: Sherlock.

So, where do you go to find answers to the

questions you come across as you go about

your work? There are many resources, both

online and in print Some answer questions

you may not even know you’ll be asking

yet Some are just too cool to not jump inimmediately and start scrounging aroundfor neat bits and pieces that are the perfectfit for the things you have zinging about inyour creative mind!

Community

LightWave’s online community is without

equal Just as some are gifted in

program-ming (as are the artist/programmers who

have contributed to the wealth of material

described in Appendix A), some are gifted

in teaching, organizing information, or

connecting people from around the world Ifyou aren’t sure where to find what you’relooking for, or if you aren’t quite sure whatyou’re looking for yet, these places can helppoint you in the right direction

NewTek

http://www.newtek.com/products/lightwave/

One of the first places to

go to find out “how” (as

well as get updates,

patches, and whatnot) is

the NewTek web site (Do

you think this kind of

community could exist for

a package that doesn’t

stand with its users

100%?)

NewTek’s web site has

collections of tutorials,

links, and information

about “who’s who” in the

LightWave community

Check it out! Figure B-1: NewTek web site.

http://www.flay.com/

Flay is also a “first

stop” for finding out

just about anything

that exists concerning

LightWave Here you

will find up-to-date

listings of news, jobs,

tutorials, tips, and of

course, my personal

favorite: plug-ins

Each category is

searchable so you can

quickly find exactly

what you’re looking

for

Figure B-3 shows

the plug-ins page,

list-ing the latest 20

plug-in “spottings”

and sporting a search

engine that will find

what you’re looking

for, even if you don’t

know its name — only

what you want it to do

for you!

Figure B-2: Flay.com web site.

Figure B-3: Flay.com plug-ins page.

legend William “Proton”

Vaughan and populated

by some of the most

established LightWave

users in the world, it is

an excellent place to

meet professionals, get

answers to your

ques-tions, and hone your

skills With its friendly,

small-town feel and an

unwavering

commit-ment to the user and his

art, SpinQuad perfectly

embodies the spirit of the

LightWave community

CgTalk

http://www.cgtalk.com/

CgTalk is the world’s

largest forum for

com-puter graphics

professionals With

almost 100,000

mem-bers, it offers support

for nearly every major

graphics application

Visitors can find focused

critiques, contests,

industry information,

jobs, and, of course,

dis-cussions on more than a

dozen 2D/3D

applications

Figure B-4: SpinQuad web site.

Figure B-5: CgTalk web site.

3D Fight Club

http://www.3dfightclub.com/

There’s nothing like a challenge to bring

out the best in a person, and 3D Fight Club

does a great job of providing users with

just that Born out of a desire to extol the

powers of LightWave over Maya, the site

now includes users of every 3D

applica-tion Members participate in a variety of

challenges, ranging from several minutes

to several hours in length The idea is to

work quickly toward your goal and produce

better work than your competitors within

the time allowed If you really want to

hone your skills, I highly recommend a

workout at 3D Fight Club

Friends of NewTek

http://www.friendsofnewtek.com/

Decades before the Internet made its

debut, user groups functioned as the

princi-pal means of support for the

computer-using community

While online forums

now offer a chance to

connect with people

all over the world,

they still lack the

ben-efits that come from a

local gathering User

groups frequently

showcase new

hard-ware and softhard-ware,

bring in special guest

speakers, and offer

personalized

assis-tance to those new to

site is a resource for connecting LightWaveand Video Toaster users with establisheduser groups in their area If you’ve neverhad the privilege of being in a user group,you owe it to yourself to check one out

Figure B-6: 3D Fight Club web site.

http://www.tucows.com/

I had just sort of assumed that most people

already knew about TUCOWS as the

ulti-mate place on the net to download reviewed

software for almost any and every

com-puter platform But I have found that a lot of

people are still unaware of it Plain and

sim-ple, it is the best place to search for

programs you need, whether they be

games, OS “fine-tuners,” network “stuff,”

emulators, or whatever (IMHO) Almost

every package is reviewed and scored in

“cows” (five cows being the highest score)

You can even super search on the kind of

license agreement the package has

(com-mercial, shareware, freeware, etc.)

Commercial

While the quantity of free materials

avail-able on the net is astounding, nothing can

match the quality of dedicated commercial

products The following resources come

from providers who have spent countlesshours developing materials to assist in thedevelopment of your skills and abilities

Kurv Studios

http://www.kurvstudios.com/

Kurv Studios burst onto the scene in

2004 and has quickly become one of the

leading suppliers of high-quality

com-puter-based training material Their

LightWave series is hosted by

indus-try-recognized artists and offers training

on nearly every aspect of the software

But what makes Kurv Studios really

stand out from the competition is not the

quality; it’s the price Videos from Kurv

Studios typically range from $24.95 to

$49.95 and contain more than 10 hours

of training material That’s less than $5

per hour, making them one of the mostcost-effective sources of training you’ll find

Figure B-8: TUCOWS web site.

Figure B-9: Kurv Studios web site.

http://www.3d.sk/

3D.sk is the de facto supplier of

high-resolution figure reference

photos The images range from

male to female, young to old,

clothed and nude There are

ref-erences for facial expressions,

body poses, and even suggested

poly-flow If you’re planning on

developing 3D characters, a

membership to this site should

be considered essential For less

than $10 you can gain access to

nearly 10,000 high-res images If

you’ve looked at the price of

stock photos or the labor

involved in hiring your own

ref-erence model, you’ll quickly see

why 3D.sk is an invaluable

resource at an unparalleled price

HDRI 3D

http://www.hdri3d.com/

HDRI 3D is definitely worth

tak-ing a look at Each issue is filled

with an amazing number of

high-quality tutorials and articles

on subjects from texturing and

hair and fur shading to vehicular

modeling and building

city-scapes It doesn’t just touch on

the “tried-and-true” uses of

LightWave The issues I’ve seen

have also explored some really

neat applications that I don’t

imagine a lot of people have

thought of — yet!

Figure B-10: 3D.sk web site.

Figure B-11: HDRI 3D magazine web site.

Worley Laboratories

http://www.worley.com/

Worley Labs is the company that

contributed the Lite version of

their Sasquatch Hair/Fur Shader

to LightWave 7+ They also have

two collections of very useful

plug-ins bundled under the

names Taft and Polk (yes, just

like two former U.S presidents)

The really cool thing they’ve just

come out with is the FPrime

pro-gressive rendering system

FPrime provides you with

“real-time F9” rendering,

allow-ing you to see changes to

surfaces, lights, cameras, objects,

etc., in real time Without a doubt, FPrime

is the most impressive product to hit the

LightWave market in some time There is

simply not enough room to describe

everything that the plug-in does, butWorley’s web site contains all of the detailsand nearly a dozen sample videos and Ihighly recommend you check it out

Colin Cohen: Freelance Programmer

http://cohen-plugs.tripod.com/

In the world of LightWave developers,

there are an elite few who consistently

pro-duce high-caliber, extremely useful

plug-ins Colin Cohen is one of them Colin

is most widely known for his free plug-ins,

but his generosity is not what makes him

such a valuable asset to the community

Rather, Colin, who lives in the Los Angeles

area, is one of the few programmers who

make their exceptional skills available to

the public His work as both an animatorand a programmer (with over a decade ofsoftware development experience) giveshim a unique insight into the needs that canarise during production Keep Colin’s infor-mation handy There are a number ofextremely talented programmers in theLightWave community, but very few ofthem are available for hire

Figure B-12: Worley Labs web site.

Next Limit

http://www.nextlimit.com/

Next Limit makes two products

that you’ll definitely want to

take a look at once you’ve got

the basics of LightWave down

These products are RealFlow

and RealWave They create

some of the best simulations of

fluids (large and small) I’ve

seen, and their fluid dynamics

simulations equal work done on Houdini

(which costs many, many, many times

more) Fully functional time-limited demo

versions of the software are available fordownload from their web site

Dynamic Realities

http://www.dynamic-realities.com

Dynamic Realities is the

com-pany that supplied the particle

simulation Particle FX to

LightWave Their new version,

Napalm, adds an exponential

level of control to what you

know in Particle FX Pyro is a

smoke and flame dynamics and

rendering engine that greatly simplifies the

creation of realistic fire and smoke in

LightWave Impact 3 is a solid body

dynam-ics system for LightWave NatureFX 2

realistically creates large bodies of water,

wakes, clouds, and atmosphere effects

Trees & Bolts creates lightning and otherelectrical effects with real-time OpenGLpreviews LumeTools helps create realisticsurfaces for your models and scenes.Demos are available from the DynamicRealities web site

Figure B-13

Figure B-14

Electronic Rain

http://www.erain.com/

If you’re into doing web graphics,

Elec-tronic Rain makes something I think will

interest you Swift 3D is a tool that exports

LightWave stills and animations into

Macromedia’s Flash format It fully

sup-ports gradients, transparency, reflections,

specularity, and shadows It’ll render your

LW scene to Flash’s vector-based format aspolygonal outlines, cartoon shading, orphoto-realistic using multiple layers oftransparency to get realistic specular high-lights and shadows

Wordware Publishing

http://www.wordware.com/

Wordware, the publisher of the book you

are reading, provides books on many

differ-ent computer-related subjects, from its

Game and Graphics Library to books on

pixel shading and real-time graphics coding

Few publishers have books that actually

teach you things you need to know I don’t

want to get on a soapbox here, but I am fed

up with books that talk a lot but don’t saymuch I choose to publish my LightWavebooks through Wordware because we share

similar foci in our intent in making a

differ-ence and giving the community things you can actually use, things you really want to know.

Safe Harbor

http://www.sharbor.com/

Safe Harbor is an online retailer that

sup-ports the 3D and graphics communities

While it is not my intention to single out

one retailer from another, I call attention to

Safe Harbor because they have served the

digital content community for more than 16

years and consistently provide a high level

of personal service and professionalism Ifyou’re looking for 3D-related hardware andsoftware and are having trouble locatingwhat you need through other vendors,check out Safe Harbor

Recommended Reading

This section lists books I have found

essen-tial to getting to where I am in my career.

With some of them, it will be immediately

obvious as to how they relate to LightWave,

animation, or filmmaking With others, the

connection may not be so obvious

Art isn’t something that can be

quanti-fied and put into a box Every work of art,

regardless of medium, is something that

encapsulates the entirety of your emotional,

mental, physical, and spiritual existence —

whatever this summation happens to be

The more you know, the more you

experi-ence, and the more you live and can really

“hold” the experiences you find, the better

artist you will be

The Artist’s Way

Julia Cameron

Top on the list of books I recommend is this

one Why? Because if you’re like most

art-ists who find themselves pulled to 3D,

you’re not just good at one thing — you’re

good at a whole lot of things How do you

know what you really want to focus your

time, energy, and spirit into? This book is

made up of exercises that seem like play at

first but really help you figure out what you

want to devote your time as an artist

toward Perhaps even more valuable, it

shows you how to experience the time you

spend creating your art as “playtime”; this is

the one true secret to letting your work

soar to its highest heights more quickly

than anything else

Letters to Strongheart

J Allen Boone

As an artist, you see, feel, experience life and

the things that impact you in ways thatleave much more permanent impressions

on your spirit than do the travels of

“every-day people.” These things have to if you are

going to be able to take these experiencesand share them with others through your

work Letters to Strongheart is a collection of

short letters detailing Boone’s travelsaround the world In a way I have not theskill to describe, Boone’s experiences and

how he sees them has done more to open my

eyes to things in my own experiences that Inever would have noticed before thannearly any other book (non-fiction or other-

wise) I rank this on the same level as The

Artist’s Way.

Film Directing: Shot by Shot

Steven D Katz

For anyone who is going to be successful in

the art of visual storytelling, you must

understand how to communicate within thismedium I’ve seen a few books come on themarket that are seriously pale shadows ofthis book This is what you study when youstudy filmmaking at the top schools in thecountry (Need I say more? Okay, I will.) To

illustrate its points as to how to tell your

story, it has extensive storyboard sequences

from Citizen Kane, The Birds, Blade Runner,

The Graduate, and Empire of the Sun It

clearly shows you all the established filmicconventions (camera positions, ways ofshooting dialogue, and establishing and

maintaining narrative control) and how to

break them when you need to.

To the Actor

Michael Chekhov

This is the premier book for teaching actors

the keys to “getting inside” their

charac-ters Its exercises have been practiced by

the best actors for generations (It is what

directors study to understand how to get the

performances they need from the actors to

tell the story they need to tell.) Plain and

simple: If you plan on doing character-based

work, either as an animator or director, the

information in this book will be one of your

greatest keys to success

LightWave 3D 8 Character

Animation

Timothy Albee

This book takes you from where you are

now and puts you on the path to being a

fea-ture-quality animator Character rigging,

inverse kinematics, posing, timing,

silhou-ettes, squash-and-stretch, action, acting,

facial animation, and taking a scene from

start to finish are only a few of the items

covered in depth within its pages If you’re

not a modeler, don’t worry; you can animate

any of the characters that ship on the

book’s CD-ROM; they even come fully

rigged if you have no interest in learning

feature-quality rigging (setting up a

charac-ter for animation) Exercises like

“Life-Drawing in 3D” and “Moving Life

Drawing in 3D” have proven themselves (in

teaching promising young animators

work-ing for me at my studios) as the best, fastest

ways of going from novice to feature-quality

charac-quickest, most effective ways of getting the

clearest picture of why the scene is in the

film (because in an audition, you frequentlyhave less than thirty seconds from beinghanded the script to acting it out before

director, producer, et al.) Then, combining

what you find with Chekhov’s “method,”you can make the scene as moving to theaudience as it possibly can be

Vilppu Drawing Manual

Glenn Vilppu

If you want to do figurative work — ters, humans, or otherwise — you need toget this book As I mentioned earlier,Glenn’s greatest gift is in being able toteach people (even those with little or noprevious experience) an understanding ofthe human form such that they are able tocreate works that one would normally asso-ciate with a master figurative artist It is the

charac-understanding of how the forms of the

human body work together that make a

model of a human look “good.” The cises in this book will give you thatunderstanding

exer-Alla Prima: Everything I Know

About Painting

Richard Schmid

http://www.richardschmid.com

All arts pull from the same source Having

a strong understanding of drawing and

painting is one of the best ways to make

your 3D work excel (It’s all art! It doesn’t

matter what tools you use to create it!) I’ve

been taught by teachers in some of the

most respected art schools in the country

All of them together have taught me only a

fraction of what I learned by reading

Rich-ard’s book Maybe the way in which he

presents what he knows fits with how I

need to have things presented to me in

order to learn — or maybe he has a unique

way of teaching that finally demystifies this

gliding of paint on canvas Regardless,

read-ing his book, I finally got it This is no

“theorist” expounding about how things

“should” be done or someone simply

show-ing you moves to copy by rote He talks

about his process of seeing that leads his

decision-making process (I don’t know how

I can impress deeply enough the fact of howimportant this is in your actually becoming

a good artist yourself — in every mediumyou touch!) Plus, Richard has this wonder-ful, light way of not taking himself or his arttoo seriously, and this is simply beyondrefreshing — the book is a joy to read

Travels with Charley: In Search of America

John Steinbeck

If you ever find yourself getting entrenched

in your element, don’t just read this book

— try your darnedest to follow in theauthor’s footsteps Steinbeck was in thesame position — his solution was to pack

up a pickup-camper, take his dog, Charley,and set off across the “blue highways” ofAmerica He knew no one, and no oneknew him, and through the book’s pages,you can feel the excitement of the treasure

of life and living flooding through author andtext (It is one thing to create art — it is

another thing entirely to live it.)