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!

I haven’t posted here in a long time – work, work, work. But here is a few quick doodles I created earlier today while having fun with the new ZBrush version until I get some more time to write something more interesting.

Hard Surface Gun Sculpted in ZBrush.

ZSketch and then the retopologized poly mesh.

Just some odd spaceship form sculpted in ZBrush.

The ZSketch and then using Clay Tubes to fill in some shapes.

Kind of a robot entity with 70's platform like shoes.

The recently introduced ZSketch which let’s you doodle freely in 3D space together with the new hard surface brushes is definitely another step forward for ZBrush. It’s pretty cool to be able to go from nothing to have some concepts sculpted out in less than an hour.

Oh well, over and out. Til next time…

Chickenosaur - Published in Filter Magazine issue 10, Oct & Nov 2009

I created this illustration to accompany an interview with the American paleontologist Jack Horner, known for being the advisor on all Jurassic Park films, regarding his theories to use chicken DNA to re-create the dinosaurs.

I love to use modo for print work, it really shines when working with stills. Here is another image of just the modo render:

The T-Rex being born in an egg box. He would probably be pretty upset hanging out in my kitchen.

And a shot of the scene in modo…

The dinochicken scene in modo

Oh, here’s also one of the early versions, which I thought turned out kind of funny. This is the pose I would have preferred to go with myself.

Oh yeah, birth anxiety!

Anyway, I’m currently occupied with a film shot and when I’ve delivered that scene I believe I’ll have some time to update my portfolio. (I seem to keep pushing the portfolio update ahead of me…)

Til next time. Cheers!

There were a few layer to OBJ scripts available for modo but none that worked like I wanted or properly with modo 401. I needed this functionality badly right now to bring layers out as separate OBJ files and then take them into ZBrush as SubTools. I do this many, many times each day in my work so this script saves me some decent amount of time. Maybe GoZ will deprecate this script when it’s released for Windows. We’ll see, but until then it’s a nice companion for a modo <-> ZBrush workflow.

Get the modo script here »

I’ve been wanting to learn Python for some time now, and creating this script was a nice little introduction to Python for me. Many other applications I use can be scripted through Python, so definitely a good language to touch some base with in other words. Not to forget that the upcoming LightWave CORE will have a solid Python API.

Just a quick ZSketch i doodled together while exploring this new tool.

Doodling in the new ZSketch mode in ZBrush

ZBrush 3.5 is overall another impressive release from Pixologic. I love the new ZSketch mode and I hope I soon will get an opportunity to use it in production. I just wish Pixologic had updated their plugins to work with 3.5 before releasing it. I’ve come to depend on many of Pixologics plugins, so I’ll have to keep using ZBrush 3.1 in my daily work until they are updated. But til then I’ll continue having some fun with the sketch spheres in 3.5.

Turntable Viewer version 2

I’ve just released version 2 of my Turntable Viewer to showcase rendered turntable clips on the web.

Major new features in version 2 are:

• Implemented a loader for jpg/png/gif image sequences.
• Implemented a theme option to create a custom theme for the viewer.
• Included better documentation.
• Changed to a more flexible Creative Commons license agreement, which allows the viewer to be freely used on commercial and corporate websites as well. Go nuts!

I rewrote the entire application architecture from scratch since the last release to be fully object oriented for easier additions of new features. I will be occupied with some work in the coming weeks so I decided to take a snapshot of the current version and release it today as I won’t have time to look at it again for the next month or so. There was a few more things I wanted to add and some things I wanted to fix, so I guess I’ll make another update later this autumn when I get some time for it.

In the meantime, enjoy this new version, I hope the inclusion of the image sequence loader will be useful and make it much easier to use.

Grab the new version of the Turntable Viewer »

Cheers!

Late Night Doodling in ZBrush

Well, now I guess I’ll catch the late night run of Stargate SG-1 or something on the telly and see if I can get some sleep at last.

Til next time…

Screenshot of the flash Turntable Viewer

I’ve got several requests about it lately, so today I made the ‘quick-n-dirty’ release. With quick and dirty I refer to that I haven’t had time to write any proper documentation or add all features that I’d like it to have for a public release. I did add the option to customize the control bar’s colors through an external XML file today though.

I’m very busy at the moment, so instead of holding back the release until I get time to finish everything I want, feel free to use this version if you’re one of those hardcore web people who don’t mind poking around a bit yourself to learn how it works.

Check my included example html, xml and swf files in the archive to learn how you can set it up and do some customization. At the moment you need to convert your rendered sequences to a swf file (like the ones in the example folder) so you need a flash authoring application to do that. That will change for the next version where you will be able to use an image sequence of jpg or png files instead without the need for any flash authoring whatsoever to use it.

Download the Turntable Viewer here.

Enjoy!

The article is expanded with a full color managed workflow for LightWave 3D with display proofing, a generic color managed workflow for all other 3D applications that lacks full color management. A linear gamma corrected workflow for modo and LightWave 3D. Color managed workflows for Photoshop and After Effects as well as a section on monitor calibration and profiling with a Spyder 3 Elite.

I originally wrote the article focused on how to deal with a wide gamut display and 3D renderings, as I was suffering from bad oversaturation problems since I got my wide gamut display. But after I had published it I continued researching the subject and returned to the article last week and kept expanding upon it, and it took life of its own and grew page by page…

Article Overview

• Introduction
• Display Calibration and Profiling
• Photoshop Color Management Setup
• Color Manage 3D Renders in Photoshop
• The Linear Workflow
• Render Display Soft Proofing
• Compositing and Editing
• More Applications and Conclusion

Enjoy and cheers!