There are nice, big pictures demonstrating it’s function on the UnMultishift page on the TrueArt website.

While you’re visiting their website, be sure to check out their commercial plugins as well. They have a wide variety of products including modeling tools, file importers, and rendering solutions.

This plugin is Windows only at this point and doesn’t work with multishifts done with polygon groups.

I have yet to try this plug in out, but it looks like a handy one.

-dwburman

So with that said we will be bringing forward several tutorials directly related to the production of the VFX for Iron Sky using LightWave 3D, here on Liberty3D.com very soon. From Dynamics and Digital Pyro using HVs and Turbulence FD to lighting and rendering in LightWave 11 which we used heavily on the show, plus the new instancing technology along with sophisticated rigging techniques and production methods to get shots out the door, this new series of videos from Liberty3D.com will put you into the production along side us as we built the show.

Stay tuned for more details!

Oh, and if I were going to name a plugin of the week, it’d be LW-CAD 4.0. I don’t have it, so I can’t demo it, but it looks awesome. You could possibly win a copy in the contest we’re hosting, but you’d better hurry. The contest ends in 10 days.

Click here for more details.

With just a few small things to tidy up, our job is done and come April 4th, 2012 you will see the fruits of our labor and hard work on the big screen (which is really kind of cool). Another special thanks goes out to the NewTek 3D development team and Rob Powers for seeing the Light(Wave) and helping us out by making LightWave11 (which saw some serious play time on deck) the best it can be for use in productions like this.

As Iron Sky comes to a close, new projects have already started up and LightWave will be the center of them! More details on this to come, but its a good time to be a LightWave artist. So hold your heads high, render hard and fast and keep rocking! There is work to be done!

Thanks again to everyone involved on the production including our own team of Liberty3D tools programmers. You guys rock! Next up is to get the tools made for us out to the community for use in their own productions and work. We will be sharing this stuff soon, some tools being free, others being very very affordable.

Stand by for more details and now that I am back I’m back into making tutorials and videos shortly featuring LightWave11 and the production methods we used with LW11′s new set of tools including instancing, fracture, bullet and more on Iron Sky!

Cheers!

One of his last shots seems to have problems rendering on the farm but this really isn’t too much of a surprise at the movement. The network in the energia office has been on the fritz for the past 3 days. So that one will render locally which is fine, its pretty quick to cook off a frame and there are not that many of them. I’m still working through the volumetrics of the last major “action” shot scene in the show. Luke did an awesome job on this one but I have to get it the rest of the way after he headed back to the UK which is cool. It’s eerily quiet around here. Lee is in Russia trying to not end up a hostage and won’t be back until Tuesday morning. Samuli is at home either resting or doing work remotely, I don’t know at the moment. He needed a break either way. Jussi and Vesa are here (our art director/matte painter and one of the comp team members respectively) working on some final bits needed for this week so the last of the set extension and compositing shots can be completed. At this time really its just rendering thats happening around here. Unfortunately Jimms Computer need the farm back, and we will be loosing about half our rendering capability starting tomorrow morning. Thankfully we don’t really have much left to cook off.

Sometime soon I hope to  be getting confirmation as to when I will be going home.  It’s been fun, but I have to get back to my life and deal with a mess of outstanding issues plus get back to cooking off more tutorials (stay tuned for details on that!).  For the moment thats all I can report but this regular blog entry thing about the progress of the show and how its been going is almost at an end. So what’s next?? Don’t worry about that for now, but its going to be pretty neat.

Kat.

This contest is closed.

WToold3D‘s new LWCAD 4 offers a huge advantage in Architectural modeling and here’s your chance to win a full copy!

Liberty3D and the Benelux Lightwave Resource in association with WToold3D are proud to be able to offer this opportunity to the LightWave community.

So let’s cut to the chase, here’s what you got to do:

1. Model an architectural structure from scratch
2. If you have the means, show us the steps you have taken
3. Tell us why LWCAD 4 would have made a difference in modeling the object
4. Upload the model, a rendered image and optionally the steps you have taken in the contest submission form before January 31, 2012
5. Wait

There are some rules you need to take in account:

• You have to model the architectural structure from scratch
• You may surface and texture it so you can provide us with a glossy render
• The motivation weighs hard in the final result also. Model 60%, motivation 40%
• Do not just model four walls, a ceiling and a floor, dress it up
• We need a minimum of fifteen contestants
• You need to be a registered user of the Benelux Lightwave Resource website (free). Not a very practical solution, but it is the best way to avoid unwanted gambling using blue pills with lots of naked women and men adverts in our mailboxes.

The winner will be chosen by LWCAD 4 creator Viktor Velicko (WToold3D)

We are awaiting your entries at the Benelux Lightwave Resource website.

When you want to provide us with the steps you have taken, add them to a ZIP file together with your object and use the form OBJECT submission field. 

p.s. you won’t see the submission form if you are not a registered user of the Benelux Lightwave Resource website.

Have fun and good luck!

To the contest at BLR..

To the contest index page..

To the entries page..

A great training guide for beginner 3D students to get started rigging their 3D models for animation purposes. Make your 3D models and characters come to life!!

*All Model and Scene Files are included with the course so that you can follow along. High Quality (Screen-Res 1440 x 900 pixels) Quicktime Video Level: Beginner Running Time: 14 hrs. 39 mins

Only $19.00USD

The rest of us are here doing the last of the last bits. It’s all just pretty much render power vs. man power at this point. That and smart approaches to what seemed like nearly impossible problems.

Tuomas has come up with an awesome solution to one of our shots that was originally to be simulated in Maya, but got dumped on us and you know what? It was the best move for them to make because Tuomas has taken it out of the “simulation” world and into the strange universe of DPont Nodes (specifically parts move) to effectively give us the same effect as desired but without any physics whatesover and just some procedurals driving around 12,000 objects (well parts in a single layered object). So once again, Maya fail, LightWave win with some help from Denis. So NewTek, just buy the guy out!

Ok that is all. Well for now.

Thanks go to Liberty3d forum member, TheMyth212, for pointing out this little gem of a script.

If you have a suggestion for a plugin of the week, feel free to leave it in the forum or in the comments below.

You can download Align to Point at pixsim.co.uk and discuss this, or any other plugin of the week, in our forum.

D.W.Burman

So what have we learned from all of this madness? Well the lesson or today which can carry on else where is the importance fo previs and how its not “just an animatic that you can screw with until the very last minute”. That’s one. Second, Have enough drive space. Third, when you get drive space, build it into a proper system that deals with heavy network load and highspeed requests better than your average bs linux home server product that gives you no control, that usually costs as much if not more than  a windows box with a bunch of drives in it, which you can log into and perform various tasks such as unlock locked files and kill off dead connections easily. Just a thought.

The last of the last bits are in progress at the moment. Tuomas is finished actually and is just going through a bunch of requests for small fixes our compositing team has asked for along with additional elements. Luke has a large shot on his desktop at the moment but its just about as kick ass as it can be.

Lee has some crazy stuff going on with a shot that he’s doing that’s pretty epic and I have one last to go.

Last lesson for the day(and for the film)  – We know what we are talking about, and if we can do it we will, but just because we can do it doesn’t mean we should when we have a stack of other stuff that needs our attention. It’s all find and dandy to ask if “x” can be done, but when you do that it takes away from “Y” there is only so much currency to go around, time is money. That’s what it all comes down to. Here at Iron Sky VFX, we know this well.

Here are some highlights:

• Consolidated Tools – all the power, less clutter
• New sphere primitive
• Set surface names within the primitive numeric panel
• UV support in primitives & polygon tools including booleans
• Polygon Slicing
• Shape Library2 with support for multiple curves/objects in a single shape
• The ability to define which parts of door/window/fence objects can scale, so you can resize a window without resizing its frame
• New roofing tools including the Line tool to quickly make L, U, and S shaped roofs
• Profiler now works with 1D shape library and makes UV maps

You can purchase LWCAD 4 at Viktor’s website: wtools3d.com

Upgrade pricing is available for owners of LWCAD 2 and 3.

LWCAD 4.0 has been fully tested in LightWave 9 through LightWave 11.

Oh joy, home! It would be soon, yes! =^..^=

You can download version 3.5 here.

– Charlot Cobben

Got some time off from work or school and don’t know how you are going to spend your vacation? Why not pick up some training videos or a new tool to play with at the http://Liberty3D.com store?

This special includes all of our training videos as well as our LightWave plugins: UberCam, Quad Panels, & VFX Wizard’s AE Link (an awesome tool for moving animation from LightWave to AE with the ability to update it later on).

All orders also entitle you to a coupon for $100 off a Liberty3D HD Workstation by Shuttle Computer.

Offer expires November 30, 2011. The 3D Coat application is not included in this deal. All products are download-only. No physical media will be shipped.

It’s been a crazy few weeks for me, so the plugin of the week kind of slipped through the cracks. I wanted to post something this week, but I don’t have a full blown demo to show you. I did notice a new script by Falogfx on NewTek’s forum that looks like it’ll be a handy one to have.

Radial Move is a free LScript that lets you scale tubular bits of geometry while maintaining the volume of the walls, i.e. the walls of the tube don’t get thicker as you scale them out.

See the announcement thread and download the script.

- dwburman

After a very long week of ups and downs with few victories due to technical BS (and immediate knee jerk reaction by some, but deflected by me to find the real problem which as it turned out was something I warned against a long time ago – but it doesn’t matter though, or does it?) we are very tired.

On the flip side we are now down to the last batch of shots for our next delivery and then there are some fixes we would all like to go through and just up setting, tweak that, and push render and call it a show. It will get to that point soon, we just have to kill these cursed (by maya – like really? What the fuck!? NEVER AGAIN – Never again will I let something like what we have had to deal with fly on any other show I do. I have been burned by maya and maya artists so many times over the last 8 years and I’m so sick of it) Zeppelin shots dead and gone and move on.

I will have to explain all of that later in a tutorial or webinar or something. Right now I am too bitter to discuss.

Before someone complains about me being too “negative” or down on things I best to be a happy kat and talk about some of the neat stuff that we have been doing. Lee for example who has had dumped on him a few nasty shots has pulled off a rather sexy edition of one shot that we all thought was pretty much going to be disaster. He’s now taking care of the absolute final shot that is seen in the film. That leaves myself Tuomas and Luke with Samuli to bang out the remaining “space combat” sequences that deal purely with ships. After that we have 2 shots that are going to need some very fast R&D and a bit of LightWave3D 11 to make work and work on time. In total, while I can’t say how many shots we have left to do – we are close to the finish line.

So the question is what happens next? Luke will be going back to the UK, Tuomas will be hanging out here obviously in Finland, Lee and I are both job hunting but he’s going to travel for a while and I think Samuli is going to need a beer and break for a while. It could be a very interesting 2012. It’s certainly been a very weird 2011.

http://www.lightwave3d.com/features-lightwave-menu.html

When you are done drooling, stop doing that and get your credit card out and pick up the pre-release version now. Yes, you can buy the full version and get your hands on it before ships at the 11.0 gold edition today.

Have fun!

Either way I’m pretty sleepy and a bit pissed off today.

In other happy kat news we are still pushing through the last remaining shots to go here on Iron Sky. Then, if we are lucky we can all go home around the end of November. Luke is going to be heading out around that time for sure but will still be able to lend a hand. Tuomas of course will be close by, and as for Lee I think he’s going to be doing some traveling in Russia or something. Me? I don’t know yet. My flight home is going to be very expensive and just gets worse as time goes on should I need to stay on further into December.

Beyond travel plans, our primary concern this week has been storage space. We managed to pick up another 5TB of storage after shuffling some things around which is good. But we are still having some pretty serious network drag at certain times of the day or completely random from machine to machine. Something that loads in 3 minutes in LW on one box at one time will take 1 hour on another box somewhere else on the network and then will switch around completely. It’s frustrating for sure, but hopefully we can resolve it quickly.

In other news if you haven’t signed up for the VFXMinds thing that NewTek is doing and you are in the Los Angeles area and can make it, you really should. I’m told seats are filling up very fast and its going to be a very large show with some cool surprises.

For more details on that hit up http://www.newtek.com/LWEmmy/

Before I close out today I just wanted to thank NewTek and the LightWave development team for helping us out here on Iron Sky. In addition, I also want to thank the LightWave team here on Iron Sky as well as our compositing guys who have been working with us in a positive fashion understanding fully the extreme nightmare that we have had to deal with on top of the extra stuff that got dumped on us by a failed maya pipeline.

It’s been a pleasure. Oh wait, we still have a month to go heheh.

Meow fur neow.

Besides laundry, other things going on related to what we are doing at Iron Sky are having an impact on the other side of the planet. For of those of you in the Los Angeles Area, who can make it to the NewTek VFX Minds Event, be on the look out for a lot neat stuff there.  If you need to register to get a seat ( space is incredibly limited) I suggest you do it now. Register at http://www.newtek.com/lwemmy

More info and details to come on that but I want to thank NewTek Inc. and the LW Development Team for all their help.

OK, next load of laundry is almost done.

More updates soon!