Dwburman’s latest tutorial is a riff on his previous mechanical displays tutorials (and probably the last in the set), only this time it’s all about the surface settings.

He still wants to a nice promo video mentioning things like “over 2.5 hours of video training!” and “object and scene files included!” while showing the final renders and time lapsed excerpts from the lessons with text explaining what is taught in that lesson. He hopes to get around to doing that soon, but in the meantime we hope the intro lesson gives a good enough representation of the content to get people excited.

This is primarily a nodal texturing tutorial that starts with a base technique and shows different ways to apply that technique. There’s a bit of instructional/theory material (primarily discussing the concepts of a spot and local vs world coordinates in texturing. You’ll be doing a bit of instancing and particle emitting, although dwburman don’t go into great detail in explaining what he’s doing with those since they aren’t the main focus of the tutorial.

Pixel Displays [dwb]

In this tutorial for LightWave 3D, Dana W. Burman shows how to build and animate "pixel displays" using Denis Pontonnier's DP_Filter and DP_Kit plugins. He starts with explaining concepts relevant to these projects, shows how to set up the surface of instanced blocks using DP_Filter's Replace Spot to color their surface, and follows it up with expanding on the technique to specific use scenarios including LCD pixel with separate red green and blue channels, LED displays, to using the technique on parts (connected polygons) and instances attached to moving particles, and he shows how this technique can be used in projects other than "displays". He ends with an overview on setting up each display so it can be moved around in your scene as well as a few different ways to parent objects in Layout.

For more information visit the product page.

This tutorial makes heavy use of instancing and therefore would be best used with LW 11 and up.

Digital Download: 720MB Total Running Time is 2 hours 47 minutes +