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Iron Sky Based Tutorials Coming soon from Liberty3d

Two great things have happened in 2011 and continue on into 2012. First of all, NewTek announced LightWave 11 in LA back in November and we expect to see it released very shortly. The second was the completion of the VFX work for the Finnish Feature Film Sci/Fi Dark Comedy – Iron Sky. These two events are deeply linked together because LightWave was a major component in making sure Iron Sky got made. I along with Luke Whitehorn, Lee Stringer, Tuomas Kankola and Samuli Torsonnen all worked very hard onRead More


Iron Sky – Mission Complete

After 7+ months of working on Iron Sky in Finland at Energia Productions, I’m finally back in Vancouver. With this said special awesome thanks to Samuli and his team at Energia and to Tuomas Kankola, Lee Stringer, Luke Whitehorn and the rest for making the experience great. 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 goesRead More


Iron Sky – Day 211

Tuomas has left the building and after a brisk walk down to the train station with him, he’s off to Helsinki and now done with Iron Sky. 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 thatRead More


Lightwave 10.1 – Rigging a Human: Project Biped

In this 14 hour video training course for beginner LightWave3D students, Instructor Adam Gibson shows the essential basics to rig humanoid characters for posing and animation. Detailed demonstration of how to build/edit a complete skeletal structure with skelegons/bones, weight-mapping, bone parenting, model modification/adjustments, test deformations, adding powerful hand and foot control nulls, IK (Inverse Kinematics) Set-up and problem solving are all included within this course. A great training guide for beginner 3D students to get started rigging their 3D models for animation purposes. Make your 3D models and characters comeRead More


Iron Sky – Day 206

Luke has escaped from the clutches of this production and gone home to England today. Lucky bastard, except for the England part. ๐Ÿ˜› 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?Read More


Iron Sky – Day 200!

Yeah, 200 days! 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 usuallyRead More


Iron Sky – Day 195

We are almost at the 200 day mark here for Iron Sky and our time on it (well, Luke and I that is).ร‚ย  Right now Luke is taking a break shooting people in the head and being shot dead in some video game that he’s playing while I am going through the paces of finding the sweet spot for a render with a dozen or so HV fire, smoke and other pyrotechnics stuff in LightWave3D 11. The New Unified Sampling system really makes for some interesting results in terms ofRead More


Iron Sky – Day 187

The home stretch is in sight now. 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 fixesRead More


LightWave3D Eleven (That’s 11)

For those of you who are not paying attention. 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! ๐Ÿ™‚


Iron Sky – Day 178

I didn’t get much sleep last night. It’s apparently completely acceptable in Finland to come home completely blasted out of your mind and play guitar and sign Nirvana songs badly until 5:30AM. I had to get up twice to go down stairs to this jerks place and knock on his door to ask him to shut the fuck up to no effect. 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 hereRead More


Iron Sky – 176

Not much to report today. Im actually doing laundry at the kitty’s place (Black Tabby!) for the day because I was absolutely out of anything to wear. It’s certainly hard living out of a suitcase that’s for sure. 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 forRead More


Iron Sky – Day 172

It’s early on Tuesday morning here at the Energia Productions offices. Ari, our compositor for a bulk of our shots from the LightWave team is here early as well and we are checking renders and other stuff from the night. The main server nose dived right in the middle of the night a few hours ago. I hope we didn’t loose anything data wise or too much time with re-rendering any frames that have failed during that downtime. Fortunately it seems that almost everything we wanted to get rendered isRead More


Iron Sky – Day 166

Due to us being crazy busy I haven’t been able to provide you happy fans of the Iron Sky LW team blog a new entry in almost 2 weeks that had any juicy bits to it. Well, today I hope to make up for it. Problem with doing this blog is that I can only talk about so much. I don’t want to give away the plot to the show and some of the stuff we are doing and with what I can’t even mention. So that makes it difficultRead More


Iron Sky – Day 158

First of I must say sorry to everyone who is out there and has been reading regularly and have been looking for more updates on our progress. We are deeeeeep in the thick of it and our schedule is pretty immovable so please forgive me for the lack of regular updates. In other words we are super stupid busy. However later tonight I may get a moment or two to do an additional post here on the Liberty3d.com site. Stand by please.. ๐Ÿ™‚


Iron Sky – Day 153

After a couple of days here doing night shifts and the other guys pulling in extra hours things are starting to come together and we are pretty much on track but like any show where you have to depend on computers for anything you become a slave to their speeds and how many of them you have. We picked up a bunch of additional nodes a few weeks back, and I am very very thankful they are here. However, due to various technical issues with respect to how things wereRead More


Iron Sky – Day 149

I’m doing the night shift here at Energia on Iron Sky. My goal for the evening is to get 3 shots into render. I have been here since midnight after leaving to get some sleep around 5PM earlier today, or yesterday or whatever it was or is. So far though out of 3 shots I have one in and its just about 4AM, and I have two more to go and I will be a happy kat I guess. I’m a little concerned with some technical stuff once things goRead More


Iron Sky รขโ‚ฌโ€œ Day 147

It’s Monday morning here in Tampere at the VFX offices of Iron Sky and I have been working on a nice little live action shot where we get to integrate our wonderful Valkyries into a shot of “New York”. Not trying to give away the plot or anything but all my work this week along with a bit of help from Luke and Tuomas and Mark will be for a sequence that takes place in NYC. Around mid-august our Director, Timo went with the DoP and producer of the showRead More


UberCam 1.9 Update!

Kiko has been very busy working on updates to UberCam and we are now releasing it to the public after a decent and successful round of Beta Testing. Special thanks go out to Ken, Jim, Charly and Dana for hammering on this thing. We also want to thank all of our citizens and users of Liberty3D UberCam over the past year since it was first released. Because of users like you, Ubercam is now being used all over the world and rendering shots on some pretty amazing stuff. That isRead More


Help Bring Welcome to the Cosmos to life!

As some of you know, Tim Oliver and I did the VFX work on Welcome to the Cosmos back in 2009. Nick Hallum has been working to complete the rest of “season” scripts with his writing team and the creators of the show with consultation coming in from none other than Michael Rymer. Don’t know who that is? Well you should. I worked with Michael on several episodes of Battle Star Galactica as he directed a shuwack of them throughout the run of the series. Quality SciFi potential Factor? IncrediblyRead More


Iron Sky – Day 139

Sunday, Sunday, Someday! That’s right! Come on down and get your shots rendered! It’s Sunday Render Farm Madness! As you might have guessed it’s Sunday and all we are doing is rendering shots and making a list, of things to do next. The compositing team is in today to comp a number of shots for our delivery this week (tomorrow) and once Lee gets his freaking shots off the farm (I’m teasing of course, his shots are going to look great!) I can throw the entire mega computing cluster (weRead More