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NewTek Europe Interviews VFX artists behind Iron Sky
Interviews of the VFX artists from Energia and Iron Sky in general are going to start popping up a lot over the next couple of weeks. Here is one of the first ones that you can read in English. It’s only a couple of pages but it will help to give you some insight into the process with regards to Iron Sky’s visual FX and how LightWave played THE central role in bringing it to life. http://www.newtek-europe.com/uk/community/lightwave/ironsky/1.html
NewTek Ships LightWave11!
Yes, its finally out! LightWave11, the biggest single upgrade in the history of LightWave since, well a long long time – perhaps even since 5.6 came out is now available. As many of you know, LightWave11 was instrumental in the production of Iron Sky as we were working with NewTek throughout the production cycle using LightWave11 to produce final shots shown throughout the film. Now is your chance to get your hands on the same advancements and improved technology that helped us make the movie when other applications failed (Maya)Read More
New Iron Sky Trailer now out!
Here is the newest Iron Sky Trailer now in full 1080p on youtube.com Special thanks to the Entire VFX Team, especially the fellow LightWave artists who saved this production by putting more than a lions effort into bringing the VFX to completion!
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. 😛 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). 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! 🙂
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.. 🙂
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 – 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