Mar 25
…it’s not the quality of the mesh, it’s the quality of the light.
Mar 07
How does one learn Bullet physics in Lightwave?
Blow up the moon, of course.
Feb 20
So Lightwave finally gets instancing, and what better way to learn how to use instancing than 8 million blades of subsurface-scattered translucent badly-modeled grass?
Mar 25
My initial attempts at creating this scene resulted in week-long render times. Once I got my settings tweaked correctly, this image only took 24 minutes to render. Woo! Yay!
Edit: This program is far too much fun.
Edit 2: I have re-rendered the above image with radiosity (51 hours, 21 minutes), resulting in much better lighting/shading in the shadowed areas:
Mar 12
After fighting through zillions of little buttons and settings, I finally got yer basic landscape generated and rendered using Vue 8. Hooray!
Feb 21
Finally, it is complete! My first subdivision model:
This represents roughly 8-9 hours worth of work (both modeling and texturing, spread out over two weeks thanks to some long hours keeping me at my day job). The shape itself is simple enough, but I went through several iterations, figuring out what worked and what didn’t. Neither did I have any kind of design plan, so building it was rather like jogging through an obstacle course at night while blindfolded and drunk.
This is also a good demonstration of just how much a difference materials, displacement maps, and lighting make, as seen in the final render:
Feb 18
What does any good geek do when learning subdivision modeling? Build a spaceship, of course.
Part 1 I call the Engine Block. The rest of the ship will eventually be crafted around this center core.
Feb 15
Lightwave 9.6, 100% procedural, heavy use of the IFW2 Node Plug-in Library.
(continue reading for images of the node layouts used to create the above image)
Feb 10
Fun with Lightwave 9.6 displacement maps, procedural textures, and adaptive subdivision (rendered with radiosity and a properly-sized sun at earth-distances).
Adaptive subdivision settings: 2 pixels per polygon.