Roll Your Own By Jeff White Requirements: LightWave

ow that Lightwave supports Flyer Clips, people are starting to take advantage of this beautiful marriage of Newtek products. While you have always been able to use images or sequences, this added support for the Flyer really opens up the possibilites for creating transitions to go from one video source to another. While the toaster has many REAL time effects, most of them are too pixelized for professional use, and while we do not suggest you make EVERY transition a rendered effect, it can surely make a difference with one or two tossed in for good measure.

Now, you don't have to own a Flyer to take advantage of this. PC users can use image sequences just as easy to create stunning effects to use with whatever hardware you are currently sending your animations out to.

Many of you may be familiar with our Visual FX packages for Lightwave, as well as Fly FX by Dimension Technologies or Hollywood FX. All these programs take the work out of creating transitions in Lightwave. But what if you wanted to create your own? That's what this article is about. We will give you a stripped down scene file designed to show you how to roll your own.

The most important thing to remember is that you want these to be smooth transitions going from Source-A to Source-B without any change in lighting, position, or size. When we were creating Visual FX, it took Leo & Mark quite some time to get this down to a science. If you use an image in the background, it will always match up with the original. However when you map the image onto an object, you will have a problem getting it to look just like the original. This sample scene is from Volume #1 of Visual FX By Leo Martin and is a perfect example of what we mean. The name of the effect is "Shrink-Flip-Expand". Image-A shrinks back on the Z axis while flipping on the Y axis to reveal & expand into Image-B.

The effect only uses 1 simple object, a flat polygon with 2 sides, but it is the position and settings of the object that make this work so well. If you use this as a template, just make sure the object starts in the same position and ends in the same position as the default. You can make the object do whatever you like in the middle, but as long as you follow these rules you will have a perfectly smooth transition effect from Image-A to Image-B. There are 3 key frames for the effect. One at the beginning, one at the end, and one in the middle. Just leave the first and last alone and play with the one in the middle. You can also add other key frames if you like. Of course, to make it your own, all you really have to do is replace our default images with your own images, sequences or Flyer Clips.

Notice how the object settings are handled. Luminosity is set to 100% while the Diffuse Level is set to 0%. This is just the opposite of the default settings in Lightwave. The Specular Level is also set to 0%. This will make the Image mapped on the object look just like the original. If you change these settings, be careful. This can make the transition "jump" since it will no longer match perfectly with the original image.

The texture map settings are exactly the same for Image-A and Image-B. They both are on the Z axis and use automatic sizing to scale the image to match.

Look at how we have the camera set up and note that we use 2 distant lights. One directly in front of the camera, and one directly in back, pointed at each other. Also note that the ambient light source is set to 0%. All these settings play an important role in matching the effect with the original images.

Well that about does it for this article. You can download this sample scene file in zip or lha format. We hope that you will experiment with this and send us your finished results. We would love to see what you come up with.

Enjoy...

Jeff White

Phone: (813) 935-6410
Email: visual@vionline.com

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