Views From The Electric NorthWoods: 4

Views From The
Electric NorthWoods
By R. Shamms Mortier

n Vermont, April is called "Mud Season", a time when you must be diligent about wiping your shoes before stepping on the carpet. It's also the time of Maple Sugaring, or the steam rising like smoke from a campfire through the vents at the top of the sugar houses, while the sap boils in long steel pans below. Unfortunately, there's nothing like Mud Season, or even Spring to Winter, in the digital studio. Just the rather glow of monitors and the whirrrrr of computer parts. Most studios don't even have windows, and those that do usually have them blocked off with shelves or other space consuming furniture. All of the murderous garbage on the airwaves has to do with there being no windows in the studios responsible for dumping their one-sided view of the world on the rest of us. Stories about urban murder, stories told as if we were supposed to believe that they were somehow ubiquitous and common, seem a little strange when viewed up here in the North Country. New Jersey, New York, and Los Angeles do not represent the common ethic or vision for the whole of America.

Your work as a digital artist and animator can be like a studio without windows. You can go along, producing stories whose themes and plots are just repetitions of a belief system pushed on you by the as-if media. In that case, all you wind up doing is to repeat what you've been told, and even how you've been told to shape it. Or, if you're brave and enlightened enough, you can take a jack hammer to that space on the wall. The space hidden behind some garble of shelves. You can allow a little light in, and reshape your productions according to who and where you are. Maybe you won't be able to open that window all of the time ("I've got to make a living you know!"), but I'll just bet you can stick your nose out of it once in a while to smell the roses.

I would be the first to admit that the fates have bestowed upon me a great fortune in regard to all of this. Though my studio windows are blocked by shelves just as yours are, there is a space outside where I plant a vegetable garden, and space around the house where my beloved plants dozens of different beds of flowers. Mud season will be gone soon, and the rainy mud that covered my shoes will seep deep into the Earth, nurturing all kinds of receptive life forms in the waiting dark. And you know, even as my hands turn the soil over and I tamp down the seeds with my rake and shovel, I am usually musing to myself about the shapes of things all around. Many of those shapes (plants, trees, sap buckets, insects), become models, most sculpted for my own pleasure. Models that wind up in some obscure personal animation, bringing the memory of an open window when the weather outside turns away again from garden time.

Letters

Some of you out there, walking along the strands of the Web, have sent me some mail with comments and questions about different LightWave and other subjects. From time to time, I will endeavor to respond in the column, especially when you mention topics that I think would be of interest to other sojourners. Here are two examples:

Dear, R. Shamms Mortier,

I enjoyed reading your column in the yet to be named (LW-Flyer) online magazine. In particular the notes on the Meta tools take over of Fractal.

Not to discount the possible threat this may cause NewTek another longtime player also deserves a mention to wit, Caligari and the soon to be released trueSpace3.

Many trueSpace users eventually migrate to LW rather than Max or SoftImage, once their needs can no longer be fulfilled by trueSpace. However since the off the shelf (new) trueSpace3 includes many features found in LW and other higher-end applications this would appear to be a greater closer threat to LW's current position.

Having started on trueSpace myself and still in awe of what has to be one of the most user friendly and intuitive interfaces I have met, I feel this would be an appropriate topic in one of your future columns.

Sincerely
K. Young

Well K, a trueSpace article in an online LightWave-centric Webazine is not exactly appropriate, but the general theme that is the foundation of your letter is. trueSpace is a wonderful Windows application, as are a few others in the LightWave price range. Strata Studio, though it is still working out some bugs, will include a Windows version in the near future. RayDream 5, from Fractal, is going through mega-upgrading even as we speak, and will be released in the summer. There are other applications as well that are pushing and shoving at the same door, trying to gain an advantageous foothold.

The problem is not and seldom has been about the bells and whistles any application contains or plans to introduce, no matter how addicted we have all become to magic effects. The problem is personal, like wool, cotton, and polyester sweaters waiting for you to try them on. They can all keep you warm, but what are your tastes? The time you spend learning a 3D application, mastering it, is time you can either put to use or not. Some folks don't wear sweaters at all, but are consumed with getting one of each type to store in their closets until the moths remove their functionality. The question remains, what are you going to DO with trueSpace, or with LightWave? Are you developing any projects that will make the world a less murderous place to live in? Is LightWave a tool that will help you pour out your creative energy? Is trueSpace?

Personally, I dislike arguing which 3D application, or even what computer platform, is "better". If your software can do the job you want done, for a price you can afford, go for it. There is little value in saying "my paintbrush is bigger than yours", as my Grandmother would say. I know folks who create 2D animations in low resolution and 16 colors, full of jaggies. Those animations have a story that moves mountains.

The absolute worse thing that could happen, although the respective companies push hard to seem to want to bring it to pass, is for only one 3D application to overwhelm and dominate the marketplace. That leads to arrogance, the negation of user services, and the eventual slowing down of new ways to do things. Competition works in creative endeavors as it does in evolution in general. Besides, who's to say you can't own and use several good 3D applications, porting parts of projects this way and that in order to take advantage of special modules? Most of the digital artists and 3D animators that I know have more than one way to take the bumps off of a pickle.

Another letter...

I enjoy reading your columns in the Video Toaster & LightWave Online Magazine and find them very informative. I have a question about a comment you have made in your columns about using Photoshop Plugins in LightWave. Are you talking about doing the image processing in Photoshop and importing the finished file into LightWave of accessing Photoshop's plugins from within LightWave? If you can access them from within LightWave 5.0, could you tell me how you do it. Thank you.

Sincerely,
Charleen Ward

Charleen. There are few topics as mesmerizing to a digital artist as the mere mention of "Photoshop plugins". It's a topic that's always white hot. Yes. You can do the image processing in Photoshop and import the finished file into LightWave as an animated background, a very tedious task when you're talking about potentially hundreds of animation frames. It's also made more tedious because Photoshop offers no way to automate the process. LightWave offers no automatic way to incorporate Pshop plugins either. In fact, the letter above is interesting, because trueSpace version 2 does allow you to automatically render animated frames that are processed with Pshop filters (maybe someone should write NewTek).

Since LightWave is a Windows application (at least, in one of its three guises), there is another solution. Render your LightWave animation as a series of single frames, then port them to Corel's PhotoPaint 7+. PhotoPaint has a beautiful animation module that allows you to configure filter animations over imported frames. It's still a little work,but the results are stupendous.

I sing the song Vertilectric

Talking about LightWave and plugins, there are a number of specific plugins available for LightWave use. Some are what might be called very special Special Effects. One that I've been having a lot of fun with is called Vertilectric, from Blevins Enterprises Incorporated (121 Sweet Avenue, Moscow, ID 83843 / 208-885-3803 / http://bei.moscow.com).

Simply put, Vertilectric allows you to add lightning effects to a LightWave animation. This includes standard lightning strikes, searing static from generators, or even cosmic laser effects. The manual is loaded with tutorials and clear walkthroughs of the settings dialogs. The Vertilectric effects use Null objects for lightning placement. One of the effects I have been playing with is to clone and rotate the Vertilectric object several times, producing a massive electric vortex. Once configured, the Vertilectric object can be sized, moved, rotated and stretched. Vertilectric effects can be set in either the Layout or Modeler. The null points can also be moved to a spaceship's laser ports, or perhaps to the eyes of a magician.

The results of Vertilectric effects can be stunning, like these two asteroids sparking in space.

Here's a simple run-through of how to set up a Vertilectric animation in Layout (you can also set up a Vertilectric object in Modeler). This takes it for granted that you have Vertilectric installed properly in the plugin drawers it belongs in:

The Vertilectric settings are accessed from LightWave Objects in Layout.

Go to the Objects menu and create two Null objects. Select Null #1, and use the "Rep Obj Plugins" button to select the Vertilectric option. Select Options to bring up the Vertilectric parameters screen. Select the Null #2 object in the list at the left and ADD it to the list at the right. Null #2 is now the Vertilectric Target, with #1 as the Source. With #2 selected on the right, click on the Parameters button. Follow the conventions in the docs to set the Vertilectric parameters. Realize that the most important parameter is the one marked Segment length. I have good luck setting it to about .7 or higher. Set all of the parameters, or leave them at their defaults, and close the dialogs.

Create a surface with a Glow (follow the LightWave manual), and save it. Back in the Vertilectric dialog, assign this surface to the Vertilectric object. Experiment with different Glow parameters, previewing the results each time. In Layout, Move the Source and Traget Nulls apart and generate a Keyframe. Do a Preview animation to check the settings.

The Vertilectric dynamics can be seen when you generate a preview of the animation.

Vertilectric is another excellent LightWave plugin that accomplished very stunning electricity effects. If you are a LightWave nut,.. buy it. Hey.

Time to go. See Jah in the Bye and Buy.

R. Shamms Mortier, PhD is the owner of Eyeful Tower Communications, a graphics/animation design house in Bristol, Vermont. He is an accompished jazz musician, recording artist and composer. He has written over 500 articles on computer graphics and animation over the last ten years for over twenty major international magazines, and has written books on related topics (Amiga DeskTop Videography, the graphics section of the Hayden Maclopedia, Pagemaker 6.5 for Hayden-Macmillan, and BackStage Pass on Web design for Ventana Books). He can be reached at rshamms@together.net.