Sean Huxter - 3D Animator (Lightwave 3D)

This was my first big project in Lightwave. I had done one other piece for a corporate video, and a number of 15 second Butternut ads, but this was a 30 second ad that had to be photorealistic, and blow-away.

It was during this time that I attended the International Film and Video Workshops in Rockport, Maine. I studied with Lee Stranahan who was great. He taught me something that I hadn't yet learned during the half-year I had been working and playing with Lightwave: Confidence.

When I returned from Maine, I had already figured out how I was going to do this ad, and I set out to do it. It was created, rendered and laid to BetaCam SP tape all on one Amiga 2500 unaccelerated. We didn't have a big enough hard drive to store all of the frames for each scene, so we had to lay down each frame to the Beta Recorder after it rendered! This meant that if anything screwed up, we'd have to redo it. Plus, our deadline was January 6, and we rendered the thing for over two weeks, over Christmas, with our editor Steve Cook having to come in periodically to make sure it was still running!

Remember that it is a 30 second ad, with photorealistic quality. I cheated, of course, wherever possible. I used spot lights with shadow mapping, and other lights used no shadow at all. The reflective surfaces for the most part use a reflection bitmap, (of a giant cow towering over Topeka, Kansas, if you want to know) and the hub of the handle was fully reflective. The bitmap reflections render faster, but for the handle, we needed to see the surroundings reflected correctly.

I used a fair amount of procedural displacement in this ad, as logo banners fell from the air. They rippled as they went. I used world coordinates for the ripple effect, but at the same time I used a negative Y velocity. So not only did the ripples look real, the "air pockets" fell realistically too, giving a nicer flag-like effect. I had played with a ripple bump-map on top of that effect, and for a test-render it looked very nice, but it made the logos harder to read, and it would have increased the rendering time past the air date!

For sheer photographic quality, this is my best looking ad. I'm pretty proud of it. I don't have a video clip of it yet, as it was fairly large. I may put one up sometime, since it is pretty cool.

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