Seasons Greetings 8 sec movie - 160x120 - xmax.avi
- [1.4Mb]
- In my previous job at an ad agency and production house I would design Ad
Vantage's Christmas card, and until 1994 I designed the card in Corel Draw.
Then I decided it was time to produce a card using Lightwave.
I took the hardwood floor I created for the Thinker, placed these words on
it and surrounded them with Christmas ornaments and lights. The lights use
the versatile lens flare options of Lightwave and the ornaments use ray-traced
reflections, so you can actually see the surroundings in the balls. We printed
this card on 4x6" photo print paper and attached it to the cover of 1994's
Christmas card.
- This graphic has been printed in the January 1996 issue of Video Toaster
User Magazine. This image was created as a still. I did the camera move
much later.
- I started with a standard font and in Modeler I typed out SEASONS GREETINGS.
I extruded the objects, and gave the extruded sides a new surface name. Then
I beveled the text out at a 45 degree angle. I separated the beveled edge
from the sides and front by selecting all four sided polygons with the surface
name TEXTFACE, and cutting them and pasting them right back
into place. This made it possible for the bevelled edges to be smooth, but
not blended into the face or the sides.
- The hardwood floor was relatively easy. I took the Lightwood graphic
that came with the Video Toaster software, and used it as a colour map. Then
I created a graphic with strips of different gray colours. I used this as
a specularity and a diffuse map on the floor surface. To top it all off, I
took that graphic and gave all of the edges black outlines, and then filled
in the "planks" white. This was used as a bump map on the floor
surface, making the grooves between the wooden planks.
- Each of the bulbs in the picture are representative of ones I saw on my
Christmas trees when I was a child. The disco ball bulbs were the easiest
to do, because I just made the ball using the ball tool in Modeler,
and didn't turn smoothing on in the surface menu. The right amount of diffuse
and reflectivity, and voila! Disco ball bulbs that actually adorned my tree
when I was wee.
- The cabling for the Christmas lights was created by sketching a curvy
line in one plane of Modeler. Then I used the drag feature to lift
points around in another plane, creating a winding line. Then I created two
six-sided discs touching each other, and did a rail extrude on the
line. I placed the bulbs on afterwards individually.
- One complaint I have about the lens flares of Lightwave is that I could
not produce flares that looked like real Christmas lights. As lens flares
get intense in Lightwave, their color tended toward White. A real blue Christmas
bult has a blue lens flare. A red bulb has a red lens flare. In my finished
picture, the flare colours are only visible near the edge of the carona, whereas
in reality, the whole flare would be richly coloured. I can see this being
a problem in future.
All content of these pages ©
Sean Huxter.
