There is a new human-computer interface device on the market that lets you manipulate the cursor or even 3D objects by just waving your hands in the air. That device is called the Leap Motion Controller, and it is surprisingly inexpensive. Using infrared cameras, it can track exactly what you are doing with your hands and use that to control your mouse cursor or run specialized code written into compatible applications (similar to how pressure-sensitive tablets have even more options in Photoshop than just the operating system you are running).

Autodesk has integrated the Leap Motion into Maya, so it is already possible to use it with at least one popular 3D software suite. Leap Motion has a promotional video on their website showing it in use with Maya, although the technical details and examples are very sparse: Continue reading “Leap Motion Controller”

A fan made an amazing short animation as a tribute to Samurai Jack, the classic Cartoon Network animation created by Genndy Tartakovsky. Take a look:

The animation was made in Blender, which is a freely available 3D animation software package. I am impressed with how well the creator was able to use a 3D animation tool to match the look and feel of the old 2D cartoon.

On a related note, I also just found out that Samurai Jack has a been turned into a comic book, continuing his story after the abrupt end of the television series. That set of comics started about a year and a half ago and recently finished. In addition, another set of comics was released that covers events before and during the television series, named “Samurai Jack Classics”.

But Samurai Jack is still lacking an ending. Maybe one day Genndy will return to his creation and let him return to his own time after defeating Aku.

I played around with one of the newer features in LightWave this week: instancing. This feature lets you load a single object and then duplicate it throughout the scene. There are multiple advantages to using instancing instead of manually loading multiple copies of an object into the scene. First, instancing uses far less memory to store the duplicated object information, which becomes very obvious if you duplicate the object hundreds of thousands of times. Second, you can use some simple rules to automatically place the objects throughout the scene, either uniformly or randomly. You can even control the random placement using a texture map.

In my initial tests, I just wanted to get instancing working using a very simple scene. Inspired by the recent news of the Kaze series, I decided to try to make a field of bamboo stalks. First, I created a single square polygon to act as a ground plane. Next, I created a very rough model of a bamboo stalk, extending vertically about 3 meters from the ground. Then I loaded those two models into Layout. Continue reading “LightWave Instancing”

I stumbled onto a new 3D animation product website that also has a marketplace for 3D models.  The product is DAZ 3D and their site is daz3d.com. It looks like the software uses preexisting models and provides an interface for animating those models. But I was more interested in the model marketplace, which are provided without any restrictions for use.

There are a few models that are priced at $0.00. That’s free! Unfortunately, the site’s search features make it very difficult to find the full list of free models. However, I did find two model sets that are pretty cool, both of which are for cityscape buildings. The models are in LWO format (the native LightWave object format) and include textures.

• Dystopia City Blocks 001-010
• Dystopia City Blocks 011-020

Another good 3D model marketplace is TurboSquid, which has much better search features than DAZ 3D. TurboSquid also has a semi-secret way of filtering for only the free models: filter by price and set the min and max values to “0”. The only downside to TurboSquid is that a lot of the models are only available in 3DS Max format, which is proprietary and cannot be opened by LightWave or Blender.

For the past week, I decided to work on a more photo-realistic render. A while back, I was entertaining myself by trying to render the Earth and moon in Maya. I never finished that scene, however, because I couldn’t find a good way to render out stars in Maya without using a static background image. Before I found a good solution in Maya, I got sidetracked and forgot about it.

I decided to translate the surfaces from Maya to LightWave, to try to stretch my abilities in the LightWave node editor. Here is my final result:

Continue reading “Earth and Moon”