The last two weeks have been pretty hectic with the holidays and then getting caught up at work, so I never had a chance to finish touching up the Cowboy Bebop warehouse scene I was creating. But that’s OK, because I learned some good lessons from creating the scene, especially as it relates to building anime-style backgrounds in LightWave. The only touch up I wanted to try was adding a paintbrush effect to the walls, but I don’t expect I would use it very often since I tend to prefer cleaner renders. Plus, that would be something to create in Photoshop, not within LightWave itself, so I can push it off to another time, if I ever need it.

Here are the some of the lessons I learned while working on this scene:

Continue reading “Cowboy Bebop Warehouse Wrap Up”

I have continued working on my 3D representation of the Cowboy Bebop background.  I created a series of UV maps on the floor, walls, and some of the boxes.  I then created individual bump, diffuse, and color maps to mimic some of the features in the original scene.  I also tweaked the geometry since my last post, to fix some of the relative proportions of the different objects.

Continue reading “Cowboy Bebop Background”

Now that I finished recreating the FLCL background using LightWave 3D, I have started working on a second background. This time, I’m using a shot from Cowboy Bebop, my favorite anime. If you haven’t seen the show, get yourself a copy (or wait until it starts airing on Adult Swim again — they have been showing Cowboy Bebop since Adult Swim first started in 2001, because the series is that good).

Continue reading “Another 3D Anime Background”

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that I am working on creating anime-style backgrounds within LightWave. I was a little delayed on this side project by a small cold but I finally finished a draft of my first basic scene, which is the main character’s room from FLCL. You can view the reference image either in my original post or directly here.

This draft is as much as I plan on doing for this particular side project. My goal was to create techniques that will aid me in creating better backgrounds for traditional-looking animations, and I accomplished that goal.

Continue reading “3D Anime Background – FLCL”

PiVisuals asked if I could post the details of my lighting setups from my Outdoor Lighting Tests, so I quickly compiled a quick table of the important settings for each scene.

All scenes have these common settings:

• “Final Gather” radiosity set with 2 indirect bounces.
• One main distant light for the sun (or moon).

Continue reading “Lighting Tests Addendum”

Last week I created a basic outdoor scene and created multiple lighting setups for different times of the day (and night).  You can see a simple clay render of the scene in my “LightWave 3D Clay Render Tutorial”.  Below is a simple radiosity render after I textured the objects.

Using this exact scene, I used different lighting setups to give the feeling of morning, noon, sunset, and night. All scenes use the same textures/surfaces.

Continue reading “LightWave 3D Outdoor Lighting Tests”