LightWave Mailing List Contest

The LightWave Mailing List Contest
Hall of Fame

November 1997 - Steamy Stuff

These images were created with LightWave 5.5's Steamer plugin.

1st Place

Pier.jpg
Created by: Göran Bäckman
E-Mail: goran@mbox305.swipnet.se
Web-Site: http://home4.swipnet.se/~w-47825/

Artist's Comments
"Another day at the pier"

The fog consists actually of three parts; close to the camera is a vertical plane that uses a fractal noise transparancy map with rather big scales, you can merely see the edges. Secondly, there is the standard LW fog feature with a blueish linear2 curve implemented. And finally, and most important, there is two foggy particle steamer clouds that brings a more interesting look to it all.

The water consists of different bump maps. Crumple, fractal noise and a ripple map made in Photoshop makes the water look rather realistic. I used a custom made color map, Photoshop again, on the water as well.

Some say decreasing color saturation is to take away all the nice colors, but here I had two reasons for doing so. I wanted the scene to have a more "bad weather"-ish look, and when all comes around, there isn't many really bright colors in real life, wouldn't you say?

2nd Place

"Concept.jpg"
Created by: Mike Alkan
E-Mail: mikea@mgisoft.com
Web-Site: http://www.tamcotec.com/michael/

Artist's Comments
Back at you, this time its a concept sporty-landrover created entirely within Lightwave. The challenge was to create a model without resorting to any sort of boolean/extrude operation, the entire external-body of the vehicle is 1 metanurb object, for example the mirrors on the body are part of the nurb, not just another piece carefully connected, also lw's traditional tools, such as smoothshift, setvalue and other common tools were used, no external plugin such as macroform was used, although i'm sure it might prove helpful. No bumpmaps were used for the extruding shaped lines on the body. The entire vehicle took 3days to model, and another 3-4days was spent testing and testing.... darn it! i was only using 50% of the duals cpu, since there was absurd amount of bugs, even using Gaffer under multithreading, just kept getting holes, talk about a nasty bug, none the less it was created just for fun, and no serious deadline was going to be screwed up because of this. There is still some bugs in the object, I'm no tech-geek, so i'm sure it would fail an engineers test.

For the final rendering, in layout the patched steamer proved to be worthy of praise, although i'm still not happy with the look of the animation/output, i know with further persistance and testing, LW can do much better. Just to make it clear, incase some people accidently mislead the fog as emitions from the car, its not. The only external plugin that was used for the rendering was Gaffer, which is extremely helpful in giving large set of controls over individual surfaces. Inspiration came mostly from the Isuzu Vehicross, Suzuki models, and i also looked into other various references.

As far as the animation goes, the wheels are IK'ed so the front rotate from left to right headings, and cyclist will be used, although after seeing StarShip Troopers, i'm in the mood for some disgusting bugs... ;)

Merry Xmas...

3rd Place

"Cistern.jpg"
Created by: Ron Dutcher
E-Mail: dutch@macnica.co.jp

Artist's Comments
Malenka walks to this cistern every morning to fetch water for her mother. In her small dessert village, rain falls once or twice a year, so these deep cisterns are necessary to catch and store the runoff rainwater for everyone in the village for the year. Malenka doesn't mind this chore so much since she enjoys the cool air and the STEAMY shadows.

The idea for this scene came by talking with some Archaeologists on the Arch-L mailing list. They were discussing King Solomon's cisterns, I asked a few questions, and before I knew it they were sending me photographs from all angles and detailed blue prints.

The hard part of creating this image was dissolving the Steamer spotlight enough to see the composited background through the arch and still keep the soft volumetric shadows. The Steamer Z-buffer display didn't help much and test renders took a lot of time. With Steamer's samples turned up to 200 and AA on HIGH, along with reflection and refraction, the scene took 51 hours 36 minutes to render.

The water is procedural with a layer of ripple and a much smaller layer of crumple. The water in the research photos was a disgusting muddy brown, so I compromised a little and turned it green for this image. I needed Gaffer to adjust the point light level on the water.

The cistern walls use texture maps I derived from some photos the Archaeologists mailed to me and I tweaked them in Photoshop.

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