The LightWave Mailing List Contest
Hall of Fame


February 1998 - Olympic Spirit

CLICK HERE to view February's voting results

CLICK HERE to read people's comments about February's entries


1st Place

    Entry #10
    Filename: KEGoalie.jpg
    Created by: Keridan Elliott
    E-Mail: keri@megatoon.ca
    Web-Site: http://www.megatoon.ca/~keri/WiP/WorksInProgress.html

    Artist's Comments
    "The Early Morning Practice"

    This month's contest interested me for many reasons, as Hockey and 3D are two of the three things that I have a passion for. The third subject, we'll leave that for another month's contest idea, as it is quite organic as well.

    I did the modeling in Lightwave 5.0 and 5.5. All of the objects were created with MetaNurbs only. The Mask and the Face were freezed so that I could model the holes and other small details.

    The scene setup was fun, as I was able to add a simple bone structure to the MetaCages for the Metamation, and I parented the Glove, the Blocker and the Head to the Goal-Nulls I used for each arm and the neck. IK and goals were used for the pose, that way, the textures can be created for the unbent model, so that they fit correctly once animated. All the textures were done in PhotoShop.

    It is surprising sometimes how 2D Planar Image map projections can fit on such curved and uneven objects. After some experimentation, I decided to add most of the small 3D details and effects of depth and specularity right into the 2D textures.

    The lighting took some time, and I ended up re-lighting several times. I added some fog to give the image some mood and to help blend in the boards and wash out the nonexistent crowd of Olympic enthusiasts. Doing the still pose was a challenge, now I can't wait to animate him.

    You can find other more detailed images I did while doing test renders, at :

    http://www.megatoon.ca/~keri/WiP/WorksInProgress.html


2nd Place

    Entry #6
    Filename: Hockey.jpg
    Created by: Wilmer Lin
    E-Mail: wilmer@earthlink.net

    Artist's Comments

    Inspired by Mike Alkan's excellent use of MetaNURBS a couple of months ago, I thought I would try to use MetaNURBS finally. The head and helmet took the longest, though they still need a lot of work.

    Had I known the women's team would win the gold, I would have modeled a female character. Oh well.

    This image is also a composite. With all the talk about compositing on the mailing list, I thought I would show one of the best uses of compositing: simulated depth of field. The stairs in the back, the wall (with the logo), the rink, and the player are really separate "layers," each with a varying degree of Gaussian blur applied in Photoshop. I would render the layer farther from camera, blur it, then use the resulting image as the backdrop for the next layer. If this were an animation, of course, it would be better to use After Effects (or something better) for compositing.

    I scrapped my original idea of having other hockey players and audience members after my machine started paging. It's still not finished but deadlines are deadlines...

    This image was created in Lightwave 5.5 on an underpowered Pentium 200MMX, 32 Megs RAM, Permedia2 video. Surfaces were scanned and retouched in Photoshop 4. Total polygon count was kept manageable for RAM restrictions: 60,000 polys.


Third Place

    Entry #5
    Filename: 2ManBob.jpg
    Created by: Ken Van Brocklin
    E-Mail: Ken_VanBrocklin@ATK.COM

    Artist's Comments
    "2 Man Bobsled"

    You have all heard about the Jamaican Bobsled team, but the one team creating a stir at this years Olympics is the LightWave Bobsled team. Piloted by Allen Hastings, with Stuart Ferguson as the brakeman. The bobsled was modeled using spline patching for the rough cage, and MetaFormed for the final shape. The concave track was also modeled and textured in LightWave. Allen and Stuart are primitive human shapes (no disrespect intended) with texture mapping applied. PhotoShop was used for Image map creation. I used my home system, Zeos P133, 80 megs ram, NT 4.0 and LightWave 5.5 in my spare time for all the work. Final render time was about 30 min.




Honorable Mentions
Here are the other images entered into the February 1998 contest:



Entry #1
Filename: Belushi.jpg
Created by: Roger Crouse



Entry #2
Filename: Skier.jpg
Created by: Paul Mikulecky



Entry #3
Filename: Disaster.jpg
Created by: Rodrigo J. S. Oliveira



Entry #4
Filename: Stoppu.jpg
Created by: Adrian Pope



Entry #7
Filename: SnowBoard.jpg
Created by: Kent Sunde



Entry #8
Filename: Snowboarder.jpg
Created by: Kerry L. Tresback



Entry #9
Filename: Glory.jpg
Created by: S. E. O'Brien





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