LightWave Mailing List Contest

The LightWave Mailing List Contest
Hall of Fame

March 1998 - Nature's Fury

CLICK HERE to view March's voting results

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

1st Place

Entry #13
Filename: LW_Tornado.jpg
Created by: Ron Wolfe
E-Mail: vrkaya@bright.net
Web-Site: ???

Artist's Comments

"Lightwave Storm"

I've always had a fascination with storms, so March's topic was of
real interest.  For the scene, I wanted a strong, radial composition that
would emphasize the power of the tornado's strike.  It's a good thing this
is only a still image, because an animation would reveal the amount of
tilting I did with the buildings to reduce the parallax caused from the wide
camera angle I chose.  This image is 95% sweat using Lightwave 5.5.  The
remaining 5% is about an hours worth of Photoshop work - particularly the
people who are just comped in.  I must especially thank Dan Ablan for that
great book, "Lightwave Power Guide".  His tornado tutorial was
indispensable.  I estimate I used 80% of his methods and about 20% I
finessed on my own.

I purchased a digital camera for this project and it also was
indispensable.  I used it for all the texture maps and for the people (they
were shot in my backyard - my wife and I :)  ).

Well enjoy.  Take a good look around, though.  Did you notice the
beloved treasure that I am carrying with me to the cellar, and check out the
weather vane;  anything familiar?  I had a great time working on this.

2nd Place

Entry #17
Filename: goldengate_final.jpg
Created by: Steve Kruschwitz
E-Mail: stevek@sirius.com
Web-Site: ???

Artist's Comments

"The demise of the three dollar delay"

Spent a week modeling the Golded Gate. I Used the "Engineers Report"
after the bridge was completed as reference. I ended up over modeling
the thing, it is way larger that it needs to be point and polygon wise.
The wave is was done with Steamer for the spray. The whole thing was
done on a 166 with 64mg of ram. Usually I just model and animate odds
and ends, doing something much bigger was a nice change.

Third Place

Entry #7
Filename: soclose.jpg
Created by: Ron Dutcher
E-Mail: dutch@mbs-clinic.com
Web-Site: ???

Artist's Comments

I have seen several beautiful oceans done in Lightwave and 
other 3D packages, but very few rough stormy ocean scenes...
now I know why.

My ocean is a highly subdivided plane with several layers 
of ripple and crumple.  To get the crests, I applied an 
image sequence to a few verticle planes, and did my best 
to composite them into the scene.  The Splashes are one 
point polys.  I found to make good splashs this way, you 
need a few of these objects so you can set the poly and 
line thickness for both small, medium and large.  Otherwise 
the splashes looked too mechanical. 

I didn't have as much time as I wanted for this project 
this month so I resorted to using the Ship and the rowboat 
models found on the LW5.5 CDROM.  The sailor is actually a 
slightly altered comander Norton from my Jan. contest entry, 
"The Button." Apparently, he survived the self destruct 
situation only to find himself lost at sea.