Terrence Walker Lightwave 2019 musings

[TheLexx]

The independent Anime artist and film-maker Terrence Walker is an interesting person, and his latest video has a little musing on LW2019.

To reflect overall on any notion of LW's "dated" workflow, here is a very recent Blender crowd creation tutorial which seems to be completely wowing their community, yet is remarkably similar to a technique in LW described years ago by WV. The KISS principle I guess.

[kyuzo]

That crowd tutorial by WV is great.
I never would have thought of that method, but the moment he zoomed in close to see the 'frankenstein shuffle', I knew they were animated with morphs. Genius.

I recall that LW was used to animate and render crowd scenes in the closing episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer... I'm wondering if this is the technique used..?

[prometheus]

That crowd tutorial by WV is great.
I never would have thought of that method, but the moment he zoomed in close to see the 'frankenstein shuffle', I knew they were animated with morphs. Genius.

I recall that LW was used to animate and render crowd scenes in the closing episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer... I'm wondering if this is the technique used..?

Lightwave Crowded army fight in "The Last Samurai" too.
Though I do not know of any "people" crowd animation made with the help of flocking that finally ended up in some movie somewhere?
There are probably more advanced recognized tools for the Major studios today such as Massive and Golem, depends what you need though and sometimes a shot may only require distance perspective cams and not any particular AI movement..but only movement that can be done with some manual tweaks and cloning...such as William V´s morphs and duplicating, and the similar approach in blender.

[kyuzo]

I've also heard that the crowds in Last Samurai were done in Max, using character studio. Havent really dug very deep, but I did know that a lot of FX in the movie was LW.

It did occur to me that mixing William's technique with flocking would be worth trying, though i hardly do any animation, and have never needed to try the flocking tools... I'll pencil it in for some experimentation on a quiet day.

[hrgiger]

If only there weren't 300 other examples of things you can do in Blender(or other apps) that show LW's dated workflows...

By the way, that guys blender vids aren't wowing them because of some sophisticated technique, in fact he calls them tutorials for the lazy... but its more about how he can obviously take a very simple technique and take it to a very polished looking final result. And be completely silly in his videos for the entertainment value.

[TheLexx]

If only there weren't 300 other examples of things you can do in Blender(or other apps) that show LW's dated workflows...

If only...hrgiger...if only. I'm not sure if that is a criticism of me, or LW , or WV (or maybe all three ? ). I had the word dated in inverted commas, in that it is not particularly dated. Did you have any opinion on the T. Walker video ?

[hrgiger]

Well I would agree that ZB and Marvelous are indispensable, especially for the type of things Terrance does. I can't speak to his decision to utilize the latest LW or metamorphic. My continuing opinion has been that things that seem revolutionary to LW in general is because its lacking a lot of things that other people enjoy or even take for granted in other applications. I mean if you look at the great things Oliver did with his OD toolset. The reason he has over 500 scripts/tools in his toolkit is because LW was lacking those 500 things. Now his focus is on Houdini, he might eventually get to that number in Houdini, but they're simply going to be workflow enhancements or automations, not patching holes in the general features of the program. And even in LW with his toolset as great as it is(really good actually), you simply can't script your way out of LW's legacy problems which only NT can address.

And no of course I wasn't criticizing you or WV. William Vaughan has done more for LW (and now MODO) more than any one person ever has. I guess that only leaves one And its not even LW, I always liked LW, still would love to see it be relevant again, my criticism was and continues to be NT for lettting LW flounder.

[prometheus]

I've also heard that the crowds in Last Samurai were done in Max, using character studio. Havent really dug very deep, but I did know that a lot of FX in the movie was LW.

It did occur to me that mixing William's technique with flocking would be worth trying, though i hardly do any animation, and have never needed to try the flocking tools... I'll pencil it in for some experimentation on a quiet day.

Then it must be both Lightwave and Max, and one need to verify which scenes is using what, I thought the final battle scene when they go man to man (not horses)..it would have been done with Lightwave, thought I saw a video clip of that also, but now I can´t find it..so maybe that was max.

Dave Jerrard and Jen Hachigian seem to have been involved in some crowd creation in there, perhaps just army instancing then with particles and mdd´s,
found this which deals a bit with randomizing mdd actions with scripts...

http://www.celshader.com/perl/

And then you have this which just shows that Lightwave was used for the creation of the boat and arrows with lw particles, which seem to have been working well in the movie 300 as well.

http://www.flashfilmworks.com/d-samurai.htm

[prometheus]

some old links regarding crowd info..
https://forums.newtek.com/showthread...Scan-in-action

But I would really like to see some AI implementation in to flocking or a completely new crowd system.

[gar26lw]

Well I would agree that ZB and Marvelous are indispensable, especially for the type of things Terrance does. I can't speak to his decision to utilize the latest LW or metamorphic. My continuing opinion has been that things that seem revolutionary to LW in general is because its lacking a lot of things that other people enjoy or even take for granted in other applications. I mean if you look at the great things Oliver did with his OD toolset. The reason he has over 500 scripts/tools in his toolkit is because LW was lacking those 500 things. Now his focus is on Houdini, he might eventually get to that number in Houdini, but they're simply going to be workflow enhancements or automations, not patching holes in the general features of the program. And even in LW with his toolset as great as it is(really good actually), you simply can't script your way out of LW's legacy problems which only NT can address.

And no of course I wasn't criticizing you or WV. William Vaughan has done more for LW (and now MODO) more than any one person ever has. I guess that only leaves one And its not even LW, I always liked LW, still would love to see it be relevant again, my criticism was and continues to be NT for lettting LW flounder.

yep.

[Chris S. (Fez)]

NT is still funding a team of talented, dedicated full-time developers.

Yep. Mistakes were made. Take a look at the Core specs, at what they wanted Lightwave to be. History. Modifier stack. They knew and they know now what Lightwave is missing.

Why is almost any positive post in this forum answered with Blender ads or weirdly eager negativity?

Last week I posted how pleased I am with LW 2019 VPR with Exrtrader and ODtools for hires print renders.

The response, from a longtime lightwaver... basically "cool story bro but Blender can beat that...you should donate". In a LW forum.

Why the incessant tactlessness and negativity? What exactly is the goal?

Like it or not there are still quite a few active productive Lightwavers. Are you trying to drive their business elsewhere? LW requires sales to sustain development. The insinuation that active Lightwavers must be blissfully ignorant is bogus.

Some of you are clearly more than willing to hurt a small company in the pursuit of telling hard truths but that excuse is increasingly facile. So, again, what is the goal?

[Marander]

...My continuing opinion has been that things that seem revolutionary to LW in general is because its lacking a lot of things that other people enjoy or even take for granted in other applications. I mean if you look at the great things Oliver did with his OD toolset. The reason he has over 500 scripts/tools in his toolkit is because LW was lacking those 500 things. ...

Fully agree. And it's not just OD Tools, also OD Workspaces, OD Substance Reader, OD Uberpass, then all the 3rd Power Tools etc. All things that are part of other software's base functionality - and due to that much better integrated.

[Shabazzy]

NT is still funding a team of talented, dedicated full-time developers.

Yep. Mistakes were made. Take a look at the Core specs, at what they wanted Lightwave to be. History. Modifier stack. They knew and they know now what Lightwave is missing.

Why is almost any positive post in this forum answered with Blender ads or weirdly eager negativity?

Last week I posted how pleased I am with LW 2019 VPR with Exrtrader and ODtools for hires print renders.

The response, from a longtime lightwaver... basically "cool story bro but Blender can beat that...you should donate". In a LW forum.

Why the incessant tactlessness and negativity? What exactly is the goal?

Like it or not there are still quite a few active productive Lightwavers. Are you trying to drive their business elsewhere? LW requires sales to sustain development. The insinuation that active Lightwavers must be blissfully ignorant is bogus.

Some of you are clearly more than willing to hurt a small company in the pursuit of telling hard truths but that excuse is increasingly facile. So, again, what is the goal?

And then they wonder why the NT don't follow what's going on the forums.

I think they all ready know.

[TheLexx]

Gentleman, I respect your views but hadn't intended another software death-match. I think there is a tyranny-of-choice observation to be made. Maybe I should have just left it at the original Terrence video, where as a user of both ZBrush and Metamorphic, he amiably makes a comparison for his real world scenario, where more advanced software was actually diminshing returns over a certain quality threshhold - where I personally felt that quality was very good anyway. Had the artistic choice been made not to go for the cel shading approach, but a more realistic aesthetic, I thought his animation would still cut it. It was really nice to see LW2019 in action in this way. Didn't mean to fire any arrows or anything.

[prometheus]

NT i
Why is almost any positive post in this forum answered with Blender ads or weirdly eager negativity?

Why the incessant tactlessness and negativity? What exactly is the goal?

Some of you are clearly more than willing to hurt a small company in the pursuit of telling hard truths but that excuse is increasingly facile. So, again, what is the goal?

First...I agree to some extent that the thread started to go of a bit in terms of comparing values betwee software in General, but...


Minor toolset difference references is a must, if you do not care about that..we will have a software that would be endlessly behind every other 3d software out there.

For instance, I am often in need of rounding flat corners, it is impossible in Lightwave native, unless chamfering multiple times, rounder doesn´t work on flat polypoints, you compare to a tool in the free blender which can bevel flat points with defined segments, this is in my opinion some basic modeling toolset that should be there from start..they could develop their new tools lik "chamfer" to simply have an option to make rounded segments, or improve rounder or bevel to work on points like that.
Workarounds is to invest in a much expensive LW cad, or get the free Unigon plugin..for a task that should be native really.

There it is..the blueprint on how to make modeler better, it is in no way ment to hurt the company Newtek..or to be seen as negativism.

The Goal?
Obviously to have Lightwave become better and catching up in many areas, or should we assume the Goal is to hurt newtek..just because old users think it´s fun, or that they are working for other companies trying to kill of Lightwave? In my ears that doesn´t sound realistic.

OWNER OF THE LATEST LW RELEASE.