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GLOSSARY CONTINUED

WARNING!!! This section tends to have poor quality info! The Glossary Section has been divided into three sections. If you use your "Back" button for the following pages, one hopes you have no problems navigating between these sections: 1 - F , G - O and P - Z .

P

Paint box

Painting objects

Particles

Patches

Perspective

Photogrammetry

Photoshop

Plug-ins

Point objects

PointsClonePLus

Point walking

Polygon reduction

Positive/negative transparency maps

Pricing

Procedural textures

Proxies

Questions

Quicktime

Radiosity

Rain

Reading tracks

Rebuild

Recording

Recording sound

Reference art

Reflection maps

Refresh times

Rendering times

Rhythm

Rotoscope

Ruler

Sample objects

Save Transformed

Screen capture

Self-talk

Shaders

Shift

Silhouette

Skateboards

Skelegons

Smoke and Steam

Smooth

Smooth-shift

Snow

Sound

Special effects

Spherize

Spinning light

Spline settings

Story

Storyboarding

Streaming

Style sheet

Subdivision surfaces

Surfaces

S-VCD

Targetting the camera

Text editing

Texture mapping

TGA

TIF

Tracking

Transparency

Tutorial

Two's

Uncomputer look

Unwrap

Utility scenes

UV

V

VCD

Video cards

Video tape

Volume

Volumetric lighting

Water

Watermarking

Waves

Web interfaces

Website wisdom

Weight-mapping

Weld

Weird buttons

Whiplash

Widescreen

Wind

Window

Wireframe mode

Workarounds

XSI

Z-buffer

(End of Glossary Page 3 of 3)

P

P: the "p" key in layout is one of those little short cuts we all need to have down to second nature.

Paint Box: see "Adobe Plug-in's." A wide range of image adjustment may be achieved using INSPIRE alone. The "brute" way is to use a Scene file. One may use a card in a scene file to do a multitude of minor adjustments. If an image sequence is anamorphosed using a .6666 scale in the y axis and then is "Faux Projected" through an actual light as a "projection image," it may be tinted by coloring the card's surface, since the light is producing the image. The ambient setting of the light can be increased. The card can be made transparent, or an image of the card may be texture mapped on itself, made negative, you get the idea. The "graceful" way is to achieve the majority of these effects using the "Effects"panel pixel and image filter requesters and "Math Filters." "AURA" from www.newtek.com is also supposed to be able to perform many of these filtering operations; it is a compositing program similar to CHALICE, FUSION, etc.

Painting objects: this can be tricky with INSPIRE, compared to LIGHTWAVE 7 with its UV method of flattening an object so that a fairly accurate texture map may be prepared and painted on it, or its painting tools. see Unwrap If you discover that you have to add one little element to a dozen objects, consider using an object and doing a "S Drill" in the Multiply Panel if polygons count is not crucial. See "Surface." See UV Mapping. "Interactive placement" is what LIGHTWAVE users do to get the most out of a texture, whether it is planar, spherical or cubic mapped. You assign a texture a "Add Reference Object" which may be a Null, but may also be an actual object that you later save to create keyframing targets using "Save Transformed." Usually a Null is enough. You have Open GL turned on, and you activate the "Texture Reference Object" requester, putting in the name of the Null, which you will probably rename in the Objects Panel (just press "p" twice). Anyway, as you look at the Scene, moving the Null moves the texture, once you apply one. If you change the size of the Null, the texture shrinks or enlarges -- it's a KICK! VERY cool. I think you're supposed to either "Save All Objects" to make the settings stick, or copy the settings from the numeric indicator in Layout. I have also learned from experience that if one has two objects loaded in Layout, one can get some pretty accurate interactive "Save Transformed" results by comparing between them. Having Layout open in two places -- one exclusively for textures -- also pays off. Consider: one may texture map a texture to a heavily subdivided card (1,000 plus polygons), and use Bones to move the texture around, emulating "vertex mapping." Then one can re-photograph the texture card for a new "tga" texture -- not "interactive," but not too shabby either. Reference objects may also be used to control animated textures like steam rising or multiple overlapping fire textures or waterfall image sequence files, etc. The "workaround" of handling morphing objects by emulating the morphing with a single-textured object with multiple bones is actually pretty common. Actual hair objects are sometimes "proxied" with rope-like hair for bones animation; the rope is later replaced with hundreds of strands, as in "Shrek." see UV Mapping

Particles: Two words: "inventory scenes." (I like to call them utility scenes: optical effects like irises, an area lightbox, a linear light, ...) Make them, borrow them or buy them. Particles and Dynamics are sometimes confused because particle systems often include gravity or wind deforming systems, and particles are just objects that are animated as a crowd. Some kinds of particle animation can be emulated using INSPIRE. The fastest technique is probably going to be "Load from Scene" an animation of a flame (a fire-textured ball that emerges from a point, rises, shrinks and then returns to the origin, and repeats), parent the animated object to a Null, and "Load from Scene" again, for as many Nulls as one feels like positioning. I have had trouble animating multiple smoke objects, because of overlapping seams; I am told that a majority of smoke cycles are moving animated cards. Programs like MAYA seem to use balls, so perhaps these have same-size effectors preventing collisions? To streamline the process further, one should have a dozen different animated balls with their cycle start points shifted. INSPIRE has a snoke example, but it is not really "industry standard," though the animated sparks may be useful. Go to the INSPIRE disk to obtain smoke plumes from the "Launch" scene and fire particles from the "Cave fire" scene. A good ashy-smoke plume effect can be achieved with multiple overlapping blobs each with a smoke (FRACTAL REFLECTION) pattern at a 100% transparency setting, and either edge falloff added in a paint program like "Adobe Photo Deluxe" or set in the transparency texture panel (though they can be squarish). (One can also create "tiling" textures that spherically map without seams using "Photo Deluxe" or another paint program.) The particle systems of LIGHTWAVE 5.6 appear to be largely through plug-in's like "Particle Storm,"so to achieve these effects, one needs to "brute" what these plug-in's do, or get those suckers to load into INSPIRE. Also, a favorite motion plug-in to use is "Lazy points" for swarm-like motions. According to Jon Carroll, there are a number of particle "tricks" that may be used for INSPIRE. draven@infi.net The PointsClonePlus plug-in in INSPIRE does not work (see PointsClonePlus), so one may have to make many spheres in order to create better smoke, but the "Array" command works wonders for this kind of object cloning. Moreover, one can make two sets of cloud point particles, one more concentrated than another, perhaps rotated and vortexed, and metamorphose between them. Something similar is used with the snow scene sample in INSPIRE. When combined with displacement mapping, and arrays of motion Effector-Nulls (Effectors in INSPIRE are always spherical and are combined to form complex shapes) and moving Null parenting (for gravity or wind), these objects can reproduce some repeatable naturalistic effects, one hopes. See Dynamics. See Smoke. "Polygon size" is an oft-overlooked requester than can produce some large-sized points for point particle techniques. Point particles are sometimes used with procedural 3D textures that lend them the illusion of structure. In general, however, the majority of particle systems I have encountered seemed to use balls ranging from golf to basketball-sized. A procedural texture of bubbles, panned vertically, could lend the appearance of boiling water; but since I haven't observed this effect in person, it may not be quite as straightforward as that. It bears repeating that there are many programs better suited to particle animations, which frequently use some form of Dynamics simulations, than INSPIRE. It would be a lot faster to contact some LIGHTWAVE owners on a message board about adding water to your fountain scene, than it would be to emulate this kind of effect from scratch, which no employer is going to need as a job skill. It is also a standard practice to omit particles effects elements from a Scene, see Compositing. It is easier to adjust these elements in an editing package like CHALICE or AURA when they are on a separate image sequence. Lastly, MGM and other studios used to rent water trucks regularly to water down locations to ELIMINATE the dust and debris that some artists find so enthralling. Debri, for them, was properly used for more dimensional special effects action sequences, where the size and speed differences lent a stronger depth impression. In practice, these sequences walk a fine line between joyful exhilaration and fear; fear suppressing the depth experience, so writing and staging are as important as particle animating.

Patches: this is referred to here on Gallery Page 10 in some detail. The art of creating a card or more likely a ball that is half-invisible, and applying a texture matching the texture beneath it, just where a seam is. Seams are created as a default by the computer wherever an edge exists not bounded by points, and smoothing exacerbates the effect, so the Stahlberg patch approach should be highly efficient. In practice, it takes setting up the patch object in its own Layout scene with the "patchee" and then renaming and saving the objects and surfaces or using the "Save Transformed" button once the textures are correctly sized, assembled and saved. "Falloff" can be assigned from the center of a surface outward in the texture panel as well. Another way to create a patch quickly is coincidentally the better solution for ram modelling -- add some point welds instead of Booleaning. Point welding a leg to a hip with smoothing (surface and also the tool) is very effective. If one wants to, one can do a Boolean "intersection" with the prior object, in order to "derive" a patch for balljoint animation, but the patch willnot animate much. "Sub-division" and "Spline" patches are other unrelated critters that are part of the current generation of high-end modelling. To some degree, "MetaNurbing" is similar to "Sub-d" methods, because one can have a model in two forms: <tab> MetaNurb-subdivided, and <tab toggled> crude polygonal. I do not know much about Spline patches either, except that the curve utility of INSPIRE (which uses freeze) may be used for modelling. See the 1078 page Manual for LIGHTWAVE 7 on the free CD to find out more about patches.

Perspective View: see Window.

Photogrammetry: did I mention that INSPIRE is a pretty good 3D graphics solution? There are better 3-D object scanners and photogrammetric programs. But INSPIRE can probably be used to approximate a photogrammetric scanner. My uses for photogrammetry are limited, so these are suppositions more than proven methods. Let's say you put a plastic fork on a scanner, and then made that image into a displacement map. If you applied this map to a dense high-polygon-count plane, you might get a nice template for a 3D fork. This could be Boolean-edited or otherwise made useable. Scanners are almost perfect for photogrammetry, because they use a broad light source, and have very high intensity falloff, so that a few inches from the image plane is pure black. This kind of photogrammetry requires the surface to be painted gray or white, and to have a dull finish. It can also be emulated using a camera, but this requires some care to get an "area light" effect, either by shooting through a large white card or with a diffused flash. The sharp falloff of a scanner may be tough to get. Rotate the object and repeat -- I see this system being useful for making very high polygon count object strips, which are then Boolean combined. Hopefully, they can then be "optimized." See optimization.

PhotoShop: see Adobe PhotoShop.

Plug-in's: Thou shalt not covet! How I get a minute of animation done in a day is by being terribly terribly grateful for the tools I have, like INSPIRE, and making the most of them. Yes, LIGHTWAVE has a plug-in for just about any job you can name: boolean-carved tire tracks in moon dust, beams for laser weapons, you name it... I have "installed" LIGHTWAVE plug-in's into INSPIRE with negligible success, but maybe you will have more luck. Apparently some LWers are having a lot of success doing this.

Point objects: these little doo-dad's are worth touching-on, since they can come in handy. One makes a point object by making a box in only one window, creating a square, and then removing three of the four points. Voila! (Or hits the Tools plug-in "Points to Poly" button to make a whole bunch.) But this point is going to show up as "default" gray wherever it is used. Ouch! So, assign it a color and make sure it becomes transparent when loaded in Layout, if it is used as an alternative Null, to replace another object, etc. Very handy for rain, snow, star fields, dust storms. Used with the "Path Clone" tool in the Multiply panel, one can keyframe a Null to reproduce all of the points of an object for vertex-mapping, or to create a reference art silhouette polygon, or a rough garden path for a character whose every footstep seems to be perfectly positioned. Converting some of the points of an objects to a separate file, without polygons, makes it possible to "Particle Blur" them in the "Camera" panel. Great for comet tail effects.

PointsClonePlus: this particle/fur/etc emulator crashes the system. To create a field of wheat or forest or head of hair, other methods will need to be tried, like using "Array" with could have much the same effect as "PointsClone+,"or using Path Clone with a motion path using a Null in Layout, saving it as a motion file using the Graph Editor "Save Motion" button.

Point Walking: this is where one can "walk" from one point to another using arrow buttons. It is not an INSPIRE/LIGHTWAVE fuinction, but something similar may be achieved by selecting a group of points and going to "Display" and clicking on "Info." Use the "Next" button. This method is redundant with other methods, like selecting most of an object and "Hide Selected" it, in order to select points more easily.

Polygon reduction. An option to consider among the Tools plug-in's in Modeller. If you're doing a great deal of subdividing, either consider using a Boolean "knife" instead (see knife) or polygon reduction. Also very handy for creating dummies/proxies to reduce "refresh" times when scenes get polygon-heavy. An errant polygon may get omitted in the process, so keep an eye out for this.

Positive/Negative transparency maps. This is where one has a black-and-white texture map loaded into both the surface and the transparency with one negative of the other, and any additional texture "added" in. Described in the Gallery on Page 10. It sounds very similar to "Clip maps." And it can be used for everything from peacock plumage to hair to fences to foliage.

Pricing: it is recommended that you price yourself according to the business you generate for an advertizer, and not what other animation studio's may charge. It is recommended that you price your feature according to the number of viewers who may take an interest in it and not what other studio's charge. The "rate card" for late night TV tells us that a TV station should be making over $1,000 per hour per market, before overhead, and that the rental of a movie is part of that overhead. Commercial time starts around $50 per 15 seconds late night on cable; better deals are often available. But one should not be pricing oneself according to the cost of the time, but rather, the amount of increase in sales for the advertized product. It is recommended that you price your special visual effects according to the time it keeps you away from features and commercials which pay better.

Procedural texture: a checkerboard in 3D is achieved by using equations instead of actual maps. A swiss cheese procedural texture, if semi-transparent, would resemble a group of bubbles. True 3D textures currently only seem to exist as equations, just as 3D computer graphics does not actually animate balls or cubes, it animates balloons and boxes. A true "3D map" in 640 x 480 x 640 resolution would be roughly 500 Megs. The "texture department" would have someone at the cheese slicer all day long. Instead, equations are used to create different 3D solids. "Procedurals" are used instead of animated image sequences for generating displacement mapped waves, bump and specularity maps.

Proxies: the major studios animate with low polygon count "dummies." The can be made by using "Reduce Poly" in the Tools Panel. Work with proxies as close to the color, texture and shape of the actual object as possible.

Q

Questions: what is the audience saying to the screen? Whether "Jerk," or "Watch out!" what we say to the screen, we may be saying to ourselves. Keep them saying "Hey, that's cool, you aren't mortal really, and you have proof all around you. But how will you remember that?" Or "How have you experimented with conscience? Do you have powers that you're not exposing?" Or, "How do you handle this amazing gift?" And then you completely mess with the audience by publishing the questions in the end credits. You've been completely honest, you've expanded the art form.

Quicktime: INSPIRE's Quicktime format is broken, but a patch is apparently available free from http://sunflower.singnet.com.sg/~teddytan/index.htm and other places like customer service for Newtek. Quicktime is apparently easy to add sound to, but one should always convert files from image sequences to video in a separate scene file. If you goof and need to extract TGA's from this highly compressed format, consider "Bink" from www.smacker.com , one of the few programs around I know of that does this. see Mov.

R

Radiosity: this is the capacity of objects in a Scene to reflect enough light to illuminate other objects. It is included in LIGHTWAVE, but not INSPIRE, but I have not suffered for lacking it. The "Ambient" button in the Lights panel sets a minimum luminosity level. A "white card"emulation is also described under "area Light." see "Area Light." Since all light is inverse square light automatically, daylight "radiosity" occurs when sunlight meets a light surface that scatters some of the light, because the scattering follows inverse square diminution. (A perfect mirror will preserve the low-fall-off intensity of the sunlight.) So, a radiosityesque rainforest scene would have distant sunlight in patches, plus inverse square light sources (an inventory "load from scene" light) peppered wherever objects are positioned. A low "Diffuse level" for the surfaces in the scene might also boost their perceived contour. Radiosity is great, but it may be like "depth of field" in this respect -- what is gained in softness seems to be paid for with contour and detail. Light reflected from objects other than white reflectors is rarely explored in photography, and goes back to the silent era, when focus was also explored in daring ways. I am beginning to have mixed feelings about photo-real light -- if more contour looks better, so be it.

Rain: there is a scene file in the INSPIRE inventory of a zepellin that includes a rain example. Rain may be emulated with INSPIRE by having the points go through objects while drop splashes animate on the surface. Each group of anemone-shaped splashes can be scaled from 0 to full size in two frames, squash to flat in two frames, size to zero, and then wait for a second or two to Repeat, depending on your persnicketiness.

Reading tracks: see Lip-synch.

Rebuild: this is a MAYA command that re-arranges points so that the NURBs surfaces will flow optimally. The MAYA NURBs tool uses hoops, essentially, and the "Rebuild" function is less a requirement than a blessing. "Smoothing" a model with many "iterations" (repetitions) gives a similar effect, but since the MetaNurb doesn't use circular cross-sections as MAYA does, the smoothing may flatten if one is not careful. Since the goal of "Rebuild" is a more efficient model, be sure to try Tool (Custom) "Reduce Polygons" if the model warrants it. Experienced modellers can get "rebuild-like" effects by using MetaNurbs with "pole2""taper2" and magnetting. To get a better idea of how "magnetting" can add roundness, one should use a heavily subdivided plane or cube with magnet's ball system. Something I am experimenting with is doing a gross ball-shaped mirror-drag on the part of the model I want to smoothly round, and then using this model as a morph target, and using "Save Transformed" to extract an inbetween object that is approximately what I am looking for. Another tool that will emulate the magnet drag is a bone deformer, with "Save transformed." This may then smooth more roundly, goes the theory. Before going this far, one should try rotating the object and carefully stretching the ball magnet and then smoothing or using Dragnet (which I'm still learning). A pretty essential object when doing this will be a cursor loaded at the center cursor for later repositioning using j-snapping (keystroke "j").

Recording. At this time, the web-marketplace appears to be looking for both high-falootin' JAVA 3D and "Flash swf" and MPEG-4 v3 (streaming video) compressed video. Going from 640 x 480 32bit TGA's to MPEG-4 v3 is a compression of something like 500 to one! Newtek has a product for $99 called "Vidget" that is supposed to greatly simplify the process. A free program I have been using is called "Bink" from www.smacker.com. It requires taking steps that can take an hour or more at a time for two minutes, but the results speak for themselves. First, one compresses one's file into a "Bink" format movie, this makes it possible to add audio tracks like the "wav" one used to get lip synch from. The "Bink" plays well on many systems, so that recording "Bink" to VHS is a worthwhile option if your graphics card supports video display (this is typical for video game-oriented systems). If one has software for making VCD's, one may go to that format -- see DVD. Or one can use Bink to convert the file to an "avi" in the MPEG-4 format which plays very smoothly on Windows equipment. (MPEG 4 v3 is new with Windows 2000.) Finally, one changes the name from "cartoon.avi" to "cartoon.mpg" by clicking on the name of the icon. "Vidget" apparently will produce a better image-quality sound-tracked "avi," so it is well worth the money. LIGHTWAVE may be used to convert a 640 x 480 INSPIRE image sequence to a larger format by using "Load Sequence" and making the sequence the background. "Bink" can also convert TGA's or TIFFs into "avi's" but I've had problems viewing them on my system, due to the graphics card being overwhelmed it seems. One is probably served better by recording scene files with objects and textures to a CD-R and bringing this to a LIGHTWAVE user with a $300 graphics card who can record one's images to digital videotape realtime, than to render all the images separately onto CD-R's or as 20 second long full resolution "avi's" on CD-R and assemble these at a service bureau. A compromise to consider is saving one's ten CD-R's of rendered "avi's" until one buys a graphics card, and then renting a Canon GL or other digital camcorder. see video cards.

Recording Sound. I was blown away when I heard the soundtrack I recorded on a friends stereo hi-fi video set-up. One great thing about "wav" files is that they can be speeded up in one program, reverb'd in another program and edited in a third, and then multi-tracked! The rule of thumb with sound is to get the best cleanest quality possible and filter later. Try different microphones to see what works best. I was stunned to learn a headset microphone included with voice recognition software was the best of a handful. Animation traditionally uses a finished soundtrack based on a storyreel or board, the track has animation added to it once it has been "read." If you're going to break up an animation for transfer to digital using CD-Rs, you may want to break up the soundtrack early into twenty second chunks since TGA files will be approximately one meg each.. Aesthetically, although I took two classes on sound recording and re-recording at UCLA, I wouldn't know where to begin. There are a dozen little lessons that are learned as one goes along: how adding music to a slow sequence suddenly picks it up, for instance. How a sound effect like lightning will lead into a musical number. How "ambience" changes from shot to shot -- does it cut, does it cross-fade from the prior shot? Professor Ed Brokaw liked how Walt Disney nature films, would use a full orchestra to support a blow-up of 8mm home movie film. And you sense that this is only scratching the surface. Animation soundtracks tend to be very well thought-out and thicker than live action soundtracks.

Reference art: I have not yet had success converting from jpegs or other art to "AI" using "Adobe Photo Deluxe." The AI button in Modeller allows importing a drawing, which allows not only extruding letterheads into logo's, it allows placing a polygon of a rhino or dolphin into modeller, so that one can point-drag a ball or box to match it. I have seen some amazing animals created using this approach. The closest "workaround" for applying this approach to INSPIRE: first, enter Layout, and texture map your drawing of a rhino or whatever to a card (add a reference object and use interactive placement to get this done in a hurry), now add a Null object and position it on the profile of your object, with auto key "on" in the Options panel, and advance to the next frame or go a few frames, and reposition the Null object. Keep animating the Null as it moves around the profile of the reference art. The result will be a splined keyframe motion file in the shape of the object. Go the the Graph Editor and SAVE the motion file to a name. Lastly, create a single point object with Pen, point, or by making a card and deleting all but one point, and go to the Multiple panel and click on "Path Clone." It will request a file; give it the motion file you just made with the animated profile Null. (You may need to hit "a" (auto-fit) or "." or "," a few times to see the final result.) If you want a polygon from the points, select them all in clockwise order, and then press "p" or Make Pol in Tools. This profile template can either be used directly to create an object using cross-sectional modelling or smooth-shifting, OR it can now become the "ai" reference art for modelling a "primitive" with the profile in the background.

Reflection Maps: "Ray-tracing Plus Backdrop" is the preferred setting in the Surfaces panel "Reflection Options," because if one uses a background sphere, the only reflected image will be the nearby objects. Also, a trick sometimes employed to give more "tooth" to a reflective surface is to apply a slight bump map to it. Another solution may be to have a slightly blurred reversed camera image loaded to the backdrop in the Effects panel, since it will provide a frontward reflection when using a background object in the scene. See Surfaces.

Refresh times: although I have heard that upgrading video cards can affect screen refresh times, I have not witnessed this. To speed up refresh times in the Modeller, use "Hide Selected" as often as possible. Hide selected also speeds modeling complex shapes; it's good to get into the habit of using. For Layout, I have noticed that using the "Scene Editor" and toggling the icons alongside the objects so that most objects are partial wireframes and the main objects are fully or partially textured, results in manageable refresh times in many situations. Take one scene and chop it up by removing elements like backgrounds and objects and extraneous props or characters, then go further. Instead of having metamorphng heads during body poses, use a master head that has been "optimized" using the "Reduce Polygons" plug-in in the Tools Panel Custom menu. Create "optimized" versions of as many props as you need to get the "refresh" and render times better. They will have the same surfaces, better than "dummies," and useful for all of the necessary posing. "Load from Scene" in the Objects panel is later used to re-insert the body animation scenes, arm scenes and head scenes to the background scene. see Rendering below.

Rendering time: front projection and compositing, breaking scenes up into manageable chunks. If you want to drop your rendering time by as much as half, watch how the scene is rendered. Is the computer hanging-up on elements that are out of frame? Is it worth dropping the render time by 70% or more to make a foreground "Alpha Scene" without background objects, and a background plate without the foreground actors (or a front-projected slab)? Before you change your sluggish 500 MHz PIII chip for a different motherboard, you might want to do what everyone else does to drop rendering time dramatically. Composite. To speed rendering short tests, switch "distant" lighting to a wide (170) spotlight and "Shadow Map" instead of ray tracing and see how times plummet. As far as going straight to "avi," the cost-benefits don't seem to be there. Rendering to a sequence of images like TGAs, TIFs or Cineon's allows for crashes while multitasking, other interruptions, airbrushed fixes, "editing," and adds mere minutes when converting the TIFs to an "avi" in another scene file. Since there currently isn't a built-in converter from "avi" to TIF (though "Vidget" is affordable at $99 from newtek), though one can use "Bink" from www.smacker.com , it would appear the best way to go. Computational extravagance! If the purpose of rendering is to submit a "rough cut," one may use the "Render Frame Step" command to create a version "on two's," and compile this into an "avi" using a separate INSPIRE3D Scene and/or resort to "Quickrender" mode. The Image Sequence will be loaded, but will only advance to the next frame when it is reached, so that frame #1 will be shown for 1 and 2, and then frame #3 will be shown for 3 and 4, and so on,... The way the Image Sequence loader works can also be especially useful where one begins with full animation, goes to "ten's" for unfinished sections, then back to "one's" for an action sequence or special effect. One can have a single image for a static shot, and use a Scene file that allows panning composited images, introducing slight differential pan in the background card. 320x240 is adequate for VHS, see VCD 160 x 120 is the best way to make lighting adjustments.

Rescue: some writing books mention this, some don't. The good story is about a rescue, in which the audience is rescued as well. The storyteller as social scientist suggests coping methods, and designs characters who dislike some of them and could not imagine doing them. "Anything but that." And easier for a novel than for action-oriented movies, so movies have gotten into the habit of chase scenes, slapstick and a host of rescue complications.

Rhythm: yes, one tries to match one's animation to the notes of a musical track. This, too, may be part of the "Technicolor" look, that is really the coordination of visuals with sound. It's been done as long as there have been movies -- there were musicians playing on the sets of the silent movies. When one object intersects the profile plane of another, when an object enters frame, the rotation of a wheel or propeller -- and why not? In my experience, a film shot "on three's" seemed less jerky when the soundtrack had a similar rhythm. There is also a contrary practice, where music will be very active and dynamic in order to make a shot of a man hoeing seem to carry more mental implication.

Rotoscope: see Motion Capture.

Ruler: when I was really bored one day, I made a photo-real ruler. I haven't regretted it. The cursor will work great, too, because there are so many functions where your model is better off being to scale.

S

Sample Objects: there are SO many ways to make the most of this inventory, especially if one is going to promote oneself as an animator. In the animation studio system, although modelling and animation are funnest when they have an immense overlap, a reliance on Bones deforming for animation has lead to some specialization. If animation is your bag, animate with whatever you like, just be clear in your "demo reel" labelling when using inventory objects. Inventory objects are also great as starting points for further modelling. Using a Boolean "knife" tool with a NURBs object puts extra points where they can do more good for defining shape. Efficient NURBs models need these extra points to be added and edited judiciously to make the most of their inherent smoothing.

"Save Transformed" is a command that allows one to do a metamorphic transformation or positioning, and then grab all of the in-between poses/objects and play with them. Very powerul for a handful of reasons (see "smoke" below). It allows one to model with an in-between pose, for instance, if the head halfway between one tweak and another looks better. It also allows one to grab all of the poses from a metamorphosis and tweak them individually and add objects and texture details, and drop metamorphosis in favor of "Object Listing" if it looks better. One can use a "World Coordinate""displacement map" on an object like hair or fabric or ANYTHING, moving the object across the deforming displacement map, and then "save transformed" the improved geometry.

"Screen capture:" also known as "screen grabs." Although Windows 98 supports limited screen capturing, the full screen images so useful for modelling and Layout tutorials will need a software like some of the freeware to be found at http://tucows.oanet.com/scapt95.html . The freeware"Bulent's Screen Recorder" was located through an excellent "expert" site, www.askme.com but using a search engine with "Freeware Screen capture" or "Bulent's" should help.

"Self-talk:" what we suspect the audience is saying to the screen is called "self-talk" because they're also saying it TO THEMSELVES" It's a device for filtering bad scripts from positive ones, and it's distantly related to the Golden Rule. Carried to extremes, it's "The Glass Menagrie" or "Good Will Hunting" or science fiction films. Getting the audience to say to a character -- "that is just the beginning of your immense potential," and really believe it, is a giggle. "Star Wars." Where self-talk fails is when nothing substantial is being communicated, just ego-blather.

Shaders: see Surfacing, See texture mapping. Although the INSPIRE surface menu is limited to three texture maps per component -- luminosity, specular highlight, color, bump map, relfectivity and transparent "holes"(with alpha-ing) -- I like to remember two things: first, most theatrical make-up of the past 100 years has aimed to reduce or remove blemishes, scars, etc. And second: there is no end to the fine-tuning possible (in life). Third party "shaders" are still available for INSPIRE/LIGHTWAVE 5.6 users, for special effects like flames and "procedural" smoke, etc. See procedural textures. In CG parlance, a "shader" is usually more similar to an "srf" file, and might include other parameters like translucency. Having only heard descriptions of www.pixar.com Renderman's shader programming, I gather that one can have multiple levels of transparency to different depths, for each surface. Browsing the one freeware rendering toolkit compatible with Pixr's Renderman, "BMRT" from www.exluna.org , I am reminded that ultimately an object is just a block of numbers, and that if one wants to designate the inside of a balloon to be solid red, one may. One word of warning about these "high-end shaders," they seem to be entered using keystrokes and scripts. Incidentally, the LIGHTWAVE 7 Demo seems to allow one to save surfaces thugh not objects in the Layout module. In INSPIRE I have tried some experiments with both composited double-exposure, and with slightly oversized model copies providing extra texture to the originals underneath. Bushes, chain, diaphonous clothing, "cheated" hair -- and also with geometry. There seems to be a movement to use geometry wherever possible. It should probably also be mentioned that to "brute" some effects like "radiosity" one will need to place more lights, especially colored lights, to match ambient reflections and make for meatier bump mapping. And lastly, (See Style sheet) the "technicolor look" was not a product of special dyes. The original Technicolor dyes were too bright and were considerably muddied deliberately.

"Shift": in Modeller, not only responsible for having open more than one "layer" at once (and "saving" them as one object), but the only way to select polygons casually, rather than with devil-may-care lassooing, hiding, and an all-around higher level of stress. Hold shift down, and pick polygons until you've picked them all.

Silhouette: see negatives.

Skateboards: just a reminder. Have fun. That is, a skateboard is REALLY easy to animate, isn't it? But it looks cool. You might want to make a list of these.

"Skelegons": this nifty tool is in the main interface of LIGHTWAVE 7 Demo. It adds a bones to every pair of vertices, giving every edge a bone. Hundreds of bones at the push of a button. Why this is nice is that the main complaint with bones deformation is that "pinching" and unnatural "twisting" occur. And one solution is to add lots of bones to the areas where one doesn't want any pinching. This technique apparently preceed "weight mapping" using displacement maps to control the strength of bones deformers, which is a common practice currently. Adding a dozen bones is not too difficult, but adding hundreds of bones will take up a couple of days. (By the way, there apparently is a 350 bone limit for single objects, requiring different approaches for INSPIRE, or moving up.) Enter the "Make Skelegon" button, which lines up the bones along the surface, which is where one wants to control deformation. Since this is not an option, focus on developing the technique of making a few good skeletons with hundreds of bones, and transplanting them from model to model by adjusting key bones positions. One shuld have a central series of bones, with a second series parented to the first and parallel to it, but a different color. Then lay down surface child bones, and parent these to the second set of bones. I make the master bones orange, the parallel child set green, and the surface bones blue. I have a donut shaped ring of blue bones parented to every green bone that merits the control. If the orange bone twists, but I only want slight twist at the blue surface level, like for a wrist rotation, I adjust the green bone after keying the orange. If the elbow needs a slight adjustment at the surface, I key one or two of the blue bones and don't bother with the green. This kind of sophistication is probably expected by employers -- along with a knowledge of weight maps -- but truth be known, this method is pretty archaic. LIGHTWAVE "Expressions" and MAYA "Set driven keys" are supposed to program two keyframes for several bones as one slider/button/control. Cool, huh? I am just starting on the learning curve to this stuff.

Smoke and Steam: see "Particles." I have seen some beautiful smoke effects done by INSPIRE3D users, even though we brute-force effects that are streamlined by LW plug-in's. I'm no expert on this one -- seek out tutorials. I suppose that one jet example I saw was from the launching spacecraft scene file included in INSPIRE's inventory Scenes. Dan Ablan's INSIDE LIGHTWAVE book studies some of the Plug-in's in some depth, and his more recent books delve into effects at length. www.danablan.com If you look at smoke, you notice it convects a bit, the early cooling part slows down and the following warm part pushes it out of the way with a curl shape that pivots as it rises. I suppose one can metamorphose animate it. Since crowded objects which intersect create edge seams, I suppose one will need to do at least some of the smoke in its own compositing scene file when bruting with INSPIRE. see Compositing. Animation using metamorphosis of a 50% or so transparent smoothed object, with the Surfaces Advanced Options Panel set to Transparent edges will give a very nice effect, but the terminator/edge may be harder than you prefer, requiring either a texture panel "falloff" setting or paint-program texture vignetting or compositing with a higher anti-alias setting. See Depth of Field. Another common trick is to have the object "target" the camera, but this isn't really an INSPIRE feature; emulate it by using interactive texture placement. see Texture Mapping. To make the morph smoke object dissipate as it metamorphoses larger, one can resort to the Objects panel's "Object Dissolve" feature, or "Morph Surfaces." "Object Dissolve" may also be used with multiple layers of smoke balls overlapping one another. Typically, rather than a few large balls, dozens of smaller balls will be used, making smoke animation the acme of tedium. Effective smoke will be "Loaded from Scene" and recycled often. Combining an animation of a smoke puff with a few hinged bones can make a sinewy plume. "Morph Surfaces" will work with an image sequence as easily as with a static texture, so one should consider paint-boxing some sort of image sequence for the best effect. It is also common to use and "Added Reference Object" Null to alter the texture, rotating and/or raising it as the smoke balls rise. The programs with strong particles plug-ins seem to use MANY spheres of a variety of sizes that change in size as they move and that pile up to get the texture effect of smoke or whatever. See Texure Mapping. On the plus side, even if the smoke is black, it should be able to be "composited" using the "Load Sequence" button in the Images Panel, and can become transparent masked or "negatived" white or made blurry by increasing anti-aliasing. Metamorphic smog that is going to get fairly large should have enough polygons so that the end result isn't angular -- subdivide just in case. I have not seen many boxy clouds. Smoke is generally supposed to stay still relative to a moving vehicle, possibly rising slightly as it dissipates, so keyframing isn't the hardest thing to do if one lays a string of puffs behind a truck. I've transparent texture mapped (Fractal map will work) a sphere, surface-morphing to a larger version with 100% transparency and no map, with fair results. When I had two overlapped texture maps, one with clear voids for a dirty look, the other a smooth gray at a different texture sizing, the effect was most realistic. The "Surf Blur" plug-in is a laugh that blurs the background behind the smoke, and would be most effective for jet exhaust, BBQ's and lava. A little known color theory tip: differences between warm colors (like edge artifacts) are easier to pick-out than between cool colors. All of the above ignores the existence of 3D "procedural" solid textures, based on short equations, similar to a checkerboard in 3D. 3D procedural textures are available from 3rd party developers like www.shaders.org , but they need to texture SOMETHING from what I've read. If anyone has seen an animation of a slice of swiss cheese or colored wax drippings, that is the effect of a plane going through a procedural texture. One would need a great many particles moving through a "World Coordinate" procedural texture to get a sense that it was there volumetrically. Fortunately, a cone moving through a world coordinate texture with slight velocity looks pretty convincing. Generally, the plug-in's that exist now for smoke were developed using LIGHTWAVE 5.6, which is INSPIRE, so yes, these effects can be brute-forced and some plug-in's are still available for purchase online, but the much faster solution is to go to LIGHTWAVE 6.5 or a LIGHTWAVE user.

Smooth: the smoothing function can be very useful when cleaning up small groups of polygons at creases, etc., such as faces, by selecting only those polygons and doing repeated smooths. Using high iteration numbers can give some very useful results. For rounder results, use the magnet tool first to get some shape, THEN smooth. The function is roughly averaging the numbers of the point coordinates. To get better magnetting, distort the magnet ball and shift/rotate the object after you add some cursor objects to regain your start position.

Smooth-shift: why do some modellers use this button almost exclusively? Start with a box, select only one polygon; now "smooth shift" it using "0" as the "offset" entry; go to the "modify" panel and move this polygon so that the box is now twice as wide; go to "smooth shift" again, and then "move" again, so that the box is three times as wide. Do it one more time. Now select one of the "top" polygons, and smooth shift it, and then move it up, and then size it slightly smaller. This is one finger. Make three more. Select two other polygons at once, smooth shift and move them to become the "wrist" of the hand. Unselect selected polygons by pressing "|" or "Invert" or reselecting selected polygons, and now press the "Tab" key and see what the "MetaNurb" version looks like. "Smooth-shifted" models coincidentally make better "MetaNurb" models.

Snow: impossible for live action crews, delightful for animation crews. The brute approach: Have a single snowflake float down, hit the ground, softly land, sink, and then move it around back to its original position, and clone it like mad! Use the "Graph Editor:" shift a few frames, lift some snow and scale it in the y-movement to match, live like a king! You may also want to experiment with motion "effectors" laid out along the ground, and using parented Nulls that provide gravity for the snow. The "Snow" scene file included with INSPIRE is a delightful version of snow, using two fileds of points (which COULD be snowflakes), displacement mapped using rippling, similar to the flag-waving demo, each at a different velocity. The result is delightful, since it implies different sizes and weights of snow.

SOFTIMAGE See XSI.

Sound: see "Recording Sound."

Special Effects: LIGHTWAVE has a pretty good reputation for special visual effects, also called VFX. Digital format video capture is becoming the norm, with these files being translated to TIFs, if I understand correctly, for compositing (using the "Load Sequence" button in the Images Panel. Music video's are a good place to start a reel, whether an anti-gravity device or a field of sunflowers, but there is a great deal to know. For instance, your client may insist you move up to LIGHTWAVE's latest version, and may also expect you to render separate image layers for later editing in a video compositing system like Aura, Video Toaster or Chalice. A few books about LIGHTWAVE and CGI, in general, delve into pricing issues. Music video work is advertizing, and animated music video's have historically stood a better chance of getting airplay, I think. Visual Effects work, though lucrative, is considered scraping the bottom of the barrel. Spiritually, I do not want to perpetuate this image of "Hellywood," and sites like www.vfxpro.com

"Spherize": like me, you may not have noticed that "BGConform" in the Tools Plug-in list will create a true morph between ANY two objects, not just a sphere and cube. "BG Conform" can also used for "group-welding."

Spinning Light: some use this trick, so it's mentioned. In order to get a fuzzier shadow with Ray-tracing, some animators parent a light to a null and displace it from the Null and have the Null rotate while the light is targetted at another Null or object. The rate of spin is high, about 720 degrees PER FRAME (with "repeat" engaged in Motion Graph), and for this effect to work the render will need anti-aliasing and motion blur both engaged, and it has limitations. A lot of bother for fuzzy shadows, but now you know. Other ways of getting fuzzy shadows: shadow-mapping, and shadow "cards" parented to their objects -- tip shared by Richard Morton Richard@iqdigital.com . This technique may also be used with numerous point lights to get an "area light" effect similar to the diffused cards used sometimes by photographers for a more "ambient setting" effect. If you intend to use an area effect often, you may want to assemble a group of ten point sources in a Scene file, and then import them into whatever animated scene you want them for. You may also want to have different Area Light Scenes, with different falloff settings, for instance.

Spline settings: robo-whiplash has a certain look that has few applications since it is so distinctive, but it can be added to a flailing sword, for instance. A continuity setting of +1 with a Bias of +1 will most likely be all over the place.

Story: The more convinced you are that you are improving others' lives with your work, the better. The greater the greatness of others you see, the better. The details will follow. Credit that storyline to Jesus.

Storyboarding: see Composition, Animatics. The "Animatic" is a video animation that assembles a group of drawings and presents them as an animation with some camera and cut-out animation. It can be emulated in INSPIRE using a scanner to input the drawings and then creating a Scene file with cards at low resolution. Animatics sometimes use sound as well, which can be added using "Bink" from www.smacker.com . Animatics as I have seen them are usually very crude color renderings, pencil sketches, or black/white roughs.

Streaming: one outgrowth of the higher speed of modem lines, and the quality of "compression" currently available, is that clients may ask your for a "streaming" video version of your animation. (My understanding of "streaming" is that it implies a kind of file that can begin to be viewed while it is downloading, and which is compressed high enough to run in the range of 56K.) Not to worry. The MPEG-4 compression standard included with INSPIRE3D may be e-mailed to clients in whole or broken into e-mailable chunks. If you have "Windows 2000," you may even send an ".asf" conversion from your "avi," or post the "asf" streaming file on a web site. ASF is derived from the latest version of MPEG-4 -- MPEG-4v.3. see Recording video.

"Style sheet:" I first heard this term at a LIGHTWAVE USERS GROUP. It refers to the texture map images, effects, lighting and camera settings of a project or show. See "Lighting." Where did the "Simpsons" get their look? A colorist. An artist with a "color wheel" who picked a handful of key hues and harmonized from there. The harmonics of colors are typically mathematical harmonics of wavelength. Nifty, huh? Cartoon animation gets rid of things like lighting, costumers, camera people and set people and puts everything in terms of paint. It is as deliberate as it is arbitrary that "Seventh Heaven" often has violet accents in each shot, or that any other show looks identifiable. In my personal experience, getting a shot right will take about twenty times longer without a colorist/color wheel than with one, so it's worth considering. Theoretically, it may cause a "vibration" due to the mathematical relationships of the colors, and that will set it apart. Another similar vibration applies to careful contour lighting that juxtaposes highlights and shadows to simulate stereoscopic parallax, due to little-known phenomena like the way our eyes adjust independently to image elements. A bright cloud on the left side of the face, with the left side in shadow, makes the shadow look larger to the left eye. For good reason, these variables are not often discussed, since they are laboriously applied to cookbooks and calendars by retouching artists, where each picture on a page will receive hours of attention, not seconds. I am experimenting with putting the extra time into playing with colors in "Photo Deluxe" using stills. Technicolor shot many tests of costumes and make-up before photography. See Composition.

Subdivision Surfaces: when used with LIGHTWAVE 7, this refers to being able to "toggle" varying degrees of MetaNurb-like subdivision. Straight polygons for the whole body, polygons having one subdivision operation (tab) for above the waist, two subdivisions for above the neck. The subdivision tool and approach really do not come into play with INSPIRE, though it is handy to remember to "Reduce Polygons" objects that are only going to be seen from a distance. I cannot say I understand much about Sub-D surfaces, but in LIGHTWAVE 6 and above, MetaNurb and Sub-D are used synonymously.

Surfacing: "Save All Objects" in the objects panel will save all objects with their new textures, but since objects can have useful inventory identities, I heartily recommend renaming them first, and possibly creating new surface names for them. That's the housekeeping part. The fun part: to get, say, white stripes on a red surface color by adding a black/white stripe texture to a red surface , one will need to load the stripes into the "Alpha" channel requester as well as the texture requester, which will make a subtraction mask where the underlying surface color will not have the texture applied. To get a pink stripe on red, enter a 50% value for Opacity in the Texture requester. To have even MORE fun with the placement, try "Add Reference Object" which shifts sizing and moving the texture to a Null object, for real-time interactive texture placement and subtle effects. This is described in "Texture mapping" and also in the book. It is also a good way to animate a texture's placement without having to resort to an "image sequence," for things like barber poles, chin hairs, etc., though the trend seems to be to either ignore these elements or resort to "geometry" to replace them. On specularity: cars and jet fighters are 100% specular, think of it as "dull finish lacquer thickness" or "wax" without image reflections, it is suppressed by "glossiness," which should be set low. Specularity in nature is most visible using polaroid sunglasses or camera filters, one should probably shoot textures through polaroid to remove specularity, since specularity is highly dependent on geometry. If one spins the polaroid 90 degrees, the effect doubles the strength of the specularity, creating a kind of specularity map for the lighting present. If a texture lacks geometry, a specularity map could lend some depth, and possibly be used as a bump map. A better bump map would be probably come from a flash mounted on the camera though. It probably pays to take a few shots through a polarizing filter like sunglasses when shooting texture images. see Fresnel Some artists prefer to "paint box" little details like highlights and bump maps themselves, and this also allows subliminal repetitions of key object (leitmotif) shapes, which is pretty common in scenic design. Color highlights distinguish one kind of metal from another and are fairly uncommon; luminosity is the same as ambient setting in the lights panel, the "additive" button is for transparent objects like jet exhaust; "Diffuse Level" is based on the phenomena of a scuffed surface having somewhat higher brightness, white paint is highly diffuse, but this requester is often used with a texture map like a fractal to give a more photorealistic effect; "Diffuse level" may also come in handy when doing double-pass compositing in order to achieve certain surface effects like a blue specular sheen on a green leafy surface, where the blue pass would have a 200% specular value, "Color highlights" checked and a blue surface color, but 0 - 50% diffuse setting; "Reflectivity" is great for transforming a zepellin into a sausage-shaped mirror ball, and another way to think of it is as "high gloss lacquer." Reflectivity has many options, but these are distinct from a texture map OF reflectance, which will just cause some areas to be reflective and others dull. The application for this would be rusted metal or a post-it note on a refrigerator. see Reflection Maps. It is similar to specular level texture maps, except the specular surface only reflects the light source and not image elements like reflectivity (low glossiness being the least focussed reflection of the light source and the broadest). Loading a "bump map" as a reflectivity map as well can give some interesting effects. Since the bump map uses white and black to create relief, a negative of the map might give an effect like moisture on the ground. Finally, transparency also has a mapping function. A cute trick is to make a black and white mask, and load a negative version in the transparency requester, and a positive version in the surface requester, along with another texture which will poke through. A thought balloon with words inside, for instance. Finally finally, bump-mapping ideally is applied to textures specifically designed to match, like the mortar of a brick wall. A little time with "Photo Deluxe" can pay big dividends with bump maps, since "bas relief" can instantly create a crack bump map, or "layering" can be used to trace grain and pit structures within structures. The layer can then be saved separately. In a pinch, one can load two or three textures -- like adding "sand" to "ripples" -- one on another for a bump map to get a similar effect though contrast may need to be compendsated for by increasing texture "amplitude." Getting texture to stay in place, realtive to their vertices, is another LIGHTWAVE function. To have some fun with it; get the LIGHTWAVE 7 Demo CD with its 1078 Manual on the CD. INSPIRE vertex emulation is probably going to be easier by applying key features using "stencil" or surfacing wrinkles and beauty marks on a polygon-by-polygon basis OR relying on bones to deforme the object surface and texture image together. see Unwrap see UV Mapping for an emulation/workaround/brute see "Groups" for the Junk Poly surfacing trick. see Texture Map.

S-VCD: see DVD. S-VCD is MPEG-2.

T

Targetting the camera: simple trick, have a moving Null that the camera is targetted to. This can be parented to other objects or a Null the camera is parented to, shortening the work involved. It can seem creepy operating the camera through a Null, but it opens up quite a few possibilities, like anaglyph 3D renders, better metal surfacing, switching camera and light positions, etc. Plus, if it doesn't work out the first few tries, one can always move the camera without it. Generally, the camera should be in the same position as one of your characters, or shooting over their shoulder. This is providing a "point of view" literally. It's even sometimes called the "Point of view rule." Truffaut, Hitchcock, a lot of directors use it.

Text-editing: renaming your ".lws" Scene file as a ".txt" document (by clicking on the icon once to highlight it, and then again on the word to edit it, in Windows) will make it possible to read the various codes built-into it, and even edit a handful. Simnply click on the new file, and Windows will open it in MS Notepad or a similar text editor. When you're done fiddling with it, change it back to an ".lws."The one mentioned on other websites is "field rendering," which is supported by INSPIRE, but is not an option unless one uses the text editor to change the field rendering line's value from 0 to 1. Field rendering is used for NTSC "interlace" display.

Texture mapping. This old term applies to the images used to surface models. The book goes into some detail on how a "Reference Object" (Null) may be used for "interactive" real-time placement of a surface image on your model, so I recommend reviewing those pages. (Another powerful function is the ability to click on a test-sphere in the preview utility and have its settings loaded to the current texture.) The "add reference object" button switches the object's surface to a Null which can be moved around, distorted and keyframed. When one takes the time to do it right, it may be worthwhile to add "Displacement" mapping and "Bump" mapping, since these can add subtle finishes to a critter's skin. "Bump" mapping especially can almost make up for a low polygon count. Texture map is used as a verb sometimes, such as "to map a rippling object with a mirror surface and shoot into it, to distort a scene." Texture maps can be static images or image sequences, like leaves rustling or glimmering water or TV set images or live action elements. Very complicated textures may incorporate numerous transparent and masking layers, and even compositing. One does NOT texture map things like rippled velvet, generally, which is a product of a specular setting of 200% with "Color highlights,"a 60% or lower diffused setting and a high saturation color setting. The ripples should look better modelled, though a texture map can add a fine cloth texture. (I often use sand for soft structures.) The experts take their own photos of interesting bricks, shingles, marble, leaves, and then preview the repeated effect by multi-tasking "Photo Deluxe" or "PhotoShop" with "INSPIRE." According to Richard Morton, the "clone" tool is invaluable for eliminating seams or voids from mosaic'd images. One can use a web browser like Front Page Express to preview the "tiling" effect using it as a page background -- or a texture mapped card using INSPIRE. INSPIRE is a very good program for "tiling" a texture and saving the multiple image pattern that you might want to "spherical map" tiled, which is not an option with INSPIRE. Using a paint program like "Photo Deluxe" with a second copy of the image below and offset can simplify the process of making corrections. The "Projection Image" option for Spotlight in the Lights panel is a fun tool that can deliberately distort a texture on-the-fly and move it around, and probably has a lot of other applications. see UV mapping see Surfacing LIGHTWAVE 7 Demo includes some pretty powerful tools.

TGA: See converting IMAGES to AVIs.

TIF: See Converting IMAGES to AVIs.

Tracking: I associate tracking live action shots with LIGHTWAVE and other complete "solutions," rather than a student software package, but this feature may be bruted. Near and far, high and low image sequence object positions are chosen to create a "junk poly" with vertices at each object for front projecting the scene. A triangle will work (though I haven't gotten around to trying this). Vertex one would be a distant houselamp, and vertex two would be a mail box nail, and vertex three another mailbox nail. This triangle sits as a wireframe on top of the front projected or composited live action footage. When these vertices lose their objects to camera motion, the camera is brute-positioned to return each corner to its respective object -- since moving the camera changes the apparent shape of the triangle -- frame-by-frame. Lest I sound too confidentl; no, I haven't actually tried this yet. see Compositing In programs like "After Effects" "Chalice" "Aura," etc., camera motion files are automatically generated after as few as a couple of pixels are selected on an object. These "mot" files may then be used with a static image element like a race-car, etc.

Transparency: one of the most powerful features is transparency. If the interior of the mouth doesn't look right, instead of removing it, give it a different surface name and make it transparent, and set the "edges" to become transparent. Leave yourself the option of fixing it up later. A good tutorial on "Transparency"'s many uses is here on Gallery Page 10 .

Truth: if you seek truth, truth will find you. That is much less likely in a non-metaphysical universe. Many things are much less likely in a non-meta-physical universe, and one can prove to oneself that time does not go only in one direction, that thought can affect people/plants/events, that expecting certain patterns may reveal them, that good is less debatable when human potential is unlimited. Truth has to be mentioned because all that narratives have to offer is truth, the audience isn't given a tool or flour or gasoline. If they or you are not ready to experiment with your lives, what else can one do? It's out there. Who has what and why, all the statistics, if that's your reality. In your reality, is shelter free? Is food a right or a privilege? If you are not making someone else wealthy, perhaps they will let you leave?

Tutorial: the tutorial disk included with INSPIRE is a real treasure, and includes "all.pdi" file to study at one's leisure. Writing tutorials can open up a teaching career, a book deal, a free t-shirt from www.newtek.com , and if you believe wat comes around goes around, lots of other good stuff. See "Screen grab."

"Two's": one can render "on two's" in INSPIRE by setting the "Render Frame Step" to two and saving Images instead of an ".avi." When the images are re-shot using INSPIRE to composite them as an "avi," INSPIRE will automatically repeat the frames missing.

U

The un-computer look: tactile aesthetics, temperature, wind, moisture, fabrics, follow-through, whiplash... Flying flies, hula hoops, waving flags, birds, leaves, blanket wrinkles,... If you need to have some flying debris in order to show wind, then model some debris. Debri and bubbles seem to sell underwater scenes.Un computer-looking animation could mean having deliberately jerky keyframes, like when two objects collide, or having objects moving when at rest, or adding serpentine motions in all axes to motion paths. The uncomputer look can also apply to more cinematic lighting, and using "Spotlight" "Projection Images" like mottled patterns/Gobos or disco ball lighting. Luminosity texture maps with velocity or animation used for flame effects. It can mean "motion blur" or adding deliberate camera flare or jerkiness, or adding distracting items to the corners of a shot, because those items are more common in actualities. In fairness, what appears to be "random" is often an artistic decision. For instance, a jerky camera motion that strays from the target or anticipates it feels more natural to watch.

UV: see "Unwrap" below. UV mapping is a geographic/astronomical method of laying down texture information. To learn about UVmapping: get the LIGHTWAVE DEMO from www.newtek.com or one of its local resellers; it icludes UV mapping and a page Manual. The angular latitude is the "U" direction, the longitude is the "V" direction. Believe it or not, "u, v, w" comes before "x, y, z" is why those letters were chosen. I am a little fuzzy on the details of UV mapping, except that the principle seems to be to unwrap a shape with some effort, then texture vertices, which should be very neat for metamorphoses like lip-synch. The great thing about UV Mapping, is that once it is done for one object, it is not required again for morph targets of that object. Emulating UV mapping? This is a lot of bruting to keep face-shape morph animation fully-textured using INSPIRE. THAT IS WHY NOBODY IS DOING IT; INSPIRE ANIMATION IS BONES ANIMATION WHEN TEXTURED. AND it might also be worth mentioning that the past 100 years of cinema make-up have been based on reducing the appearance of blemishes and pores. Rigging a face for bones is not that hard. If this can be achieved, then why not learn how to be a better facial rigger and animator and skip "face-shape keys" entirely, if the geometry allows it? Alternatively, one can also Boolean "stencil" things like moles and other facial features that move a lot, and trust that a specular map of pores is not going to reveal itself on one's DVD animation. Polygonal tools like "Vortex" seem to make this unthinkable approach worthwhile. In such a case, one might go so far as to "Boolean" pores. It is only mentioned because this has been a trend with hair geometry. "Booleaning" can be a boolean addition to a single polygon, or adding a single polygon of a mole, for instance, and drawing/"p"ing tripled-connections, then deleting the original, and seeing whether this affects MetaNurbing. One should do this before making morph-targets, as with UV mapping, or one can start with a "frozen" object for morphing, though this is harder. "Shrek" apparently used facial bones extensively, and would have been able to get by with conventional texture mapping if the producers wanted. For those pursuing a "photo-real" effect, there is always working with latex casts or cubic-mapped rotoscoped image sequences. Did I mention moving up to LIGHTWAVE? LIGHTWAVE 7 has several kinds of vertex mapping, including distorting the image to fit the mapped object, and conventional UV patch methods. INSPIRE's one texture morph ceiling for MTSE might be a real logjam for this technique anyway. But first, see Workaround. Aristomenis has written an article in www.newtekpro.com about the art of creating a morph target that is flat in order to exactingly texture it (for LIGHTWAVE 7, not 5.6), and this approach can be emulated using bones, by copying/deleting/pasting/makepolying a sphere in modeller, then adding an "inventory" bones scene for unwrapping spheres and flattening them. (Once you make it.) THEN one would need to animate additional/child bones, to drag the different facial feature vertices/points to match the texture map being used. Actually, something similar to such a brute workaround exists, and has been sold for years as "Unwrap." See below.

Unwrap: this tool was later dropped from Lightwave and is not included in INSPIRE, but the Plug-in may be found at www.flay.com at this writing. Before UV mapping, one created spherical maps using the "Unwrap" button to create a wireframe texture map image matching the wire mesh of the object, and copied/pasted/cloned from one morph map to the next to match moving features like lips and chins IF one preferred the look of morph faceshapes to a single well-textured head animated with Bones. "Unwrap" can also be used with a head that has polygons placed where key texture elements are desired like moles or hairs, but the polygons are not part of the model or are given a transparent edge-less surface, they are solely used for planning and plotting spherical maps. Since wireframe maps are produced using "Unwrap," and these are used for creating/cloning/animating spherical texture maps for various morph poses, the extra polygons are lines that may be useful for following how texture moles/pores/etc shift. I have not yet used it. It looks like one can emulate this plug-in "from scratch" by creating a subdivided card and rotating and scaling its points to overlap a ball with the same number of polygons ((this actually goes pretty fast)) then subdivide both further; to morph smoothly, intermediate tube-shaped objects will be needed, and one should probably avoid merging the last edges of the card-ball. The real "unwrap" produces a wireframe image to base "spherical maps" on in a paint box. This method seems to require coloring some polygons first, then using Tools BGConform with the different morph targets, resulting in a 4:3 colored spherical starter map to apply to the object once it has had its polygons re-assigned a single color.

Utility scenes: that is what I call the Scene files that can add some really fun polish, which to some degree have been replaced by "plug-in's" if you do not want to make them from scratch. A light box Scene of 100 point lights, or a single "spinning light" going 720 degrees per frame. How about a utility scene for creating a negative of an image sequence? I recently used one of those when making an animated iris-in effect, another utility scene. A color correction utility Scene using an image sequence of a spectrum. A sinusoidal animating bones chain for animating one octopus arm, that can be loaded to all eight. How about a "master skeleton" Scene that includes dozens of rotational gestures for cutting and pasting? The gallery of poses actually comes before or after the Scene frames that will be rendered. A single card positioned to emulate a backdrop, but capable of being anti-alias blurred and color filtered or dimmed. A good ocean animation, see waves. A good cycle of smoke rising. Large numbers of effectors simulating a roof, etc. Gravity emulation scenes. Another utility scene that can be useful adds a "copyright" to every image sequence while letterboxing it, or "blows up" a low resolution image sequence, possibly with soft filtering or other anti-aliasing/filtering. A "sky dome" is an easy thing to make, once a good sky image can be found or paint-boxed; the texture is usually a 100% luminous surface, but how about one with a transparency map for an adjustable horizon falloff effect, or a second or third dome with distant clouds or multiple invisible lights, or a texture-morphing pair of domes? A "depth of field" Null camera scene is a good idea, with counter-rotating Nulls. A "Save Transformed" modelling Scene will have bones where they would likely be used for adjusting the proportions of a head/torso/etc. Many textures are much better if they include actual objects: ivy, bricks, etc. Other good utility scenes are the ones included with INSPIRE: texture "samplers," snow, outer space stars, and lightning. Some textures are better tested with multiple lights, like metals. The INSPIRE scenes are also useful for learning what one cannot Load-from-Scene; for instance, parenting a 0% intensity light to the face of a character in order to use "Light View" to pose the best eye/facial animation while also animating the character's gross motions. Another related but different idea: have a web page showing all of your models with their correct names, as surfaced, using "data overlay."

V

V: see UV.

VCD: see DVD. VCD is the precursor of S-VCD, which is MPEG-2 at 640x480 essentially. When one reads that VCD at a resolution of approximately 320x240 is "practically" VHS, visions of squinting at MPEG-4 in low resolutions may leap to mind. On the computer, it isn't much, but when you go to VHS, it really is something to behold.

Video Cards: if one despairs of making friends (NETWORK NETWORK NETWORK!), there are some nice "video cards" that allow for outputting video out the back of one's computer. These were developed for game-players who like the 30 inch gaming experience. (Be sure to unplug the machine before doing any hardware experimenting.) The procedure is fairly simple and straightforward in Windows 98. Since rendering times are CPU driven, the video card will only affect some preview and real-time refresh functions. Refresh can also be speeded-up by switching to 16 bit display and learning to toggle the Scene Editor object rendering defaults to partial polygons, or to remove characters to their own Scene files or trade them with "dummies" as soon as possible. See "Optimizing objects." To my knowledge (a VCR repair course), NTSC is NTSC whether it comes out of a $100 consumer game card or a "Hollywood," though the signal is slightly more corrupted using some connectors than others. BNCR twist sockets are adapted with a $10 Radio Shack doo-dad to RCA's. Some of the consumer cards will be "jerky" and cannot be used for professional recordings, but they ARE outputting "true" NTSC. If the image is x , then that is the quality of the IMAGE, but the signal is NTSC. Contrary to popular opinion, VHS, S-VHS, 8mm, and Hi-8mm record NTSC but into inferior formats to true NTSC, which is what the TV antenna receives. It's a tribute to NTSC TV that it can play these sloppy waveforms acceptably as Channel 3 or 4. Betacam SP and Digibeta record true NTSC, though one may need to research adapters for converting video card outputs to appropriate connectors. The highly popular "Mini DV" format appears to be slightly better than DVD -- which is 720 x 480 or 640 x 480 -- but not quite as high definition as NTSC. Composite (two TV cable plugs), component (Betacam SP) and "Serial Digital" or SD (DigiBeta) connectors being all available out the back of different Video Cards. Thanks to Jon Carroll for much of this. Since installing a new Nvidia graphics card to my machine, I should add this: LIGHTWAVE has not problem with this card, but INSPIRE does. Fiddling with things like Internet Explorer during rendering has sometimes revived the display-while-rendering capability; but it's not that big a sacrifice. I am living with the shortcoming of not watching frames as they render, because the luxury of being able to publish my own tapes gives me goosebumps. If you need a CDR made into a VHS and are desperate, email me.

Video Tape: everything is digital nowadays, but five years ago, everything was still on Betacam SP 3/4" tape. If one does not have a special video card, very large "avi" files may appear as jerky images, or images in which only a one-fifth vertical slit of the image is shown, repeated five times. The "avi" file itself is perfectly fine and useable, but the computer's display capacity is being exceeded, as far as I can understand. I try to have a "Bink" 256-color "exe" in the same folder as the "avi" when I show work around. It can make a big difference. If one brings the "avi" on a CD to a friend or studio, and they have higher-end computers, they will be able to display the "avi" in all of its glory, uncompressed. But full uncompressed 640 x 480 avi with uncompressed "wav" sound is just about twenty-five seconds of animation on a CD-R. And they will fall in love with your project and help you shoot all seventeen CD-R's, or help you buy a $300 video card and rent a digital video deck or camera. : ) The word from Jon Carroll is that TV buyers are looking for and working with Digibeta and Betacam SP. The DVD and Mini-DV formats are apparently about 720 x 480 ( lower resolution than broadcast NTSC). The HDTV format is 1920 x 1080 at 24fps, but file your renders somewhere or save the scene files for a render farm, because the recording media aren't widely available. As you would expect, the TV station equipment used to display the files closely resemble high-end computers. DVD recorders are available to print one's own DVD's is the good news, and asking around or investing $1,000 should be well-rewarded. HDTV in a consumer format seems to be stuck in the pipeline, though broadcast stations are using HDCAM and DVCPro HD, whatever they are. I am told that as long as we author to 1920 x 1080 (@ 24 fps, we should be okay.

Volume: this Modeller button seems to be primarily for obtaining statistics for just part of a model, using the LMB for blocking or the RMB to lassoo, then Display/Statistics. With the ability to actually select certain kinds of polygons using the Statistics window by pressing "+" or "-" makes it worthwhile for certain operations. The book doesn't have a lot to say about it, does it?

Volumetric lighting: foggy spotlights and such are not INSPIRE functions, but can be somewhat emulated, but some "workarounds" are similar to the "spinning light" trick, and are limited. Volume effects can be "faked" using solid cones and then blurring them -- see Blur -- and using compositing. Alternatively, one can have a a semi-transparent card larger than the frame of the image with an animated image sequence of real smoke wisps, or a "solid" fractal image panning. A similar approach may be to move a few semi-transparent planes through the scene, moving top-to-bottom or side-to-side, or "raining" large particle files through the scene. This technique is used for fog banks. see fog. A tutorial I recently browsed seemed to maximize a card with dithering and a blur setting, and made use of a world-coordinate fractal texture for some serious patchiness. A rapidly rotating spiral might be a very effective volumetric object, and could be made into a Scene file for adding where needed. The light generally needs to be made brighter and the effect may be subtle. see Fog. Creating a cone (or semi-cone) and procedural mapping or projection mapping (image sequence?) a fractal pattern across it may provide much of the effect with a minimum of the rendering time.

W

Water: see waves. www.doschdesigns.com sells a water CD of 250 frame animations that come very highly recommended by Tim Granberg. While one can create a babbling brook with a subdivided card using displacement mapping of 3D fractal textures with velocity in all three axes (x y z), followed by curving the card to match the brook's curvy path using bones, the water will get a lot of "oomph" with animated texture and bump mapping.

Watermark: a watermarked scene cannot be saved, so watermark images or sequences as your last step AFTER making a final save of the Scene file settings. A watermark utility file may be bruted.

Waves: the waves I saw on a PBS special used practically static dunes, moving slowly in one direction, while the texture of seafoam and slight rippling moved in the opposite direction. Pretty compelling. Add a rowboat and you can have some real fun. According to LIGHTWAVE APPLIED, the trick is to start with a very high polygon count (subdivided) plane and then use a "crumple" procedural texture as a displacement map with velocity in all three dimensions at once, set in the velocity requester. To do like the PBS special, have two or three textures moving with slightly different velocities. "Crumple" is not avaliable in INSPIRE, but "fractal" seems to have a useful effect. The foam on the surface can be a surface texture, bump map, or a projected texture from a light. Adjust the various parameters to taste. That is it. Consider "compositing" an animated/cycling sequence on a relatively high polygon object using the "Load Sequence" button in the Images Panel, and using the "Loop" requester. see water

Web Interfaces: ever since I made the "buttons" for this site and THEN found out that html buttons are typically entered as html code and NOT GIF images, I've shyed away from web interface building. The best way to learn what INSPIRE can do to spruce up an interface would be to visit the "webring" at the main index page of this site, and visit some web authoring web sites -- see what's being done and what you might like to add to it. There is also a movement afoot to create VR-like web sites with full 3D "rooms." According to a 03/29/01 L.A. TIMES article, three "players" in this field already are Jester Digital, Worlds.com and Activeworlds.com . SimPark amock. Would you go to Disneyworld/Epcot every day if you could?

Website wisdom: have the address of your website on every page.

Weight mapping: this is a wonderful system of "deforming" an object selectively, similar to dispacement mapping, so that "Bones" do not merely affect areas spherically. see Bones. Weight-mapping has many applications, but it isn't an INSPIRE tool. Get the LIGHTWAVE 7 DEMO from www.newtek.com to get a taste of its features, rather than hear my thirdhand description. Also, it should come up more often, but many models lend themselves to non-bones hinging and ways of reducing unwanted Bones deformation. Is there a better way to compensate for artifacts like "pinching?" SOFTIMAGE parents "effector" Nulls to bones, and LIGHTWAVE 6 uses "Expressions" to move effectors in a similar fashion, from what I read. One may animate "effectors" using wireframe as the display mode (from the Scene Editor) and invisible polygons larger than the object being deformed as indicators. For instance, an arm may have a large arrow point out of it at the elbow bone joint, and this arrow may be used as a guide for brute-animating/moving the effector. Another important thing to remember is that one may parent to a single bone a crowd of bones just along the inside of a surface in order to reduce its likelihood of being pinched. Keep typing "r."

Weld: see Merge. The result is a single welded point. Welding is one of those operations you wish were telepathic, like bevelling a subdivided cube, which has to be done with "smooth shift," not bevel. see Group Weld. It turns out that INSPIRE definitely does "group welding" of nearby points, and I about had a cow when I realized this. When one wants to weld two nearby groups of points, one selects one half, copies them to another layer as a background (like for Booleaning), then selects the other half, presses "BGConform" in the Tools/Plug-in menu (which shifts the points to the exact positions), and then "merges." Voila!

Weird buttons: "twist," taper 1," etc. Try making a bolt without "array," and THEN try converting the bolt you made into a screw without "taper 1," and you will glean the same appreciation for these weird buttons that I now have. A screw or tower would be a real pain without "taper 1." Some of these weird buttons can be emulated or "expanded upon" by using Bones in Layout to deform objects. A mouth can be made smaller by shrinking and shifting a Bone, for instance.

Whiplash: this is where an object mimicks a whip, going past its destination, and back and forth before coming to rest. It's also called "follow-through." It also implies anticipating any effort. Squash and stretch. Lastly, it relates to sinusoidal motions that are automated in programs like MAYA and LIGHTWAVE, using "Expressions." This is theoretically the kind of thing one would achieve in INSPIRE by creating a Scene file with Bones. Then, when found an element like a cat tail or snake that one wanted to have sinusoidal motion, one would load the Scene file, and shift, rotate and scale the main bone into position before typing "r" to activate it in the object file being deformed. How hard to create the file? If one bone is pivoting as a cycle in one dimension, the theory goes that all the others can have the same motion file loaded to them, with their motion shifted using the Scene Graph buttons. Or one could animate them. In any case, the bones can later be moved where needed using "Load from Scene."

Widescreen: the technology of creating a 640 x 360 version of a Scene is not daunting. "Custom Size." Since the audience is different -- folks with DVD players and large TV's -- one may want to cater to their expectations, or mess with them. The early CinemaScope audience was paying extra for a wall-to-wall theatrical image, and they were brought all the spectacle Hollywood could muster. Spectacle: big ideas, scripts written in haiku, color richness and variety, crowds, rhythm and choreography, magical movements and effects, increased 3D cues, echo, very large sets, distinctive costumes, unusual machinery, extraordinary terrain: underwater, highwire, balloon; attention to detail, synchronization, difficult concepts quickly explained, predicaments solved, and longstanding traumas dissolved. Widescreen is a lark. The system information for creating NTSC DVD widescreen is not yet familiar ground to me, but creating a "squeezed" version is as simple as positioning a card in the Layout module and texture mapping an image sequence to it with different X and Y coordinates for the Texture Size button. I have read that NTSC is actually a 480 x 480 image with a 1.5 squeezed pixel; this would seem to translate to a 640 x 427 resolution INSPIRE animation, which could be converted to anamorphic 480 x 480 in an INSPIRE Scene file, if it were necessary. It is also possible to create an anamorphic version of a Scene by creating an anamorphic Scene file and importing it, to maximize resolution, but anamorphic optics may slow raytracing to a crawl and could introduce artifacting wherever non-planar (untripled) polygons occur. It is an option, but see Workarounds. see Aspect ratio

Wind. Go to the head of the class! Wind is seen from the unseen, leaves moving, dirt speck objects, hair and clothes flapping around. A powerful metaphor for the spiritual, and fun to watch.

Window: the Layout "Perspective" as well as Side/Top/Front windows may be adjusted by holding the ALT key down while pressing and dragging the Left or Right Mouse Button. Zooming is not available, but may be keyboard-adjusted in the Options Panel.

Wireframe Mode: has been recommended to me by experts. Faster refresh times, more useful when working with Bones. The "Scene Editor" in Layout or Display panel "Options" in Modeller.

Workarounds: "Get over it!" Animator Tim Granberg has shared with me this perspective on brute animating certain effects and workarounds in general; if your goal is animating for a studio, remember that plug-ins will be bought and programmers paid to simplify "bruted"effects student animators may spend days or weeks on. Fortunately, his observation doesn't extend to garage animators making animated family features using INSPIRE except, oh, yeah, it does. You may make a three minute animated "pitch" for your animated feature, but everyone is going to have to be a visionless slob if you cannot raise the money to complete your vision with LIGHTWAVE 7, at least. There is also this wisdom to be shared from the creator of LIGHTWAVE, Jim Jenison: there are investors aplenty, consumers a plenty and business ideas aplenty. Now, he was making an entirely different point, about being careful to avoid distractions, and I immediately ignored this and said to myself YES, AND THEY'RE ALL WAITING TO GIVE ME MONEY! Is there any hpe for me? Not having LIGHTWAVE in its latest release is almost always an artifact of poverty. A lack of independence. Computer educators are increasingly teaching NETWORKING. That is where you meet somebody at a convention and get their business card and say "I have this idea/script for a feature, and I am going to make a short to pitch it around, but I need some objects; I can't model everything, I prefer to animate. Do you think you or someone you know might have some inventory they could exchange for a piece of the project?" As an INSPIRE user, I am going to stop there to try to maintain some credibility. At this point, (applying myself to the tool for 18 months, joining a User Group, etc.) I also have the e-mail addresses and phone numbers of about a dozen LIGHTWAVE owners, some of whom own special hardware, whether or not they care to help out or let the machine pay for itself by taking some money from me when I offer it.

X

XSI: The other "student" software I would barely hesitate to recommend, without having used it, is "XSI." At this writing, Softimage was reaching out to the novice with an "Essential" version of its $100,000 software for $800, non-educational version for PC. It may not still be available with the softimage rendering engine built-in, visit www.softimage.com . As terrific as LIGHTWAVE's render engine is, the XSI engine is supposed to be comparable or better. It is also supposed to be the industry standard for character rigging and animation! I prefer non-educational versions for the extra time, the chance to sell product, and the right to sell it to someone else or upgrade. Annual maintenance agreements of $1,000ish also apply with programs like MAYA or XSI though, so ask about this.

Y

Z

Z-Buffer: this is a new idea that simplifes paint-box effects like fur, water or focus blur, and may someday be used for things like holography. The relative distance of objects is stored in each image file. I do not know how to emulate it, but one imagines that if matting is not used in the shot, one could use a linear fog to record some form of distance information. After making the render for the film, make a second set of renders with linear black fog for z-info. Though the program comparing the two image results to extract z-info may not yet have been written, it's a good idea for one. ; )

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c. Scott Lee Tygett 2001