I got a question about my use of Lightwave with DV.

How goes it and all.

First off let me say, I don't use Truespace or other consumer level 3D animation software...they typically lack a lot fo features and control. I use Lightwave, LW is used regularly by the big studios in Hollywood. Name a movie with stunning special effects and you have seen lightwave in action. This includes Lord of the Rings, Star Wars episode 1&2, Artificial Intelligence and Final Fantasy. If you can't create something in Lightwave, it is pretty much your fault.

To be fair a lot of the animation is done using Maya. They take objects modelled in LW, and then rig them and control the animation in Maya. Rendering is then done either in Lightwave or using Pixar's Renderman.

Also reliability is astounding with these well made programs. I assure you, if you have problems getting it to operate properly it is YOUR system at fault. I would never say this of prgrams like Truespace or Premiere. Even Photoshop is flakey by comparison to LW or Maya.

Let me also say that you get, especially with Lightwave, the ability to pull of some absolutely astounding imagery and incorporate it into your productions. This stuff can absolutely floor your clients and audience.

Well there are some minor problems.

Most serious 3D animation programs are meant to work with Standard video and film formats. As of version 6.5b Lightwave did not support DV, which is slightly different than D1. D1 is 720x486 pixels. So you have to create a custom camera for any DV projects. By now this is SOP for me when creating a Lightwave scene. I believe LW 7 adds DV formats.

*****UPDATE: Someone who actrually OWNS LW 7 checked, they didn't add the DV camera resolutions. It is fairly trivial to fix if a bit annoying...don't let this "complaint deter your from using Lightwave.*****

Second, Lightwave Maya et al are meant to work with UNCOMPRESSED formats. This is a problem when doing non-trivial animation and incorporating it into a DV based Real Time NLE.

The normal way of doing things in 3D animation is to render your scene to still frames. Render times can easily go into WEEKS unless you happen to have a HUGE render farm...so we render to frames. This way if something happens to the machine while it renders, like a power outage, we only lose the frame we are working on. All previous work is already safely stored on disk.

If you try to incorporate these still images on the timeline you will have to render. This is trivial compared to losing a few days of compute time. Of course, you end up with two version of the animation on disk. One stored as 32-bit Targa files and one as DV. Still, with a little forethough you can get around this.

For shorter projects I actually do render directly to my RT DV format. (Matrox AVI DV/DVCAM) If you are running a render time less than a few hours, it is usually reliable enough. Then you can drop it on your timeline and just use the footage like any other DV clip.

Now, the rendered images can have a LOT more exposure latitude than you can manage with ANY DV, DV50 or Digibeta camera. The color depth is really damn good too- 4:4:4 infact, until you encode to DV. The only thing that can really match the quality of your Lightwave or Maya images is well shot film or HDCAM material. (The jury is still out regarding DVCPRO HD cameras...they fall 30% below the bitrate of HDCAM, and it shows...) IOW, the quality of the images can be TOO GOOD. You have to work a little to muck up the images to make it match properly.

All this and you still have all the trraditional animator worries about incorporating CGI that looks "fake" into your production.

Aside from these minor caveats you just use the modelling and animation tools like normal and they work fine. If you have the talent required, you can certainly deliver Hollywood style results with these Hollywood caliber tools.

Steve Jobs the CEO of Apple owns Pixar.......just wanted to throw that in for all the Mac fans out there.

I am amazed that there is a "need" to appease the Mac fans...

Anyway, Jobs owns a portion of Pixar, not the whole thing.

Also, you will note that despite Jobs ownership share that Pixar does not use a significant number of Macintosh computers.

They use Silicon Graphics, Sun and IBM UNIX workstations primarily. There is some use of Windows NT with Lightwave for modelling, they use propietary software for rigging and animation, then render using renderman on SGI and Sun machines.

I expect on the next upgrade round they will move from NT to OS X and Linux on the workstations.

When you're the 10:1 underdog in overal computer user's worldwide but an overall favorite in a niche such as DV editing- we Mac user's tend to "uprise" our positions as computer user's.......

MacAddict Magazine wrote an article mentioning the fact that Steve Jobs bought Pixar outright from George Lucas (If i am recalling correctly) and since it was mentioned here I just thought it would be cool to mention it....

..most Mac owner's know who Steve Job's is- I bet most pc owner's don't know the name of the CEO of their pc's manufacturer.

...just a tidbit of fanfare for us Mac owner's- not a prompt for a fight.
(I don't have Steve Job's $$$- so I don't really care on a personal level)

Have fun-

I happent to know the CEO of the company who built my PC rather well...he is me!

What people know about their PC is who makes their OS...Bill Gates or Linus Torvalds. Whatever...

I personally don't care much about the tools or their makers, though my ire will be raised when whatever I am using doesn't work.

Mac OS X looks good enough to bring me back to Mac, when it gets a little more mature.

Anyway, I think that if more Mac users are frank about real technical and cost advantages of their system they will get more converts...but they need not evangelize. Let Apple advertising do that.

Just as an aside here, we will not engage in any Mac vs. PC or Canon vs. Sony platform wars on these boards... so y'all don't even think about it now.

;-)

I re-installed my LW 7.0b to check the camera settings you
mentioned. Seems like they didn't add DV resolution in NTSC.
The PAL (D1) resolution is good though:

NTSC:
D1 720x486
D2 752x480

PAL:
D1 720x576
D2 752x576

Steve Jobs did buy Pixar from Lucas for 100 million dollars. The render farm is SUN. They use Mac's alot.
I shoot on SONY, animate with Maya (on a dual 1 Ghz P3), edit with FCP3 on Mac (dual 500's and dual 800's) composite with After Effects (Mac) and print back to DVD and DVCAM (and VHS, S-VHS).
I have also shot the GL-1 and XL-1 (and a host of other pro line cameras) and I have used Lightwave, Bryce, Strata, 3D Max, infini-D, Cinema4dXL, and RenderMan. I have edited with Avid, Ulead, Media100, Premier, Cinestream and others on both Mac and PC.
The bottom line is... use what works for you. Of course I have my preferences as does everyone, if I shoot a film and you do the effects and she does the editing and he does the audio and they do the master, in the end, when it all looks really good, nobody will care what platform was used (least of all me) when it comes time to write the check and pay us!
Whatever gets you to do your best work is what you should use.



Especially if it is a MAC! (sorry Chris, just had to do it! LOL!)

Rhett

Is Maya available for OS X yet? I heard that version is supposed to kick much ass, but I haven't heard about it for awhile. Right now I use Ray Dream Studio 5 in OS 9. It's actually pretty amazing what you can get that program to do, though you must add motion blur in post processing since RDS doesn't do that for you (that I know of). I have no trouble animating, my biggest problem is in the actual modeling. Ray Dream Studio doesn't seem to do that very well.

Check Apples OS X page for a list of available applications.

Maya was one of the first native OS X apps, AFAIK.

On the Alias/Wavefront web site is a FREE demo version (called Personal Learning Edition) for both Mac and PC. Yes the Mac version is out but it doesn't have cloth and fur. It is very nice otherwise. Just as a note, you will need a 3 button mouse, Contour Designs makes a very nice one for about $100.00.
In all honesty Maya4 on a Dual Athlon XP machine is the fastest thing money can buy. MUCH faster than even a Dual 2Ghz Xeon Pentium4! The Mac version is better looking though.

Rhett

What is the website URL and why would one need a 3-button mouse? I am assuming the free demo version does not permit you to render and/or save?

Maya runs off a 3 button mouse and the Demo is the same as Maya complete, you can save, you can render, everything. There will be a watermark on everything you do though. It is not for commercial use, they want people to learn it and discover just how powerfull it really is. Let me tell you, it is REALLY, REALLY powerful! It will take a while to learn all of it, heck it will take a while to learn some of it. The book SUCKS, it is the worst thing you could ever spend money on. For $17,500.00 (Maya Unlimited)you would think they could make a decent manual but they can't. What they can do is make the most POWERFUL and flexible 3D modeling and animation program I have ever seen. Heck they even have their own programing/scripting language called "MEL".
Well here is the link, I will warn you it is a 140MB download but you can order a disk for about $5.00 shipping.

http://www.aliaswavefront.com/en/Community/Special/maya_ple/alternate.html

Very best of luck!
Rhett

P.S. I think there are some good books out from PeachPit Press about Maya.
And say hello to Denver for me I moved here from there 2 years ago and miss it.

It downloaded it in about 7 minutes tops. Note to Mac OS 9 users: Netscape 4.7.x downloads files (not web pages) faster than ANY other browser out there. If you are getting 300K per second using Netscape, you will be lucky to get 180K per second using Internet Explorador on the same file from the same server at the exact same time of day.

I installed it and it ran fine. Seems pretty zippy even though I don't have a 3 button mouse (unless you count the scroll wheel) and I only have 256MB of RAM when it requires 512MB. You are right though, it will take a while to learn this program.

I stood outside and shouted "Hi Denver" for you. No response. :) I was just in Plano not long ago checking out some movie theaters (I am involved the movie exhibition industry). The Cinemark Legacy I believe it is called is not too bad. Could be better if they had smarter people running the projection booth. But they have one guy who knows what he is doing. I don't remember anything else about Plano except the Studio Movie Grill and "Nude Furniture".

If you are smart you'd use a download manager on such
large downloads to:

a) download at maximum speed (utilizing multiple channels)
b) be able to resume the download if something happens.

I never download from Internet Explorer or Netscape. Only
when it is a couple of KB....

Just a thought though.

Both of these programs are immensely powerful and complicated tools.

Both include scripting, MEL for Maya and Lscript for Lightwave, both are extensible and easy to learn yet powerful. (caveat: I was a prgrammer way before I was a video artist...)

Lightwave is pretty widely acknowledged as the best modeler out there. It also has the best built in renderer on the market. In fact I would say only Renderman is as good. That's a whole other post though.

Maya has flat out the best animation tools. Also, Maya includes a physics modeling system. This is ridiculously useful in any project using motion. I can work around LW's other animation weirdness, but I just hit a wall when I want to do physics. LW's motion designer is a joke put next to a real physics system.

When I jibber about animation, please understand I am not talking about flying a spaceship around, moving static objects like spaceships and chairs is easier in LW's animation system than Maya. (Until you need physics models...)

Maya's animation tools are great for dynamic softbodied objects. For example PEOPLE or ANIMALS. When you talk or flex your hand your skin changes shape, it folds and bunches up...etc. Maya makes animating that stuff....well I won't say a "joy" but it is very much easier.

Truth is that most big studios use BOTH of these programs. Lightwave for modeling and Maya for animation. They often tack Renderman on for rendering directly from Maya, though some studios go back into LW for rendering.

You can see the results of the combination on films like Final Fantasy, Star Wars Episode 1 and II, A.I. and anything from Pixar.

Animation being the weak point of LW there is a really useful plug-in for LW called Messiah that can handle animation better than the built in LW tools. I have not used it myself.

Messiah will eventually be incorporated into Messiah:Studio which will be a stnadalone 3D modelling and animation program meant to compete with LW and Maya.

Back to LW vs Maya: Price is a HUGE issue. Maya is $17500!!!! LW 7.0 is listed at $2495, but you can get a full version of LW 6.5b, including Aura 2.0 (compositing and paint) for $995 right now. Then you can upgrade to LW 7, or any subsequent version for $495....

Needless to say there is a clear fiscal reason I use LW in house. The fact is I do a lot more logo animation and other simple stuff intended for video destinations, most of the work there is in modelling and texturing. LW has better modeling tools, and texturing is on par between Maya and LW...

If you are an animator, then Maya is worth every single penny and then some. For now, I am not. I'll probably add Messiah or something like it to my workflow when I get there, because Maya is just too steep for me, for now.

Maya and LW both run on Windows and Macintosh. Maya also runs on Linux, and IRIX (Silicon Graphics UNIX version) Maya is far more in tune with my ideas for how my computing center will evolve, then again NewTek, maker of Lightwave, has plenty of time to change before my UNIX requirements leave it out in the cold. (For that matter OS X has time to become a better price/performance platform...and thus fit my UNIX/computing requirements)

[Note to Mac zealots, I LOVE OS X!!! Best desktop UNIX *EVER*. Apple hardware needs to catch up performance wise though...)

I live about 1 mile from the Cinemark Legacy and I work about 1 mile from the Studio Movie Grill. Pretty cool.
If you have a mouse with a left/right/scroll wheel that presses, it will work too (it is just not as comfortable). When you press ("ALT" windows) option and click the left mouse button, it will rotate the environment. ALT+middle button will shift environment right, left, up and down and ALT+left+middle will zoom in and out. Press and hold the space bar to show menu (it follows your pointer) and quickly tap spacebar to jump views (this works on the window you have the curser over). Just a couple quick tips to help you play.
Have fun!
Rhett

Ofcourse some sites don't let you. But usually they do. My
download manager can automatically grab urls for you, so
this will not cost anything extra. A good download manager
will be at least as fast as your Netscape. Why? Well, because
it is their purpose. Secondly. Your downloading something large
like 300 mb. This will take 30 minutes (for example). Now if
your connection goes awry after 29 minutes of downloading
you can start all over again. With a download manager you
can start at 29 minutes and only have to go 1 minute.

But use what your happy with! It was just a thought.

There are a lot of things that go into how many good fast connections you can make over TCP/IP

The first of these is your TCP/IP stack.

If you care much about transfer speeds on the net, then get a Mac or Linux or BSD. Windows has the wors TCP stack of any of them.

Your browser can make multiple connections, you set that up in network options.

Netscape can resume broken downloads. AMOF it is a Netscape extension that allows this feature to exist in download managers. An "innovation" MSFT has yet to make.

That all sounds reasonable...so why I'd call the pissing contest silly ?

Because ALL TCP products can transfer a LOT more than 1.5MBps which is all the bandwidth you people have. Any TCP app should saturate a 10MBps line too. Most TCP apps can saturate 200MBps duplex fast ethernet set up properly.

I just did a test here with IE, NS anda download manager or two...they all ran the same speed across my TCP LAN, and to several sites on the Internet.

If you are an IE user get a DL manager for resuming broken DL's on large files. You can also use one more readily for grabbing "hidden" net content, like the QT files for movie trailers. Otherwise it is just gravy...move along.


So...go fix your software and stop buggering about your great download manager and/or NS browser.

1.5mbps is all the bandwidth I have? Hmmmm... doesn't seem to say that in my contract. I constantly outperform my friend's dedicated T1 line that he shares with no one. Of course I am not allowed to host sites with my line. :(

Here I go yammering about the fact that appliations can use up any TCP/IP pipe you give them, and you choose to reply to an offhand generalized comment..

Bah...

Anyways...I had a chance to plug along with NS and IE today on a Gigabit LAN an acquantance installed...guess what.

280Mbps that is what. On copper wire.

Once I realized what we were getting...well I simply HAD to stream some D1 uncompressed video.

It is not the apps man.

As to your cable modem or whatever outperforming a T1...I would ask a bunch a questions about the network infrastructure of both your net connection and your friends (the person with the T1)

There is definitely somethign wrong if somebody has a T1 to themselves and is underperforming your 1.5Mbps Cable or DSL.

In any case you should get more than 500Kbps regularly from any 1.5Mbps service. It will be rare to get more than that, and you can often get less, depending on how many hops there are between you and your target, the latency of each hop, etc. etc.

Also, please realize that all sorts of issues determine what route your software will use to establish a connection.

Using traceroute try tracing the route to the same destination from the same machine 2-3 times in a row. During peak traffic hours on the net you may be surprised to find that your machine takes different routes every try. Even if it uses the same route, you'll notice the response statistics vary pretty wildly.

That is the internet and it ain't under anybody's control, much less that of some client software on YOUR computer. Imagine if you will a city whose rush hour traffic is in different places every day, at different times.

Now...if you happen to live in an area with faster cable and/or DSL connectivity, you are among the blessed. CHances are for web browsing etc you will smoke your T1 endowed friends regularly.

Interesting... you automatically assume I have either Cable or DSL! As for getting 500K on a 1.5mbps line, I assume you are referring to kilobits per second and certainly not kiloBYTES. Getting 500KB (big "B") is only 12K shy of getting 4mbps. When I download files from good servers, I have seen 3000KB (again, big "B") sustained. That's nearly 3 megaBYTES per second. Upload rates slightly faster and it is full duplex. Of course from other servers I'm lucky if I get 12K per second. It really depends. My pal has a real T1 line, (the $1200 per month kind). Yes, I have more bandwdth, but I am masked behind a couple of IPs, and am not allowed by the TOS to host an FTP or HTTP site of any kind. My line is "fiber to the curb" (FTTC). The speed is real and so is the bandwidth. T1 has certain advantages, it's not just the overall speed that matters. As far as surfing web pages go, the T1 and my line seem identical overall, since web pages are relatively small. But when my friend (again, the one with the T1 line) and I transfer uncompressed videos back and forth from here to Dallas during editing, the extra speed is quite nice!

Check out this JPG I took just for you. I did not doctor it in any way and this is from the internet, not LAN:

http://207.168.10.82/speedC.jpg

You have an interesting arrangement for net access. Cool.

If you are having a net bandwidth pissing contest with me, its no contest, YOU win, and I am jealous...I would love to get 3000KB/s to any site...but it isn't in the cards for now.

Whatever data pipe you use, it has no relevance. Looked at your .jpg...neat, but so ? It tells me nothing of utility or relevance to the argument.

You also "corrected" a statement I did not make. My post clearly says "500Kbps" yet you feel the need to point out that *if* I meant "500KBps" I would be wrong.

??? Why even create the supposition ? Do you have some strange need for me to be wrong ? Well sorry, but I won't oblige you today.

None of what you said in reply to me addresses the argument I address, which is the value of one browser vs. another, or download managers in terms of net download speed..

I say again: It isn't the apps. They can all handle all the bandwith you are likely to have for use on the Internet. I don't care if you have an optical network with DWDM running directly into your system...10KBps or 10GBps the applications can handle it. (Well, OK maybe not 10GBps, but then again who here has a system whose hardware can handle 10GBps anyway <shrug>)

I absolutely HATE MSFT, but I hate them for factual reasons...and IE happens to be just as fast as NS when configured properly...for example the default install on Windows systems. Saying IE is slow just isn't true, so don't say it.

Now what does any of this have to do with 3D animation with DV ?

--"You also "corrected" a statement I did not make."

Not really, I assumed you were correct (please re-read my sentence). However I brought it up because many people make that mistake.

--"I say again: It isn't the apps."

Maybe so maybe no. But there is no reason why my IE runs at half the speed of Netscape when downloading files. If there is a configuration issue, please let me know what to check and I will address it.

--"Now what does any of this have to do with 3D animation with DV ?"

You tell me. I only stated that I downloaded the thing in 7 minutes with Netscape which has ALWAYS downloaded files faster than MSIE on the Mac. Then I went on to talk about Maya.

Did you know the bwanatipo lizard of the Maldive Islands sheds its skin only once every three years?

So what was the topic here anyway?

Longhorns beat the Aggies. Let's just put it to bed.