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Rover Get this model from Turbo Squid

May 1, 2007  Hopefully you like Lightwave news, because that's all I've got at the moment. I finished work on a Layout plugin called Info Saver, available on the Files page. The other news item is that I've got two pieces in the new LightWave Community 9.2 demo video, which was just released to the public today. In case the server is overloaded, here's the file mirrors: Med quality Quicktime Sorenson 3 (35mb) HQ Quicktime H264 (45mb) Med quality Xvid Avi (25mb)

October 9, 2006  Okay, why did it take this long to post? A hard drive crash, the boot drive in my main machine died at the end of June (three days before my monthly backup). I had updated my Lightwave dongle drivers then shutdown, and encountered a severely damaged File Allocation Table at boot (first NTLDR couldn’t find boot.ini, and then NTLDR itself was gone). I had been having some file access issues that in retrospect were probably warning signs of an impending failure. With a new drive I got the machine working two days later, but nearly a month of work and email were gone (which left me in a bad mood). About a month later, using a Knoppix live CD and a Win98 startup floppy, I was able to retrieve the data from the bad drive. Needless to say, I now have a daily backup routine using Winzip 10 Pro and Syncback. And just when I thought everything was getting back to normal, the Sci-Fi channel cancels Stargate SG-1 and then some Committee of Old Cranks does some major Pluto hatin’. In other news, I had a birthday and finally finished my Red Dwarf DVD collection. I’m still in the process of memorizing the title of each episode and the order they go in. Because knowing that “Polymorph” is the third episode of series three may come in handy one day. But in more recent news, at last month’s Lightwave users group meeting a fellow user demo’ed a game he’s built called “Bad, Bad Bots.” A demo version is available at badbadbots.com. Lastly, I recently found out that the Free-Text Searching service was not running on my host’s SQL server. Which meant that the searching feature on the Things Jeff Levy got wrong and the Lesson search pages were broke. I notified the host and they fixed it, so the search feature now works again, I also added all of Jeff Levy’s latest lessons to the DB.

May 22, 2006  It seems that the only time I post is to give info about the latest LWUG meeting. So hopefully, when I'm not too busy I'll create a LightWave-centric area of the site. Till then, here's some info about May's meeting. Jennifer Hachigan gave another great dynamics related demonstration. This time the ins and outs of using an event-collision object with the Start By Event setting. Instead of describing the effect, here's an mov file that shows the effect, activating the dynamics for points which have collided with the event-collision object. Jennifer showed how the technique could be used to turn a vampire to dust. Next Larry Shultz showed what IK Booster is and how it works. It was awesome. Having dealt with LW's normal IK, I wish I had dug deeper and figured out what the weird IK Boost button was, it would have saved me a headache or two. Jennifer added that there's some good IK Booster info at IKBoost.com.

March 20, 2006  Here's a quick run-down of yesterday's LightWave meeting. The demo of Quidam was interesting but, I think the software needs some more work and, I think when you buy Quidam that you should get one of the platform export plugins to go with it. Next came the PD Pro Digital Painter demo. PD looks very powerful and it's inexpensive as well (which is always good). The meeting ended with Jennifer Hachigian explaining how to make falling confetti using LightWave's cloth dynamics. During which she also explained the difference between the Spring and Sub-Structure settings (spring is between edge points, sub-structure is between opposing points of neighboring polys IIRC). As well as telling where to find the old (and better) documentation for the dynamics system. Here for Motion Designer and here for FX_MotionDriver (auto translated from Japanesse).

January 22, 2006  I just got back from my first meeting of the Los Angeles Lightwave User's Group. Even with 8+ years of Lightwave under my belt I still learned quite a bit. Such as, how the controls on the Edit FX tab work and some very cool things to do with FX HardLink. Another member brought up the interviews available at AnimationPodcast.com, and I also learned about the deformation plugin Trailer (and it is SO MUCH better than Serpent). Unfortunately there wasn't enough time for Larry Shultz to discuss IK Boost as planned, but it was still an informational and enjoyable evening.

October 11, 2005  Yesterday NewTek released the Lightwave 8.5 update and then today South Park Season 6 came out on DVD. So I decided to take a break from animating and watch it straight through. So far I've only gotten through disc 1, and part of disc 2. I'm halfway through 'Red-Hot Catholic Love,' and can't wait until 'The Return of the Fellowship of the Ring to the Two Towers' and 'The Death Camp of Tolerance.' Two of the greatest episodes ever. "Lemmiwinks? NO!" - Butters

August 4, 2005  Here's a picture of a clock I built for my brother-in-law's birthday gift. It's made out of some parts from two old hard drives. A word of warning when playing with the Neodymium magnets that can be harvested from hard drives. Don't get pinched on the plam of your hand by two fast moving, highly attracted, metal plates. It HURTS.

July 8, 2005  You haven't lived until you've watched a guy get a vasectomy live on the internet accompanied by another guy and a rented midget trying to eat two large pizzas, followed up by a "dancer" doing a lap dance (sort of). Thus went the historic Kevin and Bean Nut-apalooza 2005. It rocked.

July 2, 2005  Today my sister and her husband took me to see War of the Worlds THREE TIMES...kind of. The plan was to see the 11:30am showing at the local theater. Lorry and I left with plenty of time, except that we had to pick up her husband two cities away. By the time we got him, the 11:30 had more than started. Plan B was to see it at the theater near our current location. The problem was that someone (not me) still had some banking to do, again two cities away. After that delay, all of us rushed back to where we had just been, but too late. In the end, we saw the 2pm back at the local theater. How was the movie? I liked it, I was glad to see the Red Weed was included. But was disappointed to see that the Black Fog wasn't used. With Worlds out of the way, next is King Kong then A Scanner Darkly (woot!).

April 16, 2005  Yesterday was Leonardo de Vinci's birthday, so of course I watched Quest of the Delta Knights (a la Mystery Science Theater 3000). But in more important news, I'll soon be updating the Productions page to show that 'Europan Life' is no longer on hold but is actually completed. In fact, working to get it done is the reason that there haven't been any updates. The 'Europan Life' page will also be updated to include the full animation, and some interesting stuff (stills, drawings). Once June rolls around there'll probably be another dip in the updates. June is when I plan to start on my next project, code named: GvV. All I'm going say is that it portrays an epic battle between two beloved fictional characters. I've got the ending written, and it could very well cause a civil war amongst nerds.

Copyright 2005 - Ken Nign