Issue 9

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COVER STORY: ICE AGE: THE MELTDOWN
Take a look behind the scenes and see what it takes to create a sequel to the hit CG film Ice Age. HDRI 3D spoke with the lead Animators, Effects Supervisors, Modelers, and Technical Directors at Blue Sky Studios. They shared their experiences facing the challenges in making Ice Age: The Meltdown.
by Eric Keller

AUTOMATING COMPOSITING AND RENDERING TASKS WITH NUKE
This article looks at creating and designing custom Nuke nodes with unique UI's. Essentially these nodes are nested flowcharts within a so-called gizmo. These gizmos can then be loaded into any script, or even included within the Nuke menu as a plugin. Gizmos are used for simplifying repetitive or complex compositing tasks.
By Boaz Livny

VUE 5 INFINITE
Lesson 2: Adding a LightWave Object to a Vue EcoSystem
Building on the Vue tutorial in HDRI 3D Issue 8, which showed you how to create cool images with Vue EcoSystems, this issue will show you how to add a LightWave object to the Vue scene.
by Brad Carvey

MOTION CAPTURE AS A TOOL
Motion Capture is quickly becoming the go-to method for creating quick, realistic animation in the gaming industry, so where does this leave the animator's job? This article tackles the issue of how animators can approach using motion capture and its strengths to attain aesthetically pleasing, diverse results, while still enjoying their job.
by Richard Lico

REAL WORLD PRODUCTION SERIES:
LightWave and MotionBuilder
This tutorial describes the step-by-step process of transferring motion capture animation data from MotionBuilder inside LightWave, through the breakdown of a real world project that was delivered successfully under tight deadline.
by Gregory "T.Rex" Glezakos

RIGID BODIES AND SPRING NETWORKS 101
When working in production on character assets, not a week goes by without some form of secondary motion or dynamics popping up in a meeting or in a requests list. This article bridges the gap between technical knowledge and implementation and will give you some food for thought for your next setup, or at least shed some light on notions that are often overlooked by novice technical directors themselves.
by Raffaele Fragapane

MEL SPLASHFLOCK
A few MEL scripts and a model generate an effect called the "SplashFlock." This article goes through the MEL scripts, attribute by attribute, to fully explain the process. Content geared toward novice users.
by Thatcher Bell

GRAB LIGHTWAVE BY THE NULLS!
An In-Depth Look at LightWave's Null Objects
In this article we take a look at why Null objects are so useful and explore some of the many uses for them in a LightWave production. Discover how you can start using Null objects in everything you do to improve your workflow.
by William "Proton" Vaughan

USING THE FULL BODY IK IN MAYA 7 Maya Human Animation Fundamentals, Part 3
Once you start working with this rig, you should find it superior to any previously constructed system. It's an impressive addition to Maya that by itself is worth the upgrade. This tutorial will take you through the step-by-step process of setting up the full body IK system as well as how to use it for posing and animating your models.
by Peter Ratner

TRANSMOTION UTILITIES BASICS
If you're interested in ways to speed up and broaden your animation options when using LightWave and a number of compositing packages, then the TransMotion Utilities package is a great buy. This tutorial shows you just one of the many ways you can incorporate this collection of Lscripts to port animation and keyframe data between applications for a number of purposes and results.
by Aaron Kent

WORN OUT LOOKS AWESOME
Part Two in a Series on Matte Painting-Weathering Effects
long The reader will come away with knowledge of how to weather, damage, or destroy buildings by manipulating the existing image, adding existing textures, and painting. The focus is on manipulation of imagery while using a minimum of paint, which can obscure or destroy useful texture.
by Briar Lee Mitchell

FX MAGIC WITH MAYA AND PARTICLEILLUSION
Creating particle effects with wondertouch's particleIllusion is fast and lots of fun. This tutorial shows how you can use these effects in a animation rendered in Maya.
by Eric Keller

HAULIN' WITH MULE
When you are working on a project and are in full production, one of the many delays can be the rendering and test rendering of scenes. What I want to do is take you through the weekly process I go through on my animation projects with MULE, and show you how I saved up to 30 percent of production time using this program.
by Dale L. Campbell, Jr.

THE TWO FACES OF T-SPLINES
T-Splines is a new NURBS-like surface type that opens up new frontiers in modeling by allowing you to add local detail without changing the surface. T-Splines also allows you to merge NURBS patches together to create truly seamless models. Learn how to create a face in T-Splines and use T-Splines in your workflow.
by Eric Allen

ESSENTIALS
The key to animating non-organic mechanical objects is to set up an appropriate hierarchy of object parts and nulls. Using different nulls to control a variety of rotations, movements, and deformations allows the artist to modify each individually, without affecting the others.
by Brad Carvey

IBM INTELLISTATION M PRO
A review of the IBM M Pro. Check out Performance and Impressions, Acoustic Specs, Thermal specs and OS and driver issues. Windows XP Professional x64 Edition initially supports up to 128 gigabytes (GB) of RAM and up to 16 terabytes of virtual memory. HOW MUCH DO YOU NEED?

STUFF
Color Control
Curse of the Anasazi
by Brad Carvey

KOOSHLINGS
Change is Blowin' in the (Dynamically Simulated) Wind
by Dariush Derakhshani

TD LOVE IN LONDON
by Raffael Dickreuter

FINAL RENDER
What's in a Name?
by Andrea Carvey