Hello. I also like looking at illuminated screens as well as pressing buttons. We have a lot in common!
Age 41
Animator
Tanadrine Studios
Joined on 12/31/06
Yeah, like, that's what's supposed to be the great thing about 3D. It's animation for the tweakers! :D I like it when I can poke at it for hours with no consequences.
But it's a moot point anyway. Just have to wait a few more years, and then our computers will be spitting out polygons and math like machine guns and we'll be like "ysosrs" and it'll be like OMG GRAPHICS!
I'm definitely a tweaker :). When I did 2d animation, I always felt akin to a right-handed person trying to draw with the left hand... it just never felt comfortable or natural to me (as paradoxical as that sounds).
It'll be cool when when 3d developers can work with their content in real-time instead of through crappy openGL previews and that progressive pixel-blur-to-render stuff! I think technology might get there between 10-20 years from now... I'm curious to see how it develops over time. We can display very high-detail graphics in real-time (enough video games that display this out there), but we can't *develop* this stuff while seeing it all in real-time. Not even Dreamworks and Pixar have access to that kind of technology yet.
Even though I dont use Lightwave. (3dmax here) I thought this tutorial was well done, and you have an excellent speaking voice, should definitely do more for the rest of the lightwavers out there
In the long run I'd like to cover other programs as well... and yes i've received a lot of positive comments about my speaking voice concerning tutorial content :).
In my next tutorial, I'll be explaining how Blender can be used with Lightwave (or any other image-producing program, really), to supplement a post production workflow. Blender doesn't replace a specialized post production program, but all of the functionality is there. I think 3dsmax comes with one built in as well, but not Lightwave... from the videos i've watched, Blender's way of doing post production is very similar to 3dsmax and is node-based.
Kajenx
Getting hard, eh?
That looked really cool until he said baking...then I got sad.
Tanadrine-Studios (Updated )
That's the one weakness of "part-time" IK... though it is negligible from my vantage point; being able to modify (and even add to) the rig however I like at any point in animation with zero consequences or lost work is an advantage I couldn't pass up.
I don't see the drawbacks of having to bake stuff really, it isn't like it is hard to remove and the end-viewer never sees the keyframes anyways.
This tutorial also doesn't cover targeting, which is basically the same as "Fix" only you can base a character's movement on another object's items (null, bone, or otherwise). With normal IK setups, you'd have to have specific rigs for every different set of functions you need your character to do; unchangeable, tedious, and *very* resource intensive.
I do still use normal IK setups for the legs of my characters though, as in the majority of bipedal animations that I do, the character's feet are interacting with the ground to some capacity. IKBooster is best used for situations where IK doesn't always need to be active (the arms of a character, usually).