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Here I have tried to make some animations of molecules using Lightwave that would have been more tricky to create using other programs. I have used my own programs motopov and dspovtols to create modeler LScripts that construct the lw objects, and then animated these in Lightwave.
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The insect animation is still a work in progress. The walk just does not look correct yet. The model was constructed in Lightwave as a subpatch, which is animated using key framed bones.
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The blob animation shows a surface hypervoxel particle system which was supposed to look like a viscous liquid. The emitter is located below the camera view, and the particles are directed upwards, with a small amount of explosion. The crowd self interaction feature is used to make them bunch together. Gravity prevents the particles flying off the top, and ParticleFX wind turbulence adds some randomness. The hypervoxels stretch parameter is set to a negative number to cause the droplets to flatten out along their direction of motion.
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The “arm” animation was intended as an exercise in obtaining smooth natural looking motion using keyframed bones. The model itself was exported from Poser, then skelegons and weight maps were added in Lightwave modeler.
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Download (344 KB) as AVI (requires DivX)
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Dinosaurs always seem to be a popular topic for animation, so I thought I would try to build my own in LightWave. The dinosaur model is fully articulated with over 80 bones to control the feet, toes, front claws, tail and neck. Morph maps allow opening of the mouth and motion of the tongue. ParticleFX and Hypervoxels were used to create the little dust clouds where the feet touch down.
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The LightWave user guide talks of the use of the MD_MetaPlug plugin for addition of buttons to a dress controlled by Motion Designer. Intrigued by this plugin, I set about the task of creating this effect. The dress itself is a modelled with a SubPatch, with the subdivision order set to last to enable it to be used with Motion Designer. Rather simple models of legs and feet were built and animated with bones and IK to act as collision objects. The buttons are a separate object. The dress was allowed to “relax” under gravity for a number of frames before the walk begins. The motion was saved, and then applied to the buttons object using MD_MetaPlug. The legs were not rendered as the occasional polygon passes through the dress and the model is rather rough anyway.
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The animation shows a spaceship (cyclic peptide antibiotic) attacking a planet (bacterial cell). It was intended to try out UV mapping for placing the decals on the ship, and volumetric hypervoxels for the exhaust stream. The canyon is constructed from a large rectangle with about 20 segments in each direction. The topography was roughly modelled by dragging points around. It was then converted to a subpatch and a textured displacement was applied. Bump texture provides the fine details.
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A simple cartoon animation intended to illustrate the operation of a type of assay used to measure binding of a peptide molecule (green Y shape) to DNA (blue curl) immobilized on a surface (grey disc). The large green and yellow blob is a protein which recognises the peptide and converts colourless substrate (white cubes) into coloured product (blue rectangles) which is detected.
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Copyright ©2008 James E. Redman. All rights reserved.
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