Graphics Programs Reference
In-Depth Information
If you'd like to see my scene to explore my
quick answer to the question of making a
'droid go “boom,” load
Scenes\Chap-
ter_17\Compositing_02_F.lws
. (I also
added a touch of “camera shake” at the
spike of the explosion using Bob Hood's
Jolt! motion plug-in. It's a simple, effective
plug-in similar to Colin Cohen's Vibrate
plug-in that adds temporal random motion
to an item in your scene. It's perfect for
adding realism to scenes where large
objects move close to the camera, such as
asteroids or dinosaurs or, in this case,
explosions.
Note
A strange phenomena about things in space
blowing up is that no matter where you
place the camera, at least one large piece of
debris seems to just narrowly miss it. (The
Star Furies on
Babylon 5
did the same
thing.) I don't know why — maybe it's a
design flaw or something.
Note
Now, generally I like to refrain from having
you “parrot” my work as I asked you to do
when copying the timing and values that made
the flare bloom in relationship to the explosion
beginning its animation at frame 34. Deciding
what happens when is a matter of taste that
develops over time as you begin to learn ani-
mation. As I've mentioned before, this isn't a
topic on
animation
; it's a topic on the
basic
essentials
of driving LightWave. (It's just that
what I consider to be the “basic essentials”
needed for you to get up and start making
your dreams may be a bit less “basic” than
what someone else might have in mind.)
But still, I don't want to leave you scratching
your head as to why I chose the timing rela-
tionship that I did between the flare and the
explosion. So in brief: I'm a big fan of animé
(Asian animation). And I love the way animé
explosions build just a bit before going off the
charts. So, the flare spends two frames build-
ing enough for the viewer to register it and
extrapolate its assumed growth. (The flare is
like the “energy” of the explosion building.)
Then I just ramp the snot out of the flare so it
practically obliterates everything on the screen.
It's at this point that the explosion poly is dis-
solved in, so as the flare begins to recede,
there's the explosion, and everything “makes
sense” from that point on.
(It takes a
minimum
of two frames at 24 FPS
for a viewer to register something. Something
that is on screen for three frames is seen by
most
viewers.)
What this is doing is playing with modified
timings (which is covered in some depth in
LightWave 3D 8 Character Animation
). The
effect the viewer feels from watching an explo-
sion handled this way has a lot more punch
than an explosion that just ramps up in a lin-
ear fashion, with the explosion itself visible
right from the start. (Go ahead and shift the
keys for the flare back so they match up with
the dissolving in of the explosion poly, and
you'll see what I mean.)
