TUTORIALS | Pyrokinetic effects

LIGHTWAVE 3D

Fire at your fingertips

Running into a dead end is no fun at all, so it helps if you have the power of LightWave 3D at your fingertips to
blast a hole in the wall. We show you the best way to generate the necessary superheroic VFX BY BENJAMIN SMITH

O
ne of the best bits in superhero movies such
FACTFILE as Hellboy and the X-Men series is where
a character has the ability to cause fire to
FOR
LightWave 3D 8+ spew forth from their hands before hurling an
DIFFICULTY almighty flaming ball at their nemeses. It’s certainly a handy
Intermediate / Expert superpower, and we can only hope that these people are
TIME TAKEN sensible enough to ask someone else to fill their car up at the
2-10 hours petrol station. In this tutorial, we’ll show you the safe way to
ON THE CD recreate this fantastic ‘pyrokinetic’ effect.
• Full-size screenshots Helping us with the drama is a lovely mademoiselle, who has
• Background footage
gleefully posed for a brief video clip, running down a deserted
• LightWave scene files
• Finished shot corridor and screeching to a halt before summoning up her dark
powers and throwing a powerful blue thunderbolt – presumably at
ALSO REQUIRED
A compositing program someone who’s stolen her jar of Nutella. [Pardon? – Ed.]
such as After Effects The visual effects, of course, step in where our heroine’s powers
end: creating the fireball and the wisps of blue flame that spring
from her palms as her power builds. We’ll use LightWave 3D to
track a 3D model of a hand into the scene, which will then serve
as an emitter for particles that will lap around the hand and spiral
upwards. Volume HyperVoxels will enable us to render the particles
as an ethereal blue flame, and we’ll use After Effects to composite
the render back into the background footage, enhancing it a little to
fit the scene better.
Most of the actual work will be done with LightWave’s particle
tool, ParticleFX, and since we’ll be using collisions, calculating the
simulation will probably be quite slow and somewhat unstable. For
this reason, we strongly suggest saving the scene as my_scene_
v001.lws and using the Incremental Save feature to save a new
version every few minutes.
Benjamin Smith is Creative Director of Red Star Studio, a digital
film production company. Sadly, his own superpowers are
limited to leaping tall kittens in a single bound.
www.redstarstudio.co.uk

060 | 3D WORLD February 2006


STAGE ONE | The background plate and initial scene
Locate the Fireball folder on this issue’s CD and copy
01 it to your computer. Inside, you’ll find a JPEG image
sequence that makes up the background plate for
the shot, as well as a lo-res QuickTime movie. Load LightWave
Layout, set the content folder to Fireball > lwcontent and,
from the Image Editor, load the plate image sequence. Make
sure the start frame is set to 1 and not 0.
STAGE TWO | Rotoscoping the 3D hand
To create fire flying from our model’s hand, we’ll
04 need to rotoscope a 3D hand over her own and use
it as an emitter for particles. Enter Modeler and load
hand.lwo from the Objects folder. This is a generic hand
model with a simple skeleton already set up.
Step forward 10 frames and move the hand to keep
07 it loosely in position. Repeat this at each 10-frame
interval throughout the sequence, so the animation
is blocked out. The tricky bit comes around frames 250-280,
where she pulls her hand back and shoots it forward. Make
sure you move the hand back and forth in Z enough so that it
scales with perspective.
From the Compositing tab on the Effects panel,
02 set the plate as the Background Image. In the
Display panel [D], set the Camera View Background
to Background Image. Set the scene’s end frame to 320 and
scrub the Time Slider to see our heroine go through her
motions in the Camera view.
Load hand.lwo into Layout, convert the bones layer
05 to Skelegons and set the hand geometry to use
these bones to deform. You can now move and
rotate the tiny root bone of the hierarchy to match the
position of the model’s hand.
Once you’ve got the position of the hand roughed
08 out in 10-frame intervals, you can go back and
fine-tune the position of the fingers to match the
live action. You can then start filling in keyframes where
necessary between the 10s, so the 3D hand remains locked
over the live action throughout the shot.
Pyrokinetic effects | TUTORIALS
Set the Camera Zoom to something like 4.3 (roughly
03 a horizontal field of view of 35 degrees), and move
it to about 1.5m in Y. Rotate it so the horizon and
perspective in the grid approximates that in the plate.
Start at frame 220. Position the root bone over
06 her wrist (you can see her watch, which is a useful
guide) and rotate Bone01(7) to flex the hand into
position. You can roughly select and rotate the finger bones
into position, too.
EXPERT TIP i
View the whole frame
With the 3D hand superimposed
over our heroine’s own hand, it’s
hard to see what she’s doing with
her fingers. Refer to the background
image by going into the Image
Editor, making sure Use Layout
Time is on and double-clicking the
thumbnail image sequence. The
current frame opens.
Since playback of the scene is
jerky with the plate loading in the
background, make a preview if you
need to watch the animation back to
check it. Alternatively, just load the
fireball_roto.lws scene from the CD
to get to this stage.
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February 2006 | 061
TUTORIALS | Pyrokinetic effects

STAGE THREE | Adding the particles

With the hand nicely rotoscoped, you can start
09 adding some particles. In Modeler, select the hand
object, then copy and paste it twice into two other
layers. In the first layer, delete the polygons around the wrist
and use the Smooth Scale tool to expand the hand by about
3mm. Name the layer ‘Emit’.
Shrink the second copy of the hand by a few
10 millimetres and name this layer ‘Collision’. Both
layers are automatically added to Layout, and you
just need to set them to use the bones from the Skelegons
layer to animate them. From the hand_emit object’s
Properties panel, add FX_Emitter on the Dynamics tab.
In the ParticleFX panel, the Nozzle should already
11 be set to Object-Surface. Set the Birth Rate up to
500, the Particle Limit to 2,000, activate Fixed and
set the Start Frame to 180. Hit either the Calculate button on
the Dynamics tab or bring up the FX Browser (Utilities >
Plugins (Additional) > FX Browser) and choose Start.

EXPERT TIP i
Don’t move!
LightWave 3D 8.3 locks up the
computer while simulating particles,
so once you’ve pressed Start or
Calculate, it’s important not to touch
anything else in the program, or to
try to switch to another application
or process. This will crash LightWave,
so resist the temptation to check
your email! You can quit the particle
simulation by pressing [Ctrl] for a
few seconds if you really need to
The trail of particles looks great, but it should really Where particles are born under the hand, they now
do something else. Thankfully, this
bug has been fixed in LightWave 12 drift upwards. Add a Dynamics Gravity object and 13 immediately pass through it upwards under ‘gravity’,
simulate again to see the particles drift up. You can so we won’t get any fire lapping around it. To resolve
8.5, which also has a handy progress
add some randomisation by setting variations on Weight and this, select the hand_collide layer. On its Properties panel’s
slider for dynamics calculation on the
Resistance with the +/– fields on the emitter’s Particle tab, as Dynamics tab, apply FX Collision and open its panel.
FX Browser.
well as a tiny bit of Vibration on the Motion tab.

Set the type to Object-Subdiv and Bounce/Bind
14 power to 100. Simulate again and this smaller
collision hand will repel the particles created just
outside its surface by the slightly bigger emitter hand,
causing them to lap around the main hand. You can set
Roughness in the Collision panel to 50% for variation.
Once the fire has started burning from the model’s
15 hand, it shoots upwards and away. We want it to
spiral in an organic, flame-like way, so we’ll add
a couple of Wind objects to propel the particles. However,
we want these effects to be located around the middle of
the hand.
Add a null and call it parented_to_bone. On its
16 Motion panel, add the Follower plug-in and set Item
To Follow to be a suitable bone in the hand’s palm.
Turn on World Coordinates and turn off the HPB rotate and
XYZ scale options (by setting Source to None). The null will
now follow the position of the hand, but will remain oriented
vertically (because it isn’t inheriting rotations).

062 | 3D WORLD February 2006


STAGE THREE (Continued) | Adding the particles
Add a Wind, call it spiral_wind and parent it to the
17 parented_to_bone null. Set the Wind mode to
Rotation(Y), the Radius to 150mm and Spiral
Amount to 100%. Simulate and you’ll see the particles rise
with a slight spiralling motion. You could turn this Wind off
(tick the box next to FX_Wind in the Dynamic tab) to see the
results of other Winds without being affected by this one.
Load particles_final.lws to see the final particle
20 animation created for the shot. We applied a few
more tweaks to add some extra detail and to fix any
problems. We also animated the emitter’s Birth Rate so the
fire cuts off once the fireball is released, and added a little
random variation during the rest of the shot.
STAGE FOUR | Render settings for HyperVoxels
In the HyperVoxels panel, activate the
23 hand_emitter layer, set Object Type to Volume
and open VIPER to render a quick particle preview.
On the Geometry tab, set Particle Size to about 40mm and
Variation to 50%. On the Shading tab, set Color to a suitable
shade of blue, Opacity to 25% and Thickness to 5%.
On the HyperTexture tab, choose the Crumple texture.
Add another Wind, call it vertical_wind and again
18 parent it to parented_to_bone. Set this Wind’s mode
to Cylinder-Explosion, its Radius to 250mm and
Power to –50%. Simulate and you’ll see that this Wind causes
the particles to be sucked inward toward the middle of a
cylindrical effector, so they seem to rise in a column without
spreading out so much.
We found that we had to turn the collision with
21 hand_collide object off at certain points (like when
the hand moves violently through the frame) to
prevent particles bouncing around like crazy. Add an envelope
to the Bounce/Bind power, and keyframe it down to 0% if you
experience any strange behaviour.
You can use the Preview pop-up in VIPER to create
24 a lo-res preview to check how the effect looks in
motion. Particles tend to pop into and out of
existence, so you can use Gradients to control and refine the
effect. Apply a Gradient on the Particle Size, set to Particle
Age (so the particles are 0 per cent when they’re born), scale
up really quickly and scale down as they get older.
Pyrokinetic effects | TUTORIALS
Add another Wind and call it turbulence_wind.
19 Leave it at the origin and, on its panel, set Mode
to Turbulence and turn off Falloff. Use the Vector
tab to set the Turbulence Size XYZ to 500mm and make
Turbulence Vector X 1m. This Wind adds a random motion
that helps to add more organic twists.
We also created the actual fireball, which is
22 straightforward compared to the trail of fire – a
particle emitter simply shoots out of our character’s
hand at the appropriate moment, leaving a trail of particles
that are rendered with HyperVoxels.
It may take some tweaking to get the HyperVoxels
25 looking really good, and the render time for the
sequence can be quite long. You can load the
fireball_finished LightWave scene from the 3D World CD to
see our final settings..
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TUTORIALS | Pyrokinetic effects
STAGE FIVE | Compositing in After Effects
In After Effects (or the compositing package of
26 your choice), start a new composition at 640x480
(square pixels) and 25fps. Import the background
image sequence and the rendered fire element, layering the
render over the background (remember that the render only
begins at frame 170).
The background video is extremely noisy (it was
29 shot in low light), whereas the rendered fire is
totally clean. Add a Noise filter into the fire effect
using its Alpha channel as a mask, and match the noise
against our model’s dark surroundings.
We also added camera shake to the final shot.
30 Create a new composition and drag the first
composition into it. You can now expand the
motion options for the clip in the composition, scale it up
a tiny bit and add keyframes for position and rotation to
simulate shake.
064 | 3D WORLD February 2006
Now copy and paste the fire layer, select the lower
27 layer and apply a Blur filter to it. Blur it by about
100 pixels until you have a vague blue blob, and
then set the Layer Blending mode to Screen. This will add a
blue halo around the fire, so it seems to light up the screen
and nearby objects.
As always with a composite, it’s the extra touches
31 at the end that really help to sell the final result. If
you look at the final_shot.mov on the CD, you’ll
notice that we’ve added a few extra sweeteners to this
scene, such as the lens flare that comes from the fireball
when it’s at its peak intensity. After Effects has a standard
Photoshop-like lens flare generator that works just fine, but
You can duplicate the fire layer again and apply a
28 Brightness/Contrast tool to darken it until only the
brightest areas of the scene remain. Blur this and
layer over the original with the Blending mode set to Screen.
This creates a highlight glow that seems to spill around the
edges of the model’s fingers.
for this effect (pictured above), we used the excellent Knoll
Lens Factory suite of plug-ins to make a really impressive
flare that sends reflections across the shot. Alternatively, you
could create this kind of effect by parenting a light to the
fireball emitter in LightWave, turning on Lens Flares to
render it as a separate pass, and then compositing it in. All
of these methods will produce a great finishing touch. ●