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During the first
video it quickly becomes apparent how flexible the
IK Boost bone chain can be for animating as Larry
Shultz (the author) compares a LightWave IK rig to
an IK Boost rig (a simple chain of 10
bones). What can take a long time to setup
in LightWave's natural IK system is quickly
accomplished with IK Boost and more. However
halfway through the second video you realize that
"you ain't seen nothing yet" as Larry
shows us the various popup menus that IK Boost
uses for various controls.
The IK Boost tool
is a not a "one trick wonder", rather it
is a whole new system for bone manipulation in
LightWave. Larry shows us how to merge some
of the abilities of the IK Boost tool with some of
the abilities of LightWave's standard IK toolset
to further enhance the control over a bone
rig. Larry slowly goes through some of the
options and settings in the a few of the popup control
menus. He also discusses the use of the dope
track when in IK Booster mode and how to use it to
further edit and fine tune your bone
manipulations.
The next three videos
explore a rig (bone setup) for a leg. The
first video sets up the leg using a standard
LightWave IK setup and Larry explains the basic
procedure for setup and what many of the problems
in the system can create. He also tries to
show us various "fixes" to these
problems using the standard LightWave IK
tools. In the following video he sets up the
same leg rig using IK Boost alone. Larry
shows some of the drawbacks of IK Booster when
used on its own. In the following video
Larry combines the two systems into one on the
same leg rig and discusses the benefits of being
able to use both the traditional LightWave IK
further "boosted" by IK Boost. The
amount of control becomes so much more refined!
The object
hierarchy video takes a series of objects set up
to form a tentacle. The tentacle has
standard LightWave IK applied. After
applying IK Boost Larry shows us the control we
have over the setup that we might not normally be
able to easily recreate with LightWave's standard
IK setup. Larry shows several more of the
functions in the popup menus and explains their
usage.
The Spline Deform
video takes an octopus tentacle which has the
Spline Control Tool applied to it and we not only
get a brief introduction to the Spline Control
Tool but we also get to apply IK Boost to it and
use IK Boost to deform the object. Larry
takes this one step further and adds a secondary
hierarchy to the spline, also with IK Boost
applied and shows us how a rig such as this can be
used. Although interesting I honestly didn't
understand why Larry set this rig up in this
fashion other than to have multiple controls for
the same node within the rig. Useful to a
certain degree but perhaps this object was a
little too simple for this demonstration.
The final video is
a brief introduction to how LightWave's Dynamics
fit into all this. Larry sets up a basic
bone rig with IK Boost and explains how to add
dynamics to affect the rig. Larry also shows
a quick segment on the graph editor and how to
reduce keyframes after using dynamics. This
video is fairly basic and I would have liked to
have seen more on this.
All in all the
video series is good for beginners such as myself
but I think it lacks a couple of things. I
would have liked the author to go through each of
the menus and discuss what each of the menu items
does. Instead Larry refers us to the
manual. He does use the menus a lot but
doesn't really get into any real depth in these
items and believe me there are a lot of menus and
lot of different controls to choose from.
Secondly I wish Larry would have gone into more of
the dynamics. The setup he uses in the
videos is very simple, I would like to have seen
something maybe a little more complex and in a
real FX setting of some sort. Perhaps a tree
blowing in the breeze or something like that.
The videos are very
clean, the sound tracks the video well if you
don't any other programs running in the
background. The videos are easy to watch and Larry
is good at showing what can go wrong and either
how to fix it or how to avoid the problem.
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