Creating Yoda
1st prize winner
LightWave Digital: Tell us a bit about your prize-winning entry to our May 4th competition to celebrate LightWave Digital's birthday.
Oscar Palma: Well, the initial idea was a little more ambitious, but lack of time for work has made me simplify it. The idea is Yoda/Andrew (my Yoda has a subtle spot on the skin near his ear), rescuing LW from the swampy terrain he was in. I dedicated a good two weeks of this month to making the animation. I took the original footage without the shots of Luke and R2D2 and put them together as a reference. It's basically two scenes: shots of Yoda and shots of the LW logo alternating. Yoda took me the longest, of course. I found a reference on the internet that I liked and remade it from scratch. Modelled in LW and details in Zbrush. The texturing was pretty quick. It doesn't have much mystery, a leather texture with SSS and the fabric is double geometry. A lower layer with a fabric texture and another with displacement imitating lint. I did it this way to constrain the render times. Instances or FFX would have taken too long.
LD: How did you do the hair?
OP: For the hair, I did use FFX. And yes, it increased my rendering time by more than 50%. (I was already clear about this from previous experiences like my tiger, squirrel and bird)
LD: How about the backgrounds?
OP: The backgrounds are still images, recreated from the film.
LD: Is Yoda full-rigged?
OP: Yoda's rig is just a few bones and three endomorphs. The animation uses the original background footage as a reference. (very improvable...)
LD: How about the water the logo rises from?
OP: The lake water is a procedural displacement, mixed with the background image. All within LW.
LD: What other preparations did you do?
OP: The logo is textured in Substance Painter for speed and the vegetation is textured flat polygons that move with a procedural and weight map. The falling water is also flat polygons with water drop videos.
LD: The final look of the animation is very filmic. How did you achieve that?
OP: The render was clear that I wanted it to be the native to give it prominence. And to give it some final look I used the DP_Filter to add Bloom, Dispersion and Vignetting.
Here's a link to Oscar's winning entry. We can't embed it on this site because of YouTube's rules on copyrighted elements. Oscar's film falls fully under the Fair use doctrine. Yoda
