'Lily Pad'

This is a 'still' taken from a too ambitious animation that I eventually called 'Dragonfly'. The animation itself is around 100Mb in size, so I doubt if it will ever be uploaded. I may put it on a CR-ROM of my anims at some stage. I adopted a dragonfly for my JaXanim 'logo' (also included here). I designed a variety of lily pads and waterlily flower models, including buds, stalks and other aquatic stuff. Several of the images you'll find here use them in different ways.

This frame is near the start of the animation and incorporates some rather nice water droplets. When the butterfly takes off, the drops run down to merge with the one in middle. All these droplets use my own Surface settings for optimal visual effect, clarity, reflective and refractive quality and outline. There isn't a comparable Surface supplied with LightWave and getting the best settings took ages. You'll notice from other stills included here, that the visual aspects of droplets and bubbles are quite different.

This was also my first stab at animating a butterfly (a different species is used in the actual anim). The action was achieved by having two LightWave models morphed back and forth in consecutive frames of the movie. That's the fastest method I could figure for doing it. I tried the wings flapping cycle with the wings either in phase (front up/back up) or 180 degrees out of phase (front up/back down), but neither system looked exactly right. I later improved on this, as described in the 'Thistledown' still.

Any purists out there will notice the positioning fault with the fish. It's tail fin cuts through the lily pad! This is a typical amateur's error, which in this case goes unnoticed in the movie. This still has some added Depth of Field effect.

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