And you thought Surface Effectors was just an old fossil....
Surface Effectors
Surface Effectors was first released back in 1996, as one of the pioneering commercial plug-ins for LightWave 5.0. During the intervening years, it has gotten rave reviews and has become a standard tool in many a LightWave artist's arsenal. SE has been widely used in production, having been used in television series such as Star Trek:Voyager, Hercules, and Xena, games such as InterPlay's Starfleet Academy and movies such as Mortal Kombat II and My Favorite Martian.
What is it?
Surface Effectors uses specially named nulls in your scene to drive a surface
shader applied to any of a number of surfaces in your scene. Version 2.0 adds
the ability to drive a displacement plug-in as well. SE's can apply their
effect onto any surfaces within the vicinity of their radius of effect. In
addition, SE's can have a history, where the motion of the object creates
a trail of virtual effectors...giving the user a dynamic paint brush with
which he or she can lay down trails of effect, which can dynamically change
color or fade out over time. SE also includes a fully animateable advanced
fractal noise texture (including a 4d fractal noise that can undulate over
time).
SE plays heavily in the following animations that Prem has done for commercial/corporate clients:
Florida: The Outdoor Adventure - Bug Report |
Florida: The Outdoor Adventure - A Snapshot in Time |
What's new in Version 2.0?
Version 2.0 is in mid-level beta right now, but is available for purchase
for $99.95, with a free upgrade to the final 2.0 version when development
is complete (users of SE 1.x can upgrade to SE 2.0 beta for $45). Being a
beta version does not mean that it is unstable or unusuable...simply that
all the features that are planned for this release have not been fully coded
into the software. This also means that the developer is open to you, the
user, for input into features that should be implemented in the final version.
So far, features added to the 2.0 beta version include: