How do the pros do it, i saw it on the making of TLOTR?
 

I was watching the making of the lord of the rings and they (weta digital) make there models with real bones and muscle and skin! How do they do it!!!!!? Do they use their own home grown programs or can you get them somewhere, does anyone know about this stuff!?

Most movie companys that make CG for movies have programers that write there own software for CG. Maya is a popular application for movie CG but many time the artists need more specilized tools for there movies. Like the studio that did "Ice Age" wrote there own software for fur and on Shrek they used mostly software written by programmers for there CG. Many of the off the shelf software programs use bones for animation but not many use muscles.

Lightwave, Maya, Softimage, and Max are probbly the most popular 3D apps they are generally the most well knows and robust. Maya is popular for movies. Max is popular for games. Lightwave is popular for TV. Now many of these apps are becomeing very powerfull and you will find work done for all areas of CG from all the apps just some are more popular in certian fields.

LightWave is the most well rounded CG program, probbly not the strongest but you can do more with Lightwave off the shelf than any other CG program. It also has whats considered the industrys best modeler and out of the box render engine.

And don't forget the incredible price and deals. (compared to the other software you mentioned.) :D

Are there any off the shelf programs/plugins that do it?

Not sure, but you may want to try looking at Messiah:Animate.


Take a look here: http://www.projectmessiah.com/

There is this plugin for 3D Studio Max:
http://www.cgcharacter.com/act_product_description.html

Btw, how the programmers do it?
THey use C++? is there any tutorial on making your own plugin for lightwave in C++? - (like worley?)

The only tutorial that i know of is here :http://www.catalystpics.co.uk/lwp/lesson1.htm

The best thing you can do is take a look at the SDK and the examples supplied with it.

All you need is a good knowlege of C.

What about lscrip in lightwave, seems like you could use that to make somthing, i am still 1/3 newbie so i'm not sure what you can do with lscrip, but its gotta be hard to write it in c++. Do you think that the whole skin, bone, muscle thing will become standard in lightwave in a few years, i really like that idea but it could take a while to make so i could see how it really would take a team of people to make a model with muscels and bones.

I actually find C to be very easy, but that's probably because i work as a compuetr programmer :)

To do a system like that would take a lot of work. It's not something that could be written quickly and easily. Lscript may be able to do it, but Lscript plugins run a lot slower than ones created in C.

I have been meaning to learn c in my spare time, start to learn a little, maybe a chapter or 2, then i get sidetracked in lightwave.


Anyone know where to get some lscript tutorials or know-how?

hopefully this helps a bit

http://www.newtek.com/products/light...eos/index.html

Those are some really nice tutorials, ill have to take a look at all of them. Thanks !