Lightwave - examples of Hyper Voxels for visual FX @DavidRidlen

Uploaded July 2019 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

Do not try this at home kids. There are better ways to achieve FX.
These are mostly tests I did over the last 20 years, using procedural HVs. There are no fluids. With LW 2018, HVs were relegated to "legacy," and no longer render with moblur, so they are officially obsolete, although they have been undeveloped for many years. They are replaced by the new and more complex volumetrics, but those do not yet replace the ease and functionality of simple HV tricks. For FX, use TurbulenceFD, Blender or Houdini. The upheaval at 2:22 was done by Brad Mullenix, and the Torus crumbling at the end was done by Dennis Greenlaw, both for the movie Epoch that I was CG supervisor on.

Lightwave - examples of Hyper Voxels for visual FX

Bush Burst - made of Lightwave hyper voxels (HD)

Building demolition test, created in Lightwave 11.6. 1440p HD

$Looper - cell phone created in Lightwave (view at Original res) Please view original res at 2048x1556. These are a few shots I worked on for the movie Looper, demonstrating the result of some manual tracking/match moving tricks I developed over the years- http://forums.newtek.com/showthread.php?94121-Matchmoving-in-Lightwave I modeled, textured, lit, tracked, and did first pass comps of a futuristic, folding cell phone. Created and rendered in Lightwave, and comped in Fusion. There are two other phone shots in the movie that are not shown here. The phone is slightly transparent so I had to also track CG fingers to reflect, refract, and cast shadows on the phone. Each of the four folding panel motions had to be individually keyframed. Tracking the phone was tricky since each of the actors individual fingers were also slightly flexing so there was no reference point within the plate to definitively track thruout a given shot. It was noticeable if the CG phone wriggled inappropriately by even a single pixel. The phone flaps also had to be animated with slightly more apparent weight than the paper card the actor was holding, as the card would sometimes jump in a single frame. The phone was rendered in one pass for comp.$

Lightwave 9.6 voxel fire - 120fps, no plugins.

The Shining Elevator of Blood recreated with RealFlow 4 & Lightwave 9.6

Archangel, scene previsualization - 2006