Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to make computer generated movies and pictures. Having just an Apple ][ severely restricted what I could do due to limited processing power and graphics capabilities. I was forced to render simple wire-frame models and film them straight from the screen to Super-8 movie film. The results were
not stellar.
(ahh, the times of very slow computers! To keep myself from going insane clicking the movie camera after each frame finished, I built myself a little remote control device that plugged into the Apple's game port. I was then able to have the computer trigger the movie camera to snap one frame after it completed. Too bad the whole sequence was recorded out of focus. Yes, the camera was capable of snapping one frame of movie film. A fourteen year old animator's dream.)
Now I have a powerful Windows 7 machine (3GHz Quad-core 64-bit!) with great software and graphics capabilities. I got right to work. One thing I admitted to early on was I have no talent for making models. Please understand that my renderings were constructed from models built by other
very talented (and very loaded with free time!) people out on the internet. Without them, I'd still be rendering movies of boxes and such. See the
credits.
I initially used trueSpace 3.0 from
Caligari to make a few
movies. I don't use that any more because was pretty limited for
what I wanted to do. I switched to
Lightwave 3D (now up
to v11) from
Newtek.
I've also written some extension plugins for Lightwave using their plugin SDK. Not much there yet, but you may find them useful if you're a 'waver yourself.
Finally, I've written a couple of tutorials. Check them out.