Battlestar Galactica Series:  Ultimate Guide to Gun & Engine FX

This is Kelly ‘Kat’ Myers first video for KURV studios and the first in a series on his work at Battlestar VFX on the award winning TV series, Battlestar Galactica. Kelly‘s training will not only help you create gun flashes and engine flames with realistic glows, his training will help you understand the concepts so you can take these techniques and apply them to other projects.

Kelly ‘Kat’ Myers brings his own style of techniques to this series of training. His techniques saved Battlestar VFX hundreds of hours of time on the show while winning several awards including an Emmy. Now you can see these techniques in action and apply these lighting, rendering and post production time saving techniques to your projects, space, or non-space scenes.

This title was created with intermediate to advanced LightWave 3D users in mind. Kelly’s approach of project based training will have you using LightWave 3D more efficiently and intelligently.

Kelly’s post production techniques are done here in the video using eyeonline’s Digital Fusion. However, these techniques can be used in Nuke, After Effects or any other compositing packages you may prefer.

While Fusion is shown, these techniques can be easily be done in Nuke or After Effects.

Artist Profile: Kelly Lee Myers "Kat"

Kelly, or "Kat" as some call him, has been working with Lightwave and Fusion for almost 2 decades. As the VFX Consultant for Battlestar Galactica, he has won both a Peabody and an Emmy award during seasons II and III. Beyond BSG, Kat has worked on SG:1, SG: Atlantis, Elektra and many other shows over the years on set doing Motion Control Camera work and real-time compositing and has also worked in games and multi-media. He continues today to produce VFX work in artist and supervisory roles for productions around the world and also somehow fits in the time to write TV/Film Scripts for something to do when he can't sleep.

Outside of VFX, Kat's other persona, DJ Lithium relates to his other favorite profession, which is of course the art of vinyl record Deejaying. Considered by many to be one of the top Trance DJs in North America, he ownes and operates Canada's Largest Vinyl record releasing trance labels, Black Tiger Recordings and his mixes can be heard via iTunes. As a producer of over 14 12" singles and dozens of incredibly popular DJ mixes, blacktigerrecordings.com radio has has been on the air for over decade with fans in every corner of the globe.

Kelly/Kat/Lithium also enjoys BMX street riding and annoying authority figures in all shapes and sizes.

This Class is Sponsored by: Maas Digital

Dan Maas developed StarPro because he was frustrated with the traditional methods for rendering stars. Lightwave's point particles don't motion-blur properly and have aliasing problems even at high AA settings, while texture-based techniques are prone to blurriness issues.

StarPro uses an innovative rendering algorithm that draws realistic star fields with flawless anti-aliasing and motion blur in only seconds per frame. Stars will never be jaggy or flicker even under the most extreme camera motions. StarPro includes a NASA database of over 2 million stars so you can render the real night sky, and an optional randomized star field in case you don't want to see familiar constellations.

• Integrates seamlessly with Lightwave 3D® scenes
• Star positions, brightnesses, and colors taken from a real star catalog
• Use the included NASA star databases, or create your own star fields
• Fully supports high-dynamic-range rendering (HDRI) with or without gamma encoding
• Resolution independent; suitable for web, TV, HD, and film
• Production-tested on Maas Digital's own animation projects

For more images or info, see http://www.maasdigital.com/starpro/

Sample Screen Shots from this Videos: