Joe Cosman releases Advanced Facial Rigging 1

Joe Cosman has just released his latest messiah training set Advanced Facial Rigging 1. You can get this on disc from Cafe Press or download it now from lulu.com

Joe has 4 other training sets available covering rigging, animation and general tips and tricks.

New plugins and a New site for Plankton Invasion

Our first news of 2008 and while it's not messiah3 it is a script, a plugin and a new site for Plankton Invasion.

From the site: "What makes Plankton so unique is the online script contest, making the series as interactive as can be. Within 4 weeks the first contest makes its debut and then you the audience can literally decide what will happen to our special task force unit by sending in absurd jokes, wild situations AND crazy scripts!"

Learn more at http://www.planktoninvasion.com/

Vegard aka "Useful Slug" has two new items for everyone, the Geometry Smoother plugin and the CreateBetterKey script. Learn more about these useful tools in the plugin section.

New Plankton Teaser

There's a new teaser trailer for Plankton Invasion to check out.

"Earth's first life forms and direct descendant's from the primal soup; want to reclaim their rightful place in the world. In order for them to re-conquer the planet, they need a global water world. They plotted a dark strategy and assigned a special task force to execute the operation; codename 'Global Warming'. No matter how microscopic in size, despite the insignificance of their actions, the fact they never conquer more than a dozen square meters beach or the mind blowing stupidity of their reasoning, they blindly believe in the success of their mission!

This is the never-ending story of Plankton Invasion."

Direct Link

More news on merssiah 3

Pricing and availability information for messiah 3 will soon be released from PMG.

From the PMG website: "We will be announcing the pricing and shipping date for messiah studio very soon. For many people, the biggest new feature is Fur, which for a while now has been the number one requested feature. There are plenty of other new features, both for animating and rendering, so check back here for further announcements."

New Plugins; ActionPack and ExpressionPack

Christopher Lutz has created 2 new plugins for messiah. The plugin 'ActionPack' contains several action commands for armatures. Amongst other, you will find:

- 'AP_Target', which can be used for the Animation:Master style control of objects; this is an improvement over the 'BoneController' plugin
- 'AP_Slider', for creating sliders with various options for keyframing
- 'AP_DragButton', for creating sliders that don't slide.
- 'AP_HideGroup' and 'AP_HideHandle' for showing and hiding groups and handles
- 'AP_ResetChannel', 'AP_ResetSelected' and 'AP_SelectObject' for resetting and selecting objects
- 'AP_SetOffset', which can be used for creating tab-like GUI elements

The plugin 'ExpressionPack' contains a few useful expressions, among them:

- 'EP_QuatBlend', which can be used for smooth blending of rotations (e.g. for a FK/IK switch).
- 'EP_FlipPitchKey' which helps to 'fix' keys that suffer from pitch flipping (this might happen when rotating in local mode)

You can download the plugins from cgtalk

Plankton Invasion animated series

Described as an "interactive-free-internet-broadcasting-mini" animated series, Plankton Invasion is a Tinkertree concept created by Joeri Christiaen. The project is animated with messiah and rendered in Lightwave using FPrime. The teaser movie is now available and the full site is expected before January.

The following summary is from the Plankton Invasion website.

"Earth's first life forms and direct descendant's from the primal soup; want to reclaim their rightful place in the world. In order for them to re-conquer the planet, they need a global water world. They plotted a dark strategy and assigned a special task force to execute the operation; codename 'Global Warming'. No matter how microscopic in size, despite the insignificance of their actions, the fact they never conquer more than a dozen square meters beach or the mind blowing stupidity of their reasoning, they blindly believe in the success of their mission! This is the never-ending story of Plankton Invasion."

3rd Party Autorigger for messiah

Vegard aka "useful slug" and Pekka aka "peski" have created the first 3rd party autorigger for messiah. 2 videos are available showing the plug-in, one shows a Biped and explanation and the other is of a cat model.

The plug-in is available online at www.usefulslug.com

And if that's not enough for your Monday, Vegard's also created a new tutorial How to rig a bendy limb in Messiah:Studio.

messiah V3 sneal peak: Hair Rendering

Fori posted a sneak peak of messiah V3 at CGTalk. Details include:

• The hair can be shaded by any shader attached to it, or by an internal hair shader.(Allows different looks to be attained from real to cartoony)
• It can be lit by virtually any type of light.
• It can be rendered with Global Illumination
• It can be seen through glass, and through reflection
• It has a realtime display in the world view where you can interactivley adjust length, curl kink etc
• Coverage and other hair properties can be controled by image maps. It can lay with gravity and be combed to a downward direction setup alignment of your model. (more options to come)
• It can be clipped to different shapes by using texture maps or procedurals
• It can inherit the color of a base texturemap, or gradient shader
• It renders fast

Visit CGTalk to check for more information.

New plug-in CharacterSwitcherOffer

Vegard Myklebust has created the plug-in
CharacterSwitcherOffer.mp

From Vegard's description: "If you've got multiple characters in a scene in messiah, it can sometimes slow the experience down a little, especially when the rigs are heavy. This script enables you to make an armature handle that turns off subdivision, turns off the bone deform effect and hides the character geometry, or brings it all back at the click of a button."

Weights for messiah! wow!

Peski gives us another plug-in today ImportWeights.mp. This plug-in imports weights from an ascii-file. There's also an lscript undo_weightexport.ls by Eetu Martola to export weight data from LW. For other applications take a look at the readme and sample files to create your own exporter.