AmiFlash - 06/10/2023

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"Some tests on special effects with Lightwave, like lights, flashes, light streaks, and lightning...
The idea for this image came to me while I was watching the last Flash superhero movie at the Barge cinema last month (a film that includes other characters like SuperMan/Girl and Batman). I've liked the Flash character since I was a kid, back in the 1990s when they aired Barry Allen's series (The Flash) on the Italian TV channel Italia Uno (1992). It was really well done for those times!
So, while I was sitting in front of the big screen, I thought it would be great to create something similar on the Commodore Amiga graphic workstation using LW5.0. So, I thought about 'how to do it' since Newtek's glorious software didn't have many options for automatic special effects (unlike today's 3D programs). Therefore, the beauty was in building them entirely 'by hand'!
I must say that despite the program's limitations in this area, the result met my expectations:
- Random chaotic lightning with the Vertieletic Modeler plugin
- Linear light flashes created with extruded particles in Modeler
- Yellow light streaks. Simple parallelepipeds with quick passes combined with a blur effect
- Time tunnel, a simple cylinder with procedural textures and bumps
- The character's suit with light stripes that run across the entire body, created with a boolean tool (intersection) and then overlaid on the suit in Modeler.
- Additionally, the GLOW option of Lightwave was applied to all these effects for the luminous halo effect.
- The mask on the humanoid's head is a modeling and boolean work...

The image is actually a combination of two scenes due to the richness of elements and the processing limitations of the Amiga in the classic 680xx configuration. So the first scene with lightning and the tunnel was rendered, and then a second rendering with the character, making the previous one the background image.
I should note that skeletal animations in Lightwave version 5 are still quite primitive, and the limb bending effect tends to deform the character at the joints, so the muscular deformation effect in LW5.0 is completely imperfect! However, I make do with it and always look for the best angles to 'hide' some poorly executed parts. These are daring expedients aimed at the final result.
The rendering time for the first scene on the Amiga 1200 with Blizzard 1240 was 3 hours and 27 minutes for the background image of lightning and flashes. The rendering of the second scene with the Flash character took 5 hours and 24 minutes. Both scenes were rendered at a resolution of 1280x1024 pixels with maximum antialiasing.

Below is the IFF format created with Lightwave 5.0 on a real Amiga: Download

Image of Background:

Additionally, I include the image created on a real Amiga in IFF format for the background: Download

Screenshots of the scene in Lightwave, both the final rendering and of the tunnel:

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