Miku First Signs of Life And Other Interesting Things

Hello!  I've completed the displacement maps for Miku's body*, and then I modeled the low poly cage mesh.  And as you can see from the attached short video clip I have her arm bending with all of the joint deformation morphs complete for natural bending (no flexing yet).

I have some good news...  At least, I don't think I have announced this here yet.  As of two days ago, Lightwave 3D, the animation software I use has been officially acquired by a new group.  They are calling themselves Lightwave Digital.

Let me give you a brief bit of history...  Back in 1991, NewTek created the Video Toaster.  It was a card that slotted into the Amiga computer and it hit the video industry like a nuclear bomb.  For the first time, someone could create professional looking video without spending $100,000.  It had a video switcher for transitions from one video source to another, a character generator, paint box, chroma effects, luminance keyer and 3D modeling & animation (Lightwave).  You can see the historic original announcement video narrated by the late, great Ken Nordine here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtYLx6z2eeg

Saturday Night Life's Dana Carvey has a brother who worked on the development of the Video Toaster.  That is why you can see Garth wearing a Video Toaster T-shirt in Wayne's World 2.

NewTek continued to evolve both Lightwave 3D and their video hardware, now called the TriCaster.  I hear it is extremely popular with churches and remote live events.  Anyway, in 2020 a company called VizRT purchased NewTek.

Kind of a funny story (and a bit sad as well), VizRT had no idea they had purchased Lightwave 3D.  They were interested in the video tech.  All of the sudden they started getting flooded with phone calls from Lightwave users asking what was going to happen to Lightwave.  Lightwave 2020 was nearly complete when they purchased NewTek, so they had the programmers finish up LW2020, then all of development ceased.  The programmers were assigned to other departments.  So sad.

Lightwave Digital, the new owners said they expect to have a series of updates starting in six months.  It turns out a couple of Lightwave developers were secretly continuing Lightwave development while funding and negotiations were going on with VizRT.  One thing they said they plan on addressing is Lightwave's rendering speed.  See, it's not just me that noticed it...  Lightwave's rendering engine is quite slow and in dire need of optimization.  Unfortunately that will not be ready in time to help with the animation that is currently rendering... But surely it should benefit Miku's first animation!

Speaking of which, Nadia's (foreground pass) render is on frame 4284 of 11275... So about 36% complete.

Anyway.. Much to be done yet.  I will be posting a "Paid Creation" post later today.  If you can afford to contribute I very much appreciate it.  I need to start saving up for the next Lightwave update to be sure!

* Regarding Miku's displacement maps...  Her entire body is scupted for the relaxed neutral pose, not the flexed version.  Also, I haven't made her veins yet.
I just now noticed that I forgot to sculpt her pectoral muscles displacement map.  Whoops.  I'll get on that next.

EDIT: Further tweaked the arm deformations