LightWave 3D 11

This is NewTek LightWave.

There’s a reason that LightWave artists have won more Emmy® Awards for their stunning visual effects work than any other group of 3D users. If you can dream it, you can make it.

Modeling, animation and rendering tools that bring out the artist in you—not the technician. The LightWave interface is intuitive, with easy tools to create your content and a straightforward stage with cameras and lights where you can put it all together and bring it to life. You’ll also find LightWave to be amazingly interactive. Change a light. Change a color. Rotate around your scene to get another perspective. See it right now.

Instancing

Instancing lets you create mass duplication of objects in a scene, with very little overhead. Previously, you would simply run out of memory. Now, with the ability to have huge 'virtual' polygon counts, artists can populate their scenes with incredible detail, and yet retain reasonable render times.

While instances can be thought of as clones of the original source objects, they don't need to look identical. They can be randomly scaled, positioned, rotated and even surfaced completely different from the source. This means you can use instancing for any number of uses.

Flocking

Use the Flock controller, which calculates crowd avoidance of neighbors, target alignment, and cohesive attractions, to create realistic natural motions, with ease.These are the three elements of any flocking system.

Classic examples of flocking motion are:

• Flocks of Birds
• Schools of Fish
• Swarms of Insects
• Animal Herd Behaviors
• Craft Maneuvers (planes, alien ships, etc)

Fracture

This new Modeler tool was designed specifically to compliment Bullet dynamics in LightWave Layout. It allows the artist to pre-fracture objects ready for destruction.

There are a number of different methods and associated settings to fine tune the look of the pieces as they are broken up. You also have the ability to create an Endomorph of the resulting fracture, which means you can animate the explosion, with or without using dynamics.

Weight maps can also be applied to the source object to control the density of where the fracturing takes place, making Fracture a flexible tool for creating breaking objects in LightWave.

Bullet Dynamics

Bullet is a fast, production proven, open source physics engine that is used in many high profile, effects-driven films and real-time game engines. Bullet features 3D rigid body dynamics originally created by Erwin Coumans.

LightWave 11 features the Bullet dynamics engine directly in Layout so that it can be used with the new Fracture tool in Modeler to create compelling physics-based animation. Things like collapsing buildings, explosions, and even natural placement of items in a random pattern, would otherwise be difficult to do by hand.

Virtual Studio Tools

The Virtual Studio Tools first made an appearance in LightWave 10, as a way of using third party controllers to animate items in your scene.

LightWave 11 continues to expand on this concept by allowing more controller types, such as the affordable Playstation^® Move. These third party controllers use the new SDK available for the Virtual Studio Tools, which now allows developers to hook into the system directly.

Using the new Control Booth and Device Managers in VST, users can now manage every aspect of how their controllers are configured, and how they are used within LightWave. Essentially, anything that can be animated in LightWave can be controlled, using any device.

It is also now possible to modify how the data input is manipulated as it is captured into LightWave, using the Node Editor. This allows for complex logic to affect the input. Once a virtual performance is captured, the data can be edited in the Graph Editor, letting you hand edit any live-captured performances.

Virtual Studio Tools in LightWave 11 is a significant evolution of this technology, and with the new SDK, third party developers can extend and enhance it even further.

Interchange Tools

GoZ™

GoZ™ is an interchange technology from Pixologic^®, that allows applications to send model and texture data to and from ZBrush™ for sculpting detail on a base mesh. It has proved incredibly popular among many 3D artists. Now, LightWave 11 brings that technology to you.

The GoZ implementation in LightWave Layout and Modeler is robust and fully featured. It allows you to exchange model data, along with all the associated texture maps. The Modeler implementation even lets you use ZBrush for sculpting Endomorphs for things like facial morphs.

GoZ now allows LightWave to be even more integrated within studio pipelines, making it a great addition to the LightWave 11 toolset.

Render Buffer Enhancements

Saving and viewing the various buffers produced by the render engine to make up an image, is now more powerful and much easier in LightWave 11.

The new Compositing Buffer Export panel now makes it possible to select which objects are to be included with the buffers you specify, and easier to select which buffers are to be exposed for saving or viewing.

This makes rendering out for compositing much more streamlined, as it combines and extends the functionality of two different panels you had to visit in

previous versions of LightWave. It also allows saving of presets for the commonly used buffers to aid in setting up for output, something that was not possible before.

Python Scripting

Python is an industry standard programming language prevalent in most CG pipelines. The inclusion of Python in LightWave 11 allows even further integration of LightWave into studio pipelines, as those familiar with Python can quickly begin writing tools for LightWave.

FiberFX Enhancements

FiberFX now has a new volume rendering mode. "Stroke" is the original shading method for volumetric rendering. When set to "Solid," the user can apply shading and material like any normal surface.

This lets you create very complex looking fibers, easily, and perform parametric cylinder rendering of the fibers.

FiberFX volumetric rendering has also been enhanced with smooth line rendering to match the pixel filter look, as well as render buffer support for all fiber types.

New optimizations that make the building and relaxed distribution of fibers multi-threaded, give you faster render times and interactivity when working with fiber setup and styling. Additionally, the FiberFX instance accelerator demonstrates benchmarked rendering improvements of 2x for complex situations.

FiberFX has also benefited from the new instancing system in LightWave 11. Volume mode now uses the new built-in instancing system.

The old FiberFX Instancing Tab is no longer needed and has been removed.

FiberFX has also been given enhanced nodal support in the following areas:

• Instance Info node now works to change color on FiberFX instances in Solid volume type
• Added support for nodal color input to the stroke or ribbon type of volume rendering
• Add nodal color UV texture mapping support for volume stroke rendering, including smoothing
• Add nodal color UV texture mapping support for rasterized fibers, including smoothing
• Add alpha input into FiberFX node editor
• Add alpha mapping support for texture mapping

System Requirements

Why does LightWave require TCP/IP protocols for the Hub to operate?

LightWave uses this protocol to transfer the data between Layout and Modeler through the Hub. There is so much data to be passed back and forth that this was the best and fastest way to do it. There is a way to deactivate the Hub if installing TCP/IP on your system is a problem. Please contact our Technical Support for more information on how to do this.

Will my parallel dongle work with LightWave 9?

LightWave v9 will work with a parallel dongle, but only in a 32bit environment. In order to utilize the 64bit version of LightWave v9 a USB dongle is required.
What graphics cards are recommended for LightWave 9?

LightWave 9.x requires an OpenGL 2.0 (or higher) compliant graphics card with an nVidia or ATI GPU.

Minimum (64MB of RAM):
nVidia GeForce FX 5200
or
ATI Radeon 9500

Recommended (128MB of RAM):
nVidia GeForce 7300/Quadro FX 350 or higher
or
ATI Radeon X1300/FireGL V5200 or higher.