San Francisco - NewTek’s 3D division is previewing the latest version of LightWave, its 3D animation system during GDC. “NewTek personnel work closely on a day-to-day basis with LightWave artists so that they know exactly what this audience is trying to accomplish,” says a representative. The LightWave renderer is said to be easy to set up and use, and unlimited render nodes are free. Among the features new to LightWave Version 9.5 are: A flexible hair and fur system able to be seen in in-camera reflections, refractions, with volumetric rendering capabilities and the ability to instance hair strands allowing for millions of hairs in a scene; a new lighting system with IES lighting, spherical lights, and improved area and linear lights; and more.
LightWave Version 9.5 incorporates:
- Expanded inter-application operability with Collada, OBJ, and FBX I/O including Skin Cluster import/export, base pose import/export, and conversion
- A flexible hair and fur system able to be seen in in-camera reflections, refractions, with volumetric rendering capabilities and the ability to instance hair strands allowing for millions of hairs in a scene
- A new lighting system with IES lighting, spherical lights, and improved area and linear lights
- Enhanced animation capabilities, including FK/IK blending, joints, pole vectors, and multi-threaded mesh deformations
- Increased speed and flexibility added to the render engine, with GI improvements, more control, and network-render visible disk-based radiosity caching
- Modeler additions, including ABF UV unwrapping and relax functions, and better Symmetry tolerance
- Updated SDK support for new GI, IK, and animation capabilities
- Improved image handling, including EXIF Metadata support and LDR/HDR image control
- Further optimizations for surfacing, particularly for materials and other node-based shaders