At San Francisco's MacWorld which ran from January 4-8, NewTek introduced
LightWave [6], the product's most significant upgrade in 10 years. The new
version of the already popular 3D tool boasts more new features than ever
introduced to the product in previous upgrades, many of which have never
been seen on the Macintosh system before. On the modeling side of things,
LightWave [6] introduces a whole new modeling paradigm, which gives users
control over the manipulation and animation of their models to a degree
never before seen in LightWave. The software offers infinite layers of
projection -- procedural, gradient and UV maps -- and these layers can feed
into each other for texture blending and manipulation. On the animation
side of things, particularly character animation, [6] has some exciting new
additions. Unique to LightWave [6] is a new kind of character animation
toolset: InelligEntities. IntelligEntities consist of Skelegons, Endomorphs
and Multi-meshes, which allow objects to carry data well beyond simple
geometry. Skelegons are a type of polygon which appears like traditional 3D
bones, however, as you make modifications to your model, the 'bone'
structure is automatically updated along with it (how useful!). Endomorphs
allow lip-synch and other complex morphs to be created with the greatest of
ease, by simply training a single model. And the final tool in the
IntelligEntities toolset is Multi-meshes, which are hierarchical objects
that can be saved as a single, complete model with all of the user-defined
relationship and pivot data included. The new version of Lightwave also
includes a new hybrid Inverse/Forward Kinematics engine, and a completely
re-written curves editor, giving users ever more precise control over their
animation. And of course, rendering: version [6] introduces a number of new
rendering technologies into LightWave, including radiosity and caustics
rendering; a 320-bit IEEE floating point rendering pipeline; sub pixel
displacement rendering (used for volumerics); and High Dynamic Range
Imagery to name a few. LightWave [6] is an exciting release for 3D
creatives on the Macintosh platform, and if the product can do even half of
the things NewTek says it can, then it will vastly increase the LightWave
user's toolset, and with that, the standard of their work and workflow.
Rick DeMott
Animation World Network
Creator of Rick's Flicks Picks
