Industry-leading video and 3D animation tools producer NewTek, Inc. has announced LightWave v9.5, a major update to its award-winning 3D application LightWave 3D. New capabilities include a complete hair and fur solution, new lighting system and many improvements to animation, global illumination, rendering and workflow.

The update will be available to registered owners of the LightWave v9 series at no charge. The LightWave v9.5 Open Beta program is scheduled to begin in early March; LightWave v9 owners who wish to participate may register now by visiting http://register.newtek.com.

LightWave v9.5 Update includes:

Character Animation Enhancements
New Hair and Fur System
Enhanced IK and Animation Systems
New Collada, FBX and OBJ I/O
New IK Calculation Options for Faster Performance
New Bone Type - Joints
New Objective Options for IK
IK/FK blending
Multi-threaded Mesh Deformation Evaluation
Modeler

UV Unwrap/UV Relax
Symmetry Tolerance
Lighting, Rendering and Surfacing Enhancements
All New Lighting System

New Light API
IES Lights
New Spherical Light
Area and Linear Lights Enhanced
Renderer

Faster Sampling System for GI
Improved GI Quality New GI Controls to Customize the Render
Disk-Based GI Cache
Node Editor Enhancements

Interpolated Soft Reflections/Refractions
Support for New Light API Functions
Oren-Nayar Shading Option for Many Materials
Optimizations for Materials and Shaders
SDK and LScript Improvements

New Light Plug-in Class for third Party Lights and Light Plug-ins
SDK Support for New GI Functions and Disk Cache
SDK Support for New IK and Animation Capabilities
Set Surface Properties Through the Surface Global
UI and Workflow Enhancements

Enhanced Scene Limits
Updated Scene File Format
EXIF Metadata Support
OpenGL GLSL Enhanced for New Lighting System
Image Viewer Consolidation

In addition to the new capabilities in LightWave v9.5, the LightWave v9 series has delivered enhanced performance in a number of areas including improved global illumination with higher quality and faster rendering, expanded OpenGL capabilities with new depth of field preview, advancements in the new camera tools and the node and materials editing system. Further, there are now over 24 hours of free LightWave training available online at www.lightwave3d.com.

LightWave v9 is available now at $US895 (MSRP). Registered owners of LightWave 3D [8] or earlier are eligible to purchase an upgrade to LightWave v9 for US$395. For more information or to purchase, visit www.lightwave3d.com or call 800-368-5441. For international inquiries, call +1-210-370-8000.