NewTek LightWave LightWave 3D combines a state-of-the-art renderer with powerful, intuitive modeling, and animation tools. Tools that may cost extra in other professional 3D applications are part of the product packag
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NewTek LightWave Description

Award-Winning, Production-Proven VFX and Animation Tools for Artists LightWave 3D combines a state-of-the-art renderer with powerful, intuitive modeling, and animation tools. Tools that may cost extra in other professional 3D applications are part of the product package, including 999 free cross-platform render nodes, support for Windows and Mac UB 64 and 32-bit operating systems, free technical support and more. LightWave is enjoyed worldwide, as a complete 3D production solution for feature film and television visual effects, broadcast design, print graphics, visualization, game development, and Web. LightWave is responsible for more artists winning Emmy Awards than any other 3D application. Major Studios and Post-Production Houses spend years assembling their custom pipelines, often at great expense and requiring large numbers of technical staff to maintain. Those complex pipelines are perfect for companies with hundreds of employees, but can be overkill for the majority of studios around the world with 40 employees or less. LightWave fits seamlessly into large multi-software pipelines - with its powerful interchange tools including FBX, ZBrush GoZ, Collada, Unity Game Engine Support, and Autodesk Geometry Cache. Unlike other software packages, LightWave offers artists and studios a complete end-to-end solution right out of the box. Robust polygonal and subdivision surface modeling, unique. Interchangeable layered and nodal texturing, along with powerful dedicated node material shaders. Powerful animation and rigging tools. Eye-popping volumetric and dynamic effects systems. A production proven, award-winning Global Illumination render engine - built in. You decide what workflow or pipeline suits you best and LightWave puts all of the tools in your hands. LightWave set the standard for polygonal, subdivision surface modeling a decade before many of the other 3D software packages included even basic polygonal modeling tools. While others were basing their pipelines on clunky spline-patching workflows, LightWave artists were quickly and efficiently modeling with smooth subdivision surfaces interactively. LightWave continues to offer powerful, rock-solid modeling tools and the latest versions of LightWave raise the bar with increased interactivity and ease of use. LightWave offers two surfacing systems to the artist. A fast, simple to use layer-based system, and a very flexible and powerful nodal system. Each offer different workflows to suit the artist - for quick results, the layered system is perfect for fast visualization and concept design. For those who like to dig deep, the nodal system offers ultimate creative freedom. These systems can be used independently of each other, but unique to LightWave is the ability to mix them together. You can use the layered surfacing to achieve results quickly, then choose any of the surface properties to use in a nodal context. This allows you to create extremely complex results very quickly. The node system also includes easy to use physically accurate material shaders for glass, metal, skin and carpaint, allowing you to achieve photoreal results quickly. The rigging tools in LightWave are fast and flexible and again offer artists choices in workflow. LightWave pioneered a very powerful and easy to set up automatic joint influence falloff system. This means that you can either choose to setup industry standard weight maps for your characters and rigged geometry or you can elect to bypass that often time-consuming weight mapping process for quick visualization and concept design animation workflows by using the automatic joint falloff that is built in to LightWave's animation system. This allows you to quickly and easily swap out geometry in rigs with zero weight map hassles. But you always have the choice to work with weight maps for that added control when your project requires it. LightWave includes powerful procedural, nodal, and keyframe animation tools. An easy to use and customizable keyframe graph editor allows you to quickly place and edit keys, time scale, filter, and even manipulate your animations with expressions. Bake your animations per keyframe or with frame stepping and create motion clips to blend together within the non-linear motion mixer. You can even bake animations to Autodesk geometry cache or industry standard MDD files to simplify the scene for rendering or for export to other animation packages. For facial animation LightWave includes an efficient blend-shape system called Endomorphs which includes all of your morph targets within your base object. Endomorphs can even be sculpted in ZBrush using the new ZBrush GoZ interchange tools included in LightWave. LightWave’s development team is bridging the gap between real and virtual worlds, by bringing together the broadest array in any application of new devices with which to interact with the set and characters inside LightWave's virtual stage and model shop. Device support ranges from economical mice, tablets and game system controllers to the sensor arrays and custom cameras and devices used let directors, lighting grips and camera operators walk a real set and fully capture their data into the virtual set modeled in LightWave. Applications range from propelling your camera on an architectural flythrough using a 6DoF mouse to puppeteering your characters live on stage using Playstation Move controllers, to recording every camera move shot for shot for a major motion picture, a technique pioneered on the film Avatar. Instancing allows vast duplication of objects in a scene with very little overhead. With instancing huge ‘virtual’ polygon counts can be achieved allowing the artist to populate their scenes with incredible detail, yet retain reasonable render times and memory usage. While instances can be thought of as clones of the original source objects, they do not need to look identical. They can be randomly scaled, positioned, rotated and even surfaced entirely differently from the source, allowing for a huge variety of uses. 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 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. Hypervoxels allows you to create beautiful smoke, flame, liquids, explosions, nebulas, clouds or any other volumetric effect that you can imagine. With real-time interactive support within LightWave's VPR, you can experiment and adjust volumetric effects to your heart's content. All calculated at beautiful, final render quality directly within the LightWave interface. ParticleFX Is a robust, fully-featured particle engine within LightWave. The flexibility of ParticleFX allows a wide variety of looks; from explosive effects to slow moving smoke-like behaviors. Particle emitters can be stand-alone, or attached to objects to emit particles from their vertices, polygon normals or surfaces. ParticleFX works seamlessly with HyperVoxels to allow the rendering of particles in any way imaginable. If you need hair, fur, feathers, or scales then the FiberFX tools included with LightWave are just what you are looking for. Styling and guide creation tools are included so that you can get your fibers looking just as you envision. FiberFX is known for its visual quality and its consistent look in various different lighting environments. FiberFX includes a beautiful and speedy pixel shader mode and for complex scenes where you need fibers to be ray traced in reflections or refractions you have the option of a more detailed volumetric mode. LightWave’s flocking system is based on 3D computer models of coordinated animal motion, things like flocks of birds, herds of animals or schools of fish. It can be used with LightWave’s instancing system or HyperVoxels. Use the Flock controller, which calculates crowd avoidance of neighbors, target alignment, and cohesive attractions, to create realistic natural motions, with ease. Classic examples of flocking motion are: Flocks of Birds Schools of Fish Swarms of Insects Animal Herd Behaviors Craft Maneuvers (planes, alien ships, etc) LightWave includes one of the world's most amazing render engines at no extra cost. Everything comes down to the final rendered image and with LightWave you don't have to buy extra rendering software to setup a complex render and shading pipeline. LightWave has everything you need to achieve the most amazing results at the highest quality. You will quickly see why LightWave is the Emmy Award-Winning Software used on so many top Hollywood films, television shows, commercials, music videos, and games. LightWave's VPR (Viewport Preview Renderer) is an interactive renderer that enables artists to experiment with lighting, textures, volumetrics, and shading right in the LightWave viewport. VPR produces results which are similar to a final rendered image and often at a fraction of the time. VPR also has the advantage of being able to render in any viewport and with any view type, which demonstrates the versatility of the renderer. VPR provides you with instant results and a shockingly fast interactive rendered view of scenes and objects with interactive lighting, nodal shading and full support for instancing, fibers, and volumetrics. The VPR has to be seen to be believed... users of previous LightWave versions refuse to go back after experiencing the LightWave interactive VPR rendering system right in their viewport window. Linear Colorspace Workflow is the process of ensuring all scene assets that are fed to the renderer are in the same colorspace as the render engine. The resulting rendered image also needs profiling for the target display it will be viewed on in order to look correct. This process can be quite complex in other software. In LightWave, it's as simple as turning it on, and choosing the output profile. LWF in LightWave supports standard sRGB as well as ICC Color Profiles. You have complete control over which assets are profiled, along with pre-defined presets to make setup a one-click process. LightWave offers all three major stereo camera rigs including parallel, toe-in, and off-axis rig types. Artists have the ability to dynamically correct for toe-in distortion in the animation pipeline and preview the stereoscopic effect interactively in OpenGL with a simple click-and-drag convergence point adjustment in the viewport. The interocular and convergence points can be dynamically animated over time to track stereo changes within a shot and the rig included in LightWave is the same exact rig used by several top Hollywood production companies on full stereoscopic IMAX 60mm feature film effects sequences on projects including 'Aliens of the Deep' and 'Ghosts of the Abyss' both by James Cameron. Python is an industry standard programming language prevalent in most CG pipelines. The inclusion of Python in LightWave allows even further integration of LightWave into studio pipelines, as those familiar with Python can quickly begin writing tools for LightWave. LightWave has extremely robust interchange tools tested and production-proven by top Hollywood studios. This allows easy dataflow back and forth between LightWave and the other major 3D animation and effects software packages. LightWave offers a complete pipeline from model to render but the sky is the limit with your pipeline setup. LightWave can solve problems and offer unique solutions for any mixed software pipeline. For example, rig and animate in Maya and then export your geometry cache files directly into LightWave where you can build your environments, add effects, and then render the entire project in LightWave. Or simply model and texture your geometry in LightWave and export via FBX to any major package. Another example would be quickly rigging in LightWave and exporting the rig to Motionbuilder where you can apply motion capture files and then import the final character performance into Maya or Max. It's your pipeline with your unique needs. LightWave can be a powerful tool to solve a large number of production problems and help streamline your project.

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