Today NewTek announced on a press conference the new version of their Emmy® Award-winning, professional 3D modeling, animation, and rendering software Lightwave™ 11. Lightwave 11 it’s an essential tool in many CG studios around the world fitting into any studio pipeline seamlessly, offering support for Autodesk Geometry Cache and FBX, including camera matching with Autodesk Maya cameras. It also supports the Unity game engine and Pixologic GoZ ZBrush workflow, making it ideal for all production environments and individual artists.
LightWave 11 is a complete out-of-the-box pipeline that puts award-winning modeling, rigging, effects, dynamics, animation, and final rendering at the fingertips of 3D artists. Lightwave offers many unique technologies such as the Virtual Preview Renderer (VPR) for onscreen real-time rendering, Anaglyph Stereoscopic Preview for real-time interocular, 'red-blue' anaglyphic separations, and more.
New features in Lighwave 11 includes:
Instancing
- Duplicate a vast number of objects in a scene with very little memory overhead
- Create huge polygon groups with great detail while retaining reasonable rendering times
- Scale, position, rotate, and surface randomly cloned objects for realistic detail
Flocking
- Animate realistic motion of grouped objects such as such as birds, fish, insects, animals, aircraft, spaceships, and more, using a new motion modifier
- Calculate crowd avoidance of neighboring objects, target alignment, and cohesive attractions with the motion modifier
Fracture
- Pre-fracture objects that are ready for destruction with a new Modeler tool that is designed to complement Bullet Dynamics in Layout
- Animate explosions with or without using dynamics
- Control the density of fractures by applying weight maps to objects
Bullet Dynamics
- Deliver physics-based animation with the Bullet Dynamics engine in Layout and the new Fracture tool in Modeler
- Collapse buildings, create explosions, or quickly place objects in a natural-looking random pattern
Virtual Studio and Interchange Tools
- Support for new controller types, including the Sony PlayStation® Move, allow users to easily control and record the item results with a LightWave channel
- Import and export model and texture data to Pixologic ZBrush software with GoZ™ technology
Source and full article: NewTek