Originally announced last November, LightWave 11 was originally due to ship at the end of 2011, but has been stuck in final bugfixing for a month or so. 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.
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
NewTek’s Rob Powers introduces the new features of LightWave 11 at last year’s official launch event
For more info visit: NewTek