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MillimeterLightwave 6 from NewTek
Oct 1, 2000 12:00 PM, By Frank McMahon
Lightwave from NewTek makes you feel like a superstar Lightwave from NewTek has seen an aggressive upgrade path for the better part of a decade. This premiere modeling and 3D-animation program has really advanced and kept up with the current crowd of 3D heavyweights. The latest version is quite different from previous upgrades for a couple of different reasons. First, the program represents a ground-up rewrite of the program that actually started a couple of years ago. It's better organized, faster, and more powerful than previous versions. Also, while there have been various interface changes in the past, this will probably be the first update where existing users will experience a little disorientation at first. Control panels and requestors have been moved around and consolidated. But fear not, most everything is still in there, just in new locations. Some older commands and options have been rendered obsolete by the rewrite and other controls have been moved to places that make more sense. The manual actually does a great job of guiding you by featuring a section specifically designed to re-orientate Lightwave 5.6 users into the new design.
So what's new with Lightwave? Plenty, starting with the new rendering technologies throughout the program. Lightwave 6 features radiosity and caustics that gives the lighting a very dramatic and natural feel. An example noted in the enclosed videotape uses the sunlight in your house during the day. There are no lights on, however the sun's rays are bouncing all over the place, providing plenty of light. Lightwave can now re-create indirect light as it bounces off reflective and refractive surfaces. The results are truly remarkable and really lend a look to renderings that set it apart from other packages in this price range. Lightwave now sports a 160-bit IEEE floating-point rendering pipeline for precise color accuracy and improved hue depth, which adds further realism. One of the most amazing advances in the program is HDRI (High Dynamic Range Imagery) that allows scenes to be illuminated from original photographs. Imagine constructing a desert landscape, a lake, and a few palm trees. Typically you would create a complex lighting scheme to re-create, for example, the landscape at sunset. With HDRI you simply import an image in the background and that is used for the illumination. For example, the varied brightness in a sky background image would light the scene accordingly - less bright above and brighter at the horizon, with the scene's objects lit in relation to the image. It's a pretty cool effect and certainly can create much more natural effects than sometimes harsh spot or flood lights can produce.
A rendering goal of NewTek's has been to increase the speed of computing-intensive elements, such as Hypervoxels, Lightwave's volumetric surface system. This new version features optimizations that provide an increase in rendering speed above 400%. Volumetric lighting also gains a speed increase with a 300% upgrade. Volumetric light is excellent for creating such effects as smoke and haze, as well as producing light with some texture on it. Also onboard is new Soft Body Dynamics, which allows animation effects for such items as cloth and hair. Presets, such as silk, are available and everything from gravity to wind to turbulence can be taken into account when creating these realistic natural effects.
Aside from the rendering aspects, character animation has gotten an overhaul as well. Skelegons (Lightwave 6 also got a full upgrade of buzzwords) are a new type of polygon that is saved with an object as a bone system. This way you can work on the character's design and the bone section is updated right along with it. Endomorphs let you change facial expressions on your characters with a few clicks. While not a complex lip-syncing engine, it does provide an excellent start to getting your models reacting. Lightwave 6 adds a new hybrid Inverse/Forward Kinematics engine that allows freeform and locked IK work, while at the same time allowing global flexibility and direct control. Also onboard is vertex grouping, which allows better grouping for bone assignments.
One of the problems with reviewing this version of Lightwave is trying to cover all the neat stuff contained in this overflowing update. There are literally more than 1,000 new additions and features, as well as really advanced forms of rendering and much improved character animation. The interface will be a slight challenge for some however. As a Lightwave user for about 10 years, the past changes have been gradual and it's been great to get down the locations and know exactly where everything is. While the interface looks the same, several things have moved, so expect a ramp-up time to really get comfy. Learning Lightwave, or any 3D program for that matter, takes time and it is helpful to have quality training material. NewTek scores here with new slimmed down manuals that trim off some of the elongated tutorials of versions past. The two main manuals are broken up into Motion and Shape - one for animating and one for modeling. They are an interesting mix of reference manuals, with tutorials slipped in here and there. The third manual, Getting Started, does a great job of getting old and new users up to speed. The package also includes two videotapes. The first is a guided tour, which is more of a technical discussion of not only what the new features are but how they work and interact with each other. The video is less than an hour in length, but it does cover a lot of ground and does show some inspiring examples. The second tape is an 85-minute group of tutorials on interface controls, tool palettes, the graph editor, image editor, and weight maps. Both tapes are hosted by Brad Peebler, NewTek's vice president of 3D graphics. He knows Lightwave so well and is so excited by the possibilities that you literally get swept up in the program.
But getting swept up in Lightwave is not all that hard. This is the most evolutionary upgrade I have ever seen in 10 years. As for current users, Lightwave will have you from the onset. It's the 3D equivalent of a rock concert and you are center stage. The tools are advanced and powerful and the upgrade is a no-brainer. New users should be prepared for a little bit of a learning curve. It's definitely a deep program. But after the hump, you may be hard pressed to find a more intuitive and natural-to-use program. What will really help most is the nicely produced videotapes. They are created by Desktop Images and the company has a stack of other Lightwave training tapes when you are ready.
Users old and new will find much to like with the new Lightwave. The software has a huge following in Hollywood and television, and it can surely handle any 3D job you throw at it.
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
