http://www.newtek.com/3d/lw55.html (Amiga Plus Extra No. 5/97, 05/1997)
Screen Shots
Layout Modeler
Morph Gizmo Volumetrics Examples
Explosive ideas that test the boundaries of 3D animation deserve a program that can realize them in exciting new ways. Creating worlds that no one's ever seen. Creatures that have never walked the Earth. Special effects, games, web sites - all creations that exist only in your mind. Until now.
LightWave 3D gives you an easy way to create the most sophisticated 3D animation imaginable, with formidable capabilities from an incredibly powerful, professional animation system. Its intuitive, complete, easy-to-use layout and modeling system delivers the ultimate in creative control, not to mention flexibility - the likes of which you've never seen. And unparalleled features for modeling, surfacing, lighting and animating are right at your fingertips.
For the past six years, the NewTek team has collaborated with some of Hollywood's hottest creative talents to develop an advanced 3D animation system. LightWave 3D packs a wallop of a punch. Raytracing, motion blur, MetaMation, inverse kinematics (IK), Bones, field rendering, lens flares, compositing - they're all here. LightWave 3D's OpenGL and Quickdraw® 3D support mean you can see your creations in real time.
What's more, working with Hollywood studios, like Will Vinton and Digital Domain, NewTek improved LightWave 3D's anti-aliasing quality by 300 percent over earlier versions. NewTek also improved the accuracy of IK, and increased speed by 500 percent. Its robust plug-in architecture means you can choose feature options that match the way you work. And it's exceptional image quality and throughput make LightWave 3D an ideal choice for special effects in television, film, commercial work, web page development, graphic arts, video games and education.
With all of this, plus an excellent return on investment, it's no wonder you can find LightWave 3D in more Hollywood animation suites than any other 3D program.
Yet you can get all of LightWave 3D's great features and exceptional performance for a price far more affordable than you dreamed possible. In fact, LightWave 3D costs up to 75 percent less than comparable programs.
It's no use having a great program if you can't run it. So LightWave 3D is available for all of the most popular platforms: Windows 95™, Windows NT™, Power Macintosh™, DEC Alpha™, Silicon Graphics Inc. and Sun Microsystems.
It would be hard to rival the kind of support LightWave 3D offers. 3D Design magazine said, "The endless number of tutorials available on the web, video training tapes, seminars, courses, and other training materials are absolutely amazing."
Throw in over 40,000 loyal artists who share what they know, and you can see why designers can't wait to get their hands on LightWave 3D. After all, by giving many 3D designers their start, and moving them from the garage to their own special effects companies, LightWave 3D has changed people's lives.
Naturally, LightWave 3D 5.5 includes all the great features found in earlier versions. But we've added a powerful list of new features and functions that make LightWave 3D even more attractive - and fun.
LightWave 3D 5.5's user interface maintains all the intuitive features and ease-of-use we've always had, but packages that with standard features of other computing interfaces you already know. What's more, you'll see higher resolution, greater color depth, coded button coloring for fast identification and even more creative options in how you approach your work
Who says you can'd do two things at once? With LightWave 3D 5.5, you can keep your panels (aka dialog boxes) open, move them to new screen positions, change values on a panel and view the result - all without closing the box. Think of it as productive interactivity.
With our new OpenGL, real-time texture viewing and user-selectable background color are a reality. Not only can you place textures interactively, you'll also get an even better view of your model or scene. In addition, the new RenderGL support takes added advantage of OpenGL hardware to accelerate the rendering process.
Our multi-threaded rendering means that users on multiprocessor systems can leverage the additional power that comes from their system's extra CPUs. Since multiprocessor machines are also the wave of the future, LightWave 3D is staying at the leading edge of the technology you'll be using tomorrow.
This great new feature is a quantum leap for character animation in general, and lip-sync, in particular. With Morph Gizmo, you can visually morph an object between several targets - for example, a series of facial expressions or phonemes. Dialogue and facial expressions are meshed by dragging sliders (an expression or mouth position, for instance) into place and watching the combination occur in real time. It's extremely effective and efficient and so advanced, it's hard to believe it's so easy to use.
With Direct 3D support, Intel system users can now choose their API, use low-cost Direct 3D accelerator cards and use either OpenGL or Direct 3D to create real-time shaded environments. The choice is yours.
As if all those features weren't enough, LightWave 3D has other new tools that make it more powerful... more versatile... and more fun... than ever. A new volumetric lighting engine lets you create ultra-realistic lighting effects. Hyper-Animation Language lets you create your own scripts for controlling virtually every LightWave 3D feature. And if you want to attach an audio file for timing purposes, the new audio scrubbing feature is just the ticket.
There are also two new modeling tools - Dragnet and Smooth Scale - designed to help you work with organic models. Both are especially great for MetaNURBS™ objects. Try the new extender plug-in and see how easily it gives you added control over the objects you create with MetaNURBS.
Want more? You got it. We've added a motion capture data conversion plug-in for compatibility with Acclaim and Wavefront formats. If you do character animation, you'll quickly appreciate the bone hierarchy creation you get from Skeleton Maker. You'll also appreciate the new color wheel option for great color control. On top of all that, the enhanced plug-in architecture and a host of other new features mean there's almost no end to what you can create in LightWave 3D.
Babylon 5
Blue M&Ms
Blossom
Courage Under Fire
Dark Skies
Deadly Tide
GoldenEye™ (James Bond)
Hercules: The Legendary Journeys
Nixon
Sliders
Star Trek Voyager, Deep Space Nine and Next Generation
The Titanic (television series)
Xena: Warrior Princess
The X-Files
Unsolved Mysteries
LightWave 3D's unique MetaNURBS is an elegant and easy way to model objects by transforming polygonal models to NURBS surfaces in real time. MetaNURBS delivers incredible detail and flexibility, so you can smooth organic objects even though the model is actually based on polygonal geometry. (Too bad competitors still find MetaNURBS' secret as difficult to solve as an X-Files mystery.) And with LightWave 3D, you can switch seamlessly between polygonal modeling and the organic power of NURBS for the best of both worlds. Pretty cool stuff.
Who wants to wait to see what they've created? Not you. Which is why LightWave 3D supports OpenGL and QuickDraw 3D. Now you can see objects, surfaces, composition and lighting in real time. It's what you've been waiting for.
IK accounts for all those linkages between say, a finger and the shoulder of the arm it's attached to. Move an M&M around the table and LightWave 3D's IK automatically adjusts for the movement of all the linkages in-between without endless tinkering to create a realistic motion. It's fast. Efficient. Simple.
No 3D program is complete without raytracing and LightWave 3D's is hard to beat. Thanks to its realistic reflection and refraction, great shadowing capabilities and more, LightWave 3D is professionally recognized as one of the highest quality rendering engines in the business.
LightWave 3D uses Bones to control any object's behavior, giving it natural-looking "life" and realism. Bones also relate beautifully to LightWave 3D's IK capabilities for believable, true-to-life animation. Turn on muscle flexing and joint compensation for ultra-realistic behavior.
With LightWave 3D, you get an almost inexhaustible list of lens and illumination effects, including point, spot, shadowing and lens flares, a technique we perfected. If you want depth-of-field, motion blur, field rendering and more, LightWave 3D is your program.
With its extremely robust plug-in architecture, LightWave 3D is a magnet for third-party developer special effects programs and tools. So if you're looking for add-on features like collision detection, 3D painting, particle systems, image filters or just about anything else, you can choose from an impressive list of available plug-ins to create exactly what you need.
Another great LightWave 3D feature is infinite layered surfaces, which provides algorithmic textures plus image mapping. The result is a versatile tool for stacking image upon image as deep (or high) as you like. Create clothes with wrinkles, creases and ripples or make waves with layers and crests. You can also set variable levels of transparency. It's as real as it gets.
The Boolean principle is simple. Add. Subtract. Intersect. We use it to let you take simple primitives, like spheres or cubes, and create complex shapes quickly and effortlessly.
Our spline modeling tool lets you create any shape you can dream up in incredible detail and endlessly modify your creations. So there's nothing you can't create.
Say you have a 3D creation and now you'd like it to look like a hand-drawn 2D object. Or maybe you want to merge conventional 2D with 3D animation. No problem. The cel shader calculates shading and operates much faster than hand drawing because the computer draws the interim frames. Unlike other programs, LightWave 3D's cel shader comes standard with the package. And not only is the cel shader worth the cost of the package all by itself... we expect it to revolutionize the industry.
There isn't a 3D designer on the planet who can't use LightWave 3D. With its high-end rendering and modeling capabilities, plus power and quality to satisfy the most accomplished, demanding expert, it's easy enough for even beginning 3D designers to get astonishing, professional results.
Learning to use LightWave 3D is fast and easy. In fact, in about 20 minutes, you can become familiar enough with its intuitive interface and main features to be creative - and productive - right away.
The reason is simple. LightWave 3D's enhanced interface is designed to work the way animators think and work, with the same logic and the same ability to adapt to new ideas. And, LightWave 3D's interface is exactly the same across all platforms. So if you use LightWave 3D on more than one system - say, on a laptop at home or on the road and on a powerful workstation at the office - you don't have to change a single thing about the way you work.
Unlike many animation programs, LightWave 3D is at home in any venue. Its front projection mapping allows you to seamlessly integrate 3D objects with 2D images for effects like photorealistic reflection, shadowing and refraction. For broadcast television, film and video design, LightWave 3D works seamlessly with animation and special effects. And for games, its ability to create efficient polygonal models quickly, smoth them out and move them around fast is hard to beat.
In the hot world of the Internet, LightWave 3D supports the VRML 2 standard, making it a rock-solid choice for sizzling web sites. VRML supports everything from texture and sound to hierarchical animation and morphing... all directly from layout. To keep you ahead of the curve in this fast-changing world, we even provide the lastest VRML version with a free download from our web site.
In the graphic arts, where high-res output is in great demand, LightWave 3D delivers with up to 8000 lines of resolution. For visualization, such as weather mapping or 3D data displays, LightWave 3D allows you to chart any information with ease. And when it comes to education, LightWave 3D can make the most complex concepts simple and exciting.
With all its power, sophistication and capabilities, LightWave 3D allows you to create anything you can dream up. And just like your creations, you've never seen anything like it. There's simply no other program that gives you so much professional performance, quality and flexibility for such an affordable price.
"LightWave 3D is a true filmmaker's tool. Anyone who knows filmmaking will feel comfortable with LightWave. It has a logical interface, and the output definitely has that film look."
Ron Thornton, Founder of Fondation Imaging, Emmy Award winning visual effects supervisor for Bablylon 5
"LightWave 3D's interface is very easy to navigate around. With most 3D packages, you reach a peak in creativity due to their lack of effects and rendering quality limitations. With LightWave 3D, I don't think there's anything I can't create."
Michael Sherak, Lead artist at Interplay Productions, Inc.
"LightWave 3D is the only software that we can depend on for 3D creatures. With its easy-to-use interface, it allows us to stay on budget, on schedule and make the creatures move and look great."
Everett Burrell, 3D supervisor, Flat Earth Productions, Inc., Emmy Award winning creature effects supervisor for Babylon 5
"LightWave will never leave my desktop. After dozens of national and international spots - with modeling and animation tools to meet the needs of the most demanding animator, extensive plugin support to roll-your-own tools, and a phenomenal renderer that seamlessly integrates our 3D friends with live-action - LightWave 3D has proven to be the software we count on to produce characters of distinction."
Stephen Bailey, Senior Animator / Technical Director, Will Vinton Studios.
LightWave 3D
It'll change the way you think about 3D animation.
webmaster@newtek.com
Copyright © 1997 NewTek Incorporated. All Rights Reserved.