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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.
Modeling
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.
Surfacing
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.
Rigging
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.
Animation
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.
Virtual Studio Tools
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.
Instancing
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.
Effects
Bullet Dynamics
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.
HyperVoxels
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.
FiberFX
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.
Flocking
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) Rendering
Network Software Renderer
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.
VPR (Viewport Preview Renderer)
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.
Linear Colorspace Workflow
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.
Stereoscopic Rendering
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.
Scripting
Python is an industry standard programming language prevalent in most CG pipelines. The inclusion of Python in LightWave 11 allows even further integration of LightWave into studio pipelines, as those familiar with Python can quickly begin writing tools for LightWave.
Interchange
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.
OBJ Geometry Export
OBJ import and export has been further improved in LightWave 11. Large OBJs are now saved much faster than before. OBJs textured with image maps or numeric values in other packages will come in textured but Nodal or procedural textures will not translate in either direction. Autodesk's Maya reverses diffuse and ambient, so make sure you save OBJ files for Maya using the switch provided on the OBJ tab of Options to ensure that your textures are transported correctly.
MDD Geometry Cache
MDD is a proprietary format developed by NewTek and was the first commercially available geometry and deformation caching file format. MDD is widely used in many 3D packages and provides an easy way to move animated characters, dynamic simulations and geometry deformations between packages. The MDD Multi Baker allows users to select multiple objects at once to bake and allows the user to export the geometry to .OBJ in one step.
Autodesk Geometry Cache
LightWave also includes integrated support for Autodesk Geometry Cache files as an alternative for geometry and deformation baking. This makes it extremely simple to transfer files to and from Autodesk Maya or any other 3D software that support these formats.
ZBrush GoZ Support
GoZ is an interchange technology from Pixologic that allows applications to send model and texture data to and from ZBrush for sculpting detail on a base mesh. It has proven incredibly popular among many 3D artists.
Unity Game Engine Support
LightWave can now save scenes for Unity to enable a seamless transfer between the two programs with an automated FBX file export system which is updated every time your LightWave scene changes.
ASCII Text-Based Scene Files and Object Referencing
The LightWave architecture is well thought out. LightWave has had a very efficient and robust ASCII based scene file format from the very beginning. This production-proven text-based scene file format set the standard which other professional software packages have eventually followed. Because of this simple, well thought out ASCII scene file format and the way that LightWave references separate object files you never run the risk of a large all inclusive binary scene file corrupting your assets.