Product Reviews

LightWave 7.0b is by and large the product LightWave has always tried to be. The application distinguishes itself from competitors by the power and simplicity of its tools - for example, modelling is miles better than anything else available on the Mac. And the directness of its approach to producing complex organic forms is exemplary. Any other program's tools (including Maya, form*Z and the ElectricImage modeller) seem arcane and abstruse by comparison.

The only program that betters it in the Subdivision Surface arena is Softimage|XSI, which isn't available on the Mac. Its rendering quality is legendary and is now supplemented by High Dynamic Range Images, Global Illumination and Radiosity. In the world of high-end animation, nothing can touch it for the sheer beauty of the results it can produce. Even programs that cost around £6000 would kill for the ability to produce results on a par with LightWave's, and version 7.0b is available as a free 7Mb upgrade from NewTek's Web site.

However, these results have always come with a slight overhead: a sometimes fiddly and often inconsistent interface. For instance, the interface font is still unreadably small. Also, the concept of a default button in a dialog box - one of the cornerstones of modern interface design - has never made an appearance in LightWave.

Stay on the scene

The program has addressed other areas of usability, notably the lack of methods for managing large scenes. This area had always been one where the heavy artillery of the animation world - Maya and Softimage - easily outclass LightWave. But with version 7.0b, NewTek has introduced the Spreadsheet Editor, a plug-in that gives ultimate control over every aspect of a scene quickly and easily.

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Another improvement is the introduction of non-linear motion. This lets you save out a piece of animation as a clip, which is analogous to clips of video footage. Different clips can then be mixed and overlapped to produce novel animation sequences that in turn can be saved as clips.

Clips are managed in the Motion Mixer, which draws heavily on the video editing metaphor. As with video clips, the blending between them can be controlled by specific transitions, the degree of overlap of clip and transition controlling the abruptness of one move blending into another.

As such, reusable libraries of movements can be built up and incorporated into projects. This can reduce lead times on a project considerably, and is especially relevant in the creation of games content. Closely related to this is the Graph Editor, where function curves are manipulated. Version 7.0b has seen a large increase in speed, with changes in function curves being reflected in the Layout window almost in real time.

If you're using LightWave on the Mac, you should run it under Mac OS X, as the difference in responsiveness and crash protection version is simply staggering.

Fast motion

An aspect that disappointed in the initial 7.0 version of the OS X release was a slowdown in rendering speed to around half that of the application running under Mac OS 9. This has been addressed in version 7.0b. NewTek has rewritten the renderer to take advantage of the Power Mac G4's AltiVec processor and the Motorola Math library to increase rendering speeds to well over the OS 9 speed. There is a 10% to 15% improvement in speed at present over OS 9, with the potential to increase this further. One thing to note: if you're running a dual-processor system, you'll have to set the rendering threads to two, four or eight in the Rendering Options dialog box to see any improvement.

We were impressed with version 7.0b: it's a compelling buy for anyone doing 3D work on a Mac.

Needs: Power Mac, Mac OS 8.6 or higher (Mac OS X preferred), 128 Mb RAM