Product Reviews

NEWTEK's market-leading modelling, rendering and animation package had a shaky start on the Mac, with a flaky and unstable version 5.0. But, with a few interface reservations, it's finally matured into a stable, usable and very powerful tool for creating broadcast- and film-quality animations and special effects.

The interface introduced in version 5.6 is now much cleaner and better laid out, with subtle colour coding to distinguish between buttons' functions. However, be warned that the interface breaks just about every user interface convention there is - Mac and Windows alike. The application itself is split into two distinct programs that can be launched separately. Modeler is where you build your objects, which are then exported to the Layout module for surfacing, rendering and animation.

Starting with Modeler, LightWave uses a classic four-view set-up for viewing models. All the usual primitives are supported, with a robust set of Boolean operators for combining, cutting and intersecting primitives to create more complex forms. More organic surfaces can be built up by a process known as spline-patching, where surface points are arranged in space to create a spline framework which is then 'patched' (filled in with a mesh). Deformation operators such as Bend, Taper, Twist, Vortex and so on are all able to cope with objects with large numbers of points smoothly and easily, but since these operators act in two planes simultaneously by default, they can take a little getting used to. Holding down the control key will constrain their action to a single plane.

All this is standard fare, but LightWave Modeler also comes with a few very special tricks up its sleeve. The first set comprises operators that extend or add to existing geometry. Tools such as Smooth Scale and Smooth Shift take groups of polygons and intelligently extrude them to add extra surface features.

The Bevel tool has a range of uses that belie its rather mundane name - it's really a miniature modelling arsenal - and the oddly-named Knife tool doesn't actually cut anything, but instead adds points and segments across a surface where you drag a straight line.

But, undoubtedly the star of the show is the NURBS implementation, called MetaNURBS. This allows the user to build a polygonal cage by using the geometry and transformation tools, which will then be turned into a smooth-flowing, resolution-independent NURBS model by hitting the tab key. The beauty of this approach is you can constantly swap between the polygonal and NURBS representation of your model for refining, although it's also possible to manipulate points directly in MetaNURBS mode. One important change in version 5.6 is that Modeler now allows you to MetaForm triangular polygons, as well as quadrilaterals, making the tool much more general and useful. The MetaNURBS implementation brings a whole new level of control to organic

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modelling and is unsurpassed on the Mac for ease of use .

Once a model is finished, it must be taken into the Layout section for surfacing, animating and rendering. Unlike Modeler, Layout uses a single perspective view of a workspace, and it's possible to toggle between Camera, Perspective and Light views, as well as three orthogonal views using the numeric keypad. There's no four-view set-up as in Modeler.

LightWave contains some very powerful tools for adding surfaces to models, such as the ability to layer textures indefinitely. Texture visibility between layers can be controlled by a straight opacity setting or by the use of alpha masks to selectively reveal underlying textures. This allows complex and subtle surface effects to be built up. Couple this to a standard set of procedural textures which can be used in different channels, such as Bump, Opacity or Specularity, and you have a powerful tool for the creation of realistic surfaces.

The Displacement channel is worth a separate mention, since it allows you to distort an object's geometry based on grey-scale information from a PICT or an animation. This allows a high degree of modelling with little effort. All channel effects can now be attached to Texture Reference Objects - null objects that can be scaled, rotated or moved, and which scale, rotate or move their texture, allowing surface effects to be animated over time.

Rendering quality is extremely high - beautiful, even - but slow when compared to packages like Cinema 4D and ElectricImage. The ScreamerNet option does allow CPUs to be networked to produce renderfarm set-ups, but the interface is tricky, requiring command-line arguments.

On the character-animation side, LightWave comes with a powerful implementation of Bones and Inverse Kinematics. Bones allow the construction of skeletons within a single mesh, which will then deform that mesh according to user-defined spheres of influence. Bones are particularly useful in the animation of facial expressions and lip movements, and combined with LightWave's Inverse Kinematics (the ability to create marionette-like chains of linked objects) provide a high degree of control for character animation.

Overall control of scenes is handled by setting keyframes and controlling their relationships via a series of function curve editors - LightWave has no Timeline sequencer window where you can drag keyframes around, like those found in most other animation programs. This can be an obstacle to getting up to speed with Layout if you're used to the more ubiquitous Sequencer way of doing things.

Layout and Modeler make extensive use of plug-ins to add functionality. LightWave 5.6 ships with Morph Gizmo, for interactively adjusting blending between morph targets; HyperVoxels, which produces blobbing effects from point clouds; Steamer, a highly-capable volumetric shading engine; and SkyTracer, a fully-featured procedural sky generator. The third-party market for plug-ins is vast and varied but, unfortunately, the number of Mac-compatible offerings is small in comparison with the whole.

With a list of credits too long to mention, LightWave 3D is the world's most widely-used animation tool, and it's heartening to see NewTek putting its faith in the Mac as a serious 3D production tool. At only £1365, it's excellent value for money. It's also a vindication of NewTek's commitment to the Mac that LightWave is significantly faster on a G3 than on a Pentium II-powered PC.