Product Reviews

LightWave, NewTek's high-end 3D package, has changed significantly since we last reviewed it. It received an across-the-board upgrade in version 8, with improvements made in particular to the speed of character rigging and in integration (via the Hub application) between Modeler and Layout. Of particular note was the introduction of rigid-body dynamics, in addition to the already-present cloth and soft-body dynamics.

Further, the scope of the program's dynamics widened to apply to character skeletons so that the 'bones' could react to forces (such as gravity) set by the animator, without the explicit need for keyframing motions. LightWave's famous renderer was also updated in the 8.2 release with a new, optional Anti-aliasing algorithm - Interactive Pixel Lattice Deformation - that produced the same quality of output as the previous algorithm, but in far fewer rendering passes.

Version 8.5, which is a free upgrade from any other standalone 8.x version, is a more low-key affair, but still adds some worthwhile new features. Stability is noticeably improved over the previous 8.3 release. The repeated, random crashing of the Layout module when hitting the F9 key to produce a render is now, thankfully, a thing of the past. In fact, overall, LightWave 8.5 feels much more stable than any previous version.

One of the most important features of this release is support for OpenGL 2. This is dependent on having a Mac with OS X 10.4.3 installed and a graphics card equivalent to a Nvidia GeForce 5200 FX, ATI Radeon 9600 or better. This means the program can use OpenGL shading language to display the real-time previews in Layout's viewports, enabling you to correctly display most of LightWave's procedural textures and gradient ramps. It also means you can view layers

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of procedural textures on the same object in real time, and even preview them animating.

Version 8.5 also renders complex surfaces built from multiple, masked image maps in real time. Not perfectly, but well enough to get good feedback on texture mapping and placement. LightWave 2.5 also offers far better representations of light scatter, fall-off and specularity. The remaining shaders (along with any new ones) will get OpenGL 2 support through maintenance releases.

We tested version 8.5 on an ATI Radeon 9600 with 256MB of VRAM - a decidedly middling card these days - and found that despite all this extra rendering load, LightWave was still nippy, as long as we kept the texture preview resolution low.

Note that Modeler doesn't support OpenGL 2, even though you can add all the textures and gradient ramps there. This is because each half of the program uses a different OpenGL implementation. Layout has always had much quicker OpenGL speed than Modeler, which can get bogged down in complex models.

However, Modeler has also had some improvements, notably the addition of the new Multishift tool. It's amazing how much you can achieve in Modeler simply using Subdivision surfaces and the Bevel and Smooth Shift tools. The Multishift tool takes the Smooth Shift tool to a new level. You can save each series of shifts and offsets as a profile and then reapply it as desired. You can even apply a profile to a different number of polygons than in the original operation. On top of that, each profile has an editable history, so you can step through successive shifts and re-edit them, or even add new shift profiles between existing ones. You can also save Multishift profiles externally and re-use them on different models.

This will probably be the last update of LightWave before version 9, which will see the program integrated, with many modelling tools appearing in Layout and with the renderer accessible from both Modeler and Layout. So should you wait for version 9? No: LightWave 8.5 introduces a new pricing structure - a huge price drop to £499 that includes a free upgrade to version 9 when it ships. You also get a bundled copy of the excellent Vue 5 landscape generation software and a Duo dongle that gives an additional PC licence as well. There's never been a better time to get to grips with one of the doyens of the 3D world.